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Beef, Pork Exports Set New Records in 2012US - US beef and pork exports set new value records in 2012, topping highs set in 2011, according to end-of-year statistics released by USDA and compiled by the US Meat Export Federation (USMEF).
The achievement was more significant in light of challenging export conditions that included non-science-based trade barriers in several key markets and an anemic economy in certain regions.
"The export markets are a critical profit center for the industry at a time when the industry is challenged by high input costs and, on the beef side, a historically low herd size," said Philip Seng, USMEF president and CEO. "2012 saw record highs for per-head export values for both pork and beef at a time when those returns were sorely needed by producers."
Pork exports set both volume and value records last year, reaching 2.26 million mt – up a fraction from the record set in 2011 – valued at $6.3 billion, a 3.5 per cent increase over the prior year's record.
The per-head export value of US pork exports set another record in 2012, reaching $55.87, up 1 per cent from 2011. For the year, exports accounted for 27 per cent of total pork production and 23.4 per cent of pork muscle cut production versus 27.5 per cent and 23 per cent, respectively, in 2011.
The value of beef exports for the year rose 2 per cent to a record-high $5.51 billion on 12 per cent lower volumes (1.13 million mt).
The per-head export value for beef hit $216.73, a $10.36 increase over 2011. Contributing to that was a new monthly record value of $242.65 set in December.
For the year, US beef exports accounted for 12.7 per cent of total beef production and 9.8 per cent of muscle cut production. This compares to 14.2 per cent and 11 per cent, respectively, in 2011.
Records Set in 2012
In addition to the new standards noted above, one-year export records were set in several key export markets:
- Mexico: 600,949 mt (12 per cent increase) valued at $1.126 billion (8 per cent increase)
- Canada: 235,604 mt (14 per cent increase) valued at $855.7 million (16 per cent increase)
- Central/South America: 90,897 mt (26 per cent increase) valued at $227.9 million (22 per cent increase)
- Australia/New Zealand: 76,801 mt (9 per cent increase) valued at $236.1 million (5 per cent increase)
- Russia: 80,408 mt (10 per cent increase) valued at $307.5 million (20 per cent increase)
- Hong Kong: 65,033 mt (28 per cent increase) valued at $339.5 million (43 per cent increase)
- Central/South America: 33,891 mt (31 per cent increase) valued at $134.1 million (57 per cent increase)
- Canada: $1.177 billion (14 value increase even though volume dipped 6 per cent to 180,015 mt)
Top 5 Value Export Markets for 2012
- Japan – $1.986 billion
- Mexico – $1.126 billion
- China/Hong Kong – $886.2 million
- Canada – $855.7 million
- South Korea – $421.1 million
- Canada – $1.177 billion
- Japan – $1.03 billion (surpassing the $1 billion mark for the first time since 2003)
- Mexico – $822.4 million
- South Korea – $582 million
- Hong Kong – $339.5 million
2013 Outlook
Looking ahead, the outlook for 2013 appears positive for both the US beef and pork industries, according to Mr Seng.
"There are many factors that go into projecting 12 months into the future, but as we continue to focus our efforts on markets that offer the greatest potential for growth, we are optimistic that 2013 will give us the opportunity to maintain the momentum we have seen in pork exports while rebounding in beef," he said. The recent opening of Japan to US beef under 30 months of age contributes to a projected growth in beef exports of 4 per cent in volume (to 1.17 million mt) valued at more than $6 billion. That total may be tempered if issues with exports to Russia are not resolved.
The projection for pork calls for steady to slight growth, with exports likely to still exceed 2.2 million mt valued at more than $6 billion with key risk factors including Russia and domestic production in China. On the bullish side, US pork is an extremely versatile, high quality protein at a great value that will gain market share in key export markets. Continued growth to top volume market Mexico is also expected to boost the bottom line.
Other Facts of Note
December pork exports were 186,135 mt, down 14 per cent in volume and 11 per cent in value at $515.9 million versus the high year-ago levels. December export volume was still larger year-over-year to Canada, Central/South America and Australia.
December beef exports were down 16 per cent versus the prior year at 90,789 mt while value was down just 3 per cent at $461.2 million. Export gains were seen for the month in Canada, South Korea, Hong Kong, Philippines and Central/South America.
