From this week's Economist:
Trading chicken is far more complicated than merely plucking, freezing and dispatching the birds. Chickens don’t get sold whole; exporters have to optimise the “break-up value” of their fowl. The Western palate much prefers white breast meat. Asian consumers prize the more flavoursome brown meat from the thigh and leg. White meat may fetch four times more than brown in the West but costs much the same in China. Europe, a net exporter of chicken, sends legs and feet to Asia but imports white meat.
What this tells me is that trade in chicken products is a ripe for area for anti-dumping cases. Regardless of whether there is dumping in any meaningful economic sense (if that even exists), there is likely to be price discrimination, which could lead to anti-dumping allegations.
And of course, we just had a related issue in the recent China - Broiler Products WTO dispute. This is from our DSC for the case:
An additional element here is that chicken feet are of little value in the U.S. market. They are considered to be waste, or sometimes used in animal feed products. In China, by contrast, they are a delicacy, and command higher prices. The higher price of chicken feet in China than in the U.S. might suggest that there is no possibility of dumping being found, as any price discrimination that exists results in lower prices in the home market, not lower prices in the export market. But dumping can also be based on comparing the sale price to the cost of production, so even though a straightforward price comparison suggests no dumping, a dumping margin might be found nevertheless.
In this case, the price discrimination at issue suggested no dumping, but cost of production was used instead as the basis for the dumping finding, offering up another way to find dumping here. (The Panel found China's actions to violate the AD Agreement, and there are still some open questions as to the proper cost allocation methodology.)
One other point about chickens. Recall this recent post about a farm bill provision that would limit the ability of U.S. states to regulate the treatment of chickens in other states. It appears that you can go the other way as well, pampering them rather than treating them cruelly:
these chickens are not dining on stale loaves from grandmother’s breadbox. On a recent afternoon at the farm, where a few hundred creatures inhabit a peaceful, 15,000-square-foot coop that would dwarf the size of most New York apartments, they clucked and ambled around pans of bread soaked in fresh milk, and white buckets full of leafy trimmings that would make a tremendous tossed salad.
“Some of this is nicer stuff than I have to eat when I get home,” said Mike Charles, a local poultry expert involved in the project.
Perhaps some day this will all be required by law. (But don't get too jealous of the chickens: "No matter what they eat, all these one-percenters of the poultry realm will meet the same fate. After 60 days, almost double the life span of a regular commercial bird, they’ll be trucked off to be slaughtered and air-chilled.")
