Cuba's Appetite for American Protein

With your Southeast Regional Ag News, I am Haylie Shipp. This is the Ag Information Network.

We’re talking trade on today’s show and, specifically, trade with someone who is very close by…Cuba. The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture recently led a trade mission to Cuba with the hopes of eventually improving trade between the two neighbors.

NASDA CEO Ted McKinney says Cuba makes a lot of sense as a trading partner and has a great deal of commodity needs that U.S. farmers would be happy to fill…

“They are buying a lot of our chicken. Many people do not know that. It's almost all quarter legs. They can do it cheaper from us than they can with their own farmers. Right now, they don't have the hard currency to buy feed, so they are down 90, that's nine-zero percent in pork production. They're down very substantially in poultry, so we are still supplying as we were and have been for many years, a lot of poultry. There is some rice going there. We heard that there were a few containers of eggs that went there. I mean shell eggs in containers. Feed grains. They need feed.”

He also alludes to changes in policy for the island nation that could be a first step in thawing relations with the U.S. We’ll get into the specifics on some of those amendments right here tomorrow on the Ag Information Network.