2012 Lamb Exports
2012 was a challenging year for the global lamb industry, including leaders New Zealand and Australia, and it was no different in the United States. For the year, US lamb exports dipped 29 per cent in volume and 13 per cent in value versus 2011's record high. However, exports to the top two markets, Mexico and Canada, both registered increases in value, offering promise for the year ahead.
Another key factor in reversing the recent decline in lamb exports will be gaining access to markets such as Japan, Russia, Taiwan, Korea and the European Union. These are critical destinations in which a resumption of trade could present promising opportunities for US lamb, especially in the foodservice sector. USMEF is working with trade officials to facilitate that.
TheCattleSite News Desk


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Bartram, William
Bartram, William, 1739–1823, American naturalist, b. Philadelphia; son of John Bartram. He is known chiefly for his Travels (1791), in which he describes his journey (1773–77) through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida and areas to the west. His book vividly portrays the plants and wildlife of the country and lists 215 native birds, the most complete list of that time. Bartram's influence is seen in the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Chateaubriand, and other writers who found his book an unexcelled source of descriptions of the American wilderness and its inhabitants.
See T. Hallock and N. E. Hoffmann, ed., William Bartram, The Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings (2010).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2023, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Biology: Biographies

subset: commoncrawl


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In a remarkable break from past practice, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has issued a 24-page official report assigning blame in the catastrophic May 16 New York Police Department raid on the apartment of a church-going, 57-year-old woman, Alberta Spruill. At a tense 3:00 p.m. press conference on May 29, Kelly said, "Deficiencies were found in procedures and practices of the overall warrant process. Mistakes were made. We all make mistakes. It's a terrible tragedy that Miss Spruill lost her life." (Excerpts on Kelly's comments, including his defense of warrants and his pledge for reform, can be heard on Newsday's web site.)
The raid could hardly have gone more wrong. With no evidence of wrong-doing beyond the word of a drug-using known criminal, the NYPD secured a no-knock warrant to invade Spruill's apartment. At 6:15 a.m. on May 16, they executed the warrant by breaking down Spruill's apartment door as she was dressing to go to her city job, which she had held for 29 years. Incorrectly anticipating both resistance and a pit bull, the police detonated a flash grenade -- also called a concussion grenade -- which is used to blind and stun. The police realized almost immediately after handcuffing Spruill that the tidy apartment did not fit the informant's description of a messy place divided by a dirty curtain. But the damage was done. Spruill went into cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at 7:50 a.m. at Harlem Hospital. Her death was ruled a homicide by the medical examiner.
The snarl of police errors, arrogance, and incompetence recorded in Kelly's report is stunning. Almost every decision leading up to the raid seems to have been flawed, sometimes inexcusably. Commanding officers did not confer with one another or share crucial information. Supervisors for the Emergency Service Unit, which led the raid, didn't know that NYPD policy required that flash grenades be approved by a top boss. Although several officers had serious doubt about the reliability of the informant, they did not relay this information to others. No one watched or canvassed Spruill's apartment to see if it seemed a likely household to shelter drugs, guns, and attack dogs. The drug dealer whose cache of drugs and weapons was being sought in the raid had in fact been arrested four days earlier on an assault warrant -- but precinct officers kept this information to themselves.
The brass at police headquarters are ignorant of much of what goes on in the field. The NYPD lacks a central database on informants and their reliability, says Kelly, as well as any central way of assessing the success or failure of executed search warrants, even though several such warrants resulted in disastrous raids on innocent families during the Giuliani administration. Kelly promised he would establish a database to track search warrants to uncover patterns of problematic searches.
"What we're doing," said the commissioner, "is seeing to it the best we can that something like this never happens again." Let's certainly hope so. Yet at a minimum this incident calls into question the reality of what journalist Michael Massing once called "The Blue Revolution," the idea that CompStat plus organizational innovations and changes in police culture had transformed the NYPD into an efficient crime-fighting machine.
As if to drive even conservative and/or police-friendly New Yorkers into the arms of the New York Civil Liberties Union on the issue of police spying, the NYPD has been asking political protestors such potent questions as "What kind of political sentiments do you hold?" and "What political organizations do you belong to?" as well as "Don't you think it was necessary for us to get involved in World War II?"
