bloomberg.com, Thailand, which has 60,000 tons of frozen chicken it can't sell because of a trade ban, is in talks with Russia to exchange the meat for fighter jets.
The Thai government offered to swap 250,000 tons of chicken meat in the next five years for fighter aircraft made by Russia's Sukhoi Holding Corp., the Thai Broiler Processing Exporters Association, a trade group, said in a faxed statement.
Thai chicken exports this year may fall 60 percent to 200,000 tons, the lowest shipment since 1996, after Japan, European Union members and other countries banned chicken meat imports from the Southeast Asian country following a bird flu outbreak. The Thai government has confirmed bird flu virus infections among poultry in 25 of 76 provinces since the virus reappeared last month.
Thai exporters have about 60,000 tons of frozen chicken meat in storage that they are unable to sell because of the ban, according to commerce ministry data published Aug. 19. Thailand is the world's fifth-largest chicken meat exporter.
Prachuab Chaiyasarn, the government's trade representative, will meet Russian officials from Sept. 5 to 8 for negotiations about the chicken-for-aircraft proposal, the statement said.
Prachuab wasn't available because he is in Denmark, his secretary said. She confirmed that Prachuab will travel to Russia next week for talks about chicken meat exports.
Russia banned poultry imports from Thailand along with 10 Asian countries, said a spokeswoman from the Moscow-based Agriculture Ministry, who declined to be named. The ban was imposed Jan. 26 on concern about bird flu, she said. She could not give details on when the ban might be lifted.
Russia imports as much as 1.1 million tons of poultry a year, more than half the 2 million tons it consumes. The U.S. is its biggest supplier, providing about a third of Russia's poultry.
Russia this year banned imports of chicken and poultry from the U.S. states of Maryland, Delaware and Texas as well as from the Netherlands because of bird flu.
In May, it lifted a Dutch ban while maintaining the measure for the three U.S. states, Interfax news service reported. The strains of avian flu virus found in the U.S. aren't harmful to humans, unlike the H5N1 virus linked to human deaths in Asia, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had said.
