A System Approach to Study the U.S. Poultry and Pork Industries

In the presence of significant industrial consolidation and concentration in the pork industry and complications of disease outbreaks facing today's poultry industry, as well as the increase in feed grain prices starting from 2007 strongly affecting the U.S. livestock sectors, a more up-to-date partial equilibrium, sector-specific modelling system is developed to facilitate analyzing the U.S. pork, broiler, egg, and turkey sectors, understand their interactions with other sectors, and make more accurate projections. The model can be used to analyze the effects of shocks to poultry and pork sectors and evaluate policy proposals, especially for the broiler industry where separate production regions have been included in the model to assist studying regional events that affect one region but not another. The partial equilibrium system was applied to quantify the effects of the 2015 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreak on the U.S. poultry and egg industries. The effects of the shock on production started to fade out after the second year while the effects of the shock on exports lasted longer. Different levels of shocks have also been assumed for broiler production in the AI-outbreak regions; although this has not happened in reality, the simulation results help industry stakeholders get prepared. Shocks on the broiler industry had larger effects on the other two poultry sectors than on the pork sector since the three poultry industries are closely correlated either from the supply side (broiler and egg) or from the demand side (broiler and turkey) compared to the pork industry