Antipathy to food exports is worrying some farm and food leaders.
In the United States and Canada, food exports have been criticized for continuing to occur while some store shelves have fallen empty and some grocery stores had trouble bringing in certain food products, including meat.
“It is a very sensitive area that we have to talk about, but we have to keep those trade lines open for the future of agriculture,” said Zippy Duvall, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
He was responding to a question raised by former U.S. agriculture secretary Ann Veneman, who mentioned a Reuters news story that highlighted the continuing flow of U.S. meat offshore while some stores are having trouble getting enough domestic meat.
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“How do we create this access to consumers and maintain our export markets?” said Veneman, an advocate for U.S. agricultural trade.
Julie Ann Potts of the North American Meat Institute said consumers need to realize that exports aren’t the problem, since they help support a vibrant production system.
“I think the real challenge is getting these plants up to capacity so we can deal with this backlog that we have,” said Potts.
“If we go to not exporting … that will have the impact of raising prices here at home.”
In Canada, the issue has also arisen when there have been shortages or COVID-19 has broken out among meat plant workers.
One union said a shutdown wouldn’t be a disaster for Canada because much of its meat production was exported.
Duvall said U.S. export markets need to be protected because they were hard to win and are easy to lose. Cutting off exports would cause hard-to-fix damage because U.S. reliability would plummet in buyers’ eyes.
“If we ever break that confidence with the rest of the world we may never regain those markets,” said Duvall.
