Few Westerners, not even those who regularly eat roast chicken or KFC wings, are aware of the mega-business that exists in the Asian continent – especially in China – with one of the ‘parts’ that we usually discard here: the legs.
Yes, chicken legs not only represent a huge commercial activity, they are also completely at the epicenter of the current trade war between the United States and China. Legs are basically a product that the Western consumer does not want, but which is a specialty highly valued in the East, and is prepared according to many different recipes.
In this company Newsletter,adding some statistics will give us some perspective: until 2015, the US, by far the main supplier of chicken legs, exported about 400,000 tons annually to China. Not chicken, but chicken legs! A quick calculation indicates that it equals approximately 50 containers a day …
The story is a bit long in the context of this Newsletter, but after the last outbreak of bird flu in the US In 2015, China closed its doors to US exports. Since then, other countries have already allowed the import of US chicken products again, but China has not.
And now chicken legs (amongst other matters, of course) are on the negotiating table between the two countries.
Sources in the USA chicken leg sector, trust that, under the current climate in which the end of ‘hostilities’ is being frantically sought, an agreement will be reached shortly … and that it will undoubtedly be a negative blow for the other countries that export chicken legs to China (including Spain and Brazil, for example).
Source: www.AtlasObscura.com