Promoting pork here and abroad is a team effort. David Newman is Senior Vice President of market growth for the National Pork Board and says their partnership with the US Meat Export Federation is vital to pork’s success.
That is an understatement, how massive this partnership that we have using USMEF as one of our primary contractors is, on behalf of Pork Checkoff and US pork producers because something that is great for everyone to understand is, through our partnership with USMEF we have that as a global reach in more than 25 countries around the world. That’s boots on the ground in more than 25 countries. So whether it is Chile to Hong Kong to Africa, potentially in a future markets, those are key markets and helping us understand the culture, the environment, the business environment and how we go out there.
He tells SFN the partnership is a great way to maximize the use of checkoff investments to promote the product.
We’re able to take checkoff dollars, leverage them with USMEF through USDA market access program, the MAP funds, and we literally can leverage those dollars at a one-to-one ratio in international market development with MEF. So for example, if we put $5 million into international market development, we can leverage that, USMEF can leverage that with MAP funding and we can turn that five into $10 million dollars to go out into market deployment. So it is a very close relationship we have between the staff at USMEF and our staff at the Pork Board on international market development.
Newman says it would be a lot more difficult to promote pork without working together.
Who knows where we would be, but we wouldn’t be where we are today. You know, we’ve gone from being a net importer to a net exporter. And you mentioned that number is growing and has been growing exponentially for years and in 2023, We’re going to get very close to 30% export of total production and that’s actually been a shining star on value for our US pork producers. And has really helped prop up some of the prices in this business. And I think for a producer they might say prices still aren’t very good, you know in these challenging times. I can assure you it’d be much worse without having that export partnership we have with USMEF.
And the work is paying off…the US Pork label is well known overseas.
Yeah, that’s right. And it’s interesting in markets, especially in Asia, US pork has a great reputation abroad as being safe, high quality and where we market us pork that is actually a trademark logo that we use on behalf of pork producers that’s managed by National Pork Board by our staff, we actually get brand recognition, and then we also see an uptick in sales. And that’s what this is about, whether it’s being marketed in South Korea, Japan or Taiwan. It’s a really recognizable piece and it’s a part of our relationship. It’s all about what we can do for producers.