In hearings before federal judge Charles Haight in Manhattan, civil liberties groups are asking that the 3-month-old modification to the Handschu Agreement, which since 1985 had restricted police spying, be modified again to forbid such NYPD questioning. Judge Haight was unhappy with the police, saying, "I find this most recent activity troubling." The NYCLU is hopeful that the NYPD's overstepping will encourage Judge Haight to reconsider his February expansion of NYPD surveillance powers.
What are we to make of the Nelson Lemrick debacle? The familiar details remain chilling. On Aug. 19, 1991, a 7-year-old black child, Gavin Cato, was killed (and another child severely injured) in Crown Heights after being struck by a Jewish driver speeding through a red light. Several hours later and several blocks away, then 16-year-old Lemrick Nelson joined a mob of blacks shouting "There's a Jew! Let's get the Jew! Kill the Jew!" while pursuing a 29-year-old rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum. Nelson stabbed Rosenbaum, who later died of internal bleeding in the Kings County Hospital emergency room, where doctors had failed to notice the deep wound. Before he died, Rosenbaum identified Nelson as the assailant who stabbed him.
Yet the practical outcome of the latest of Nelson's three jury Trials -- two federal, one state, all held in Brooklyn -- is that Nelson will spend no more than an additional year in prison. His 1997 conviction on federal civil rights violations in his second trial had resulted in a prison sentence of 19-1/2 years. But a federal appeals court reversed the conviction after concluding that the trial judge had improperly balanced the number of Jews and blacks on the jury. The federal prosecution followed a state trial in 1992 in which Nelson was acquitted by a jury which concluded that he had been framed by a racist police force. Jurors later notoriously celebrated with Nelson and his lawyers.
You might think that by this time everything has been said, but it hasn't been. For one thing, the historical context of these terrible events has been missing. Rosenbaum's 1991 murder occurred at the very end of what had been a period of unusually violent crime in New York, what UCLA historian Erik Monkkonen has called "a rogue tidal wave of violence in the last quarter of the twentieth century." For most of its history, New York City had a far lower crime rate than the nation as a whole -- until 1958, when violent crime started heading up. What we commonly think of as New York's high crime rate is in fact a historical anomaly. Now that crime has been in a downward spiral for 11 years, New Yorkers need to keep it that way.
But Monkkonen argues that in past cycles, once some "lower level of violence had been achieved, the mechanisms for control and the value of peace get forgotten, and a slow rebirth of violence begins." As Lemrick Nelson begins serving his minimal sentence, will it happen that crime will start back up? In other words, just as his crime occurred at the end of a cycle of high violence, will his punishment signal the beginning of a new cycle of serious violence? Already, rape has been steadily rising for months, and murder has also been up.
Nelson himself is part of a disturbing historic trend, the large increase in killings by youngsters in New York. The proportion of killers younger than 18 quickly rose from about nine percent in 1976 to a peak of nearly 16 percent in 1993. When these killers are released, as Nelson will be after a short stint, they have decades of potential violence ahead of them. Thus an overly mild justice system can fuel an upward spiral of crime.
Despite admitting he had stabbed Rosenbaum, Nelson was found not guilty of any charges by the first state jury and not guilty of the most serious charge by the latest federal jury. This leniency, according to Monkkonen's 19th century data, is typical of the tendency of New York juries to give offenders the benefit of the doubt -- a tendency that has often led to justice but in this instance to grave injustice. "In a city filled with bars, rowdiness, and a good deal of physical violence, the all-important coroner's juries often placed themselves in the offender's situation and found the deaths to be accidental," says Monkkonen.
Indeed, although about half of all 19th century murderers in New York were arrested, less than half of these were tried, and only about half of these were convicted. Of the 10.7 percent convicted, three-fourths were sentenced to fewer than 7 years in prison, and a large proportion of these were pardoned. Leniency was the "central element" of the criminal court system.
There is also a historical link between major riots and personal violence, according to Monkkonen's data. Most of the city's serious riots have occurred during times of high violence. He believes, though his data cannot prove, that while some rioters are rationally motivated, many violent individuals simply use the crowd as a mask, becoming more violent in riots. But the real lesson is that a violent culture produces far greater violence during rioting than a less violent culture does.
What this means for the city's future is that keeping violent crime down is the nonnegotiable base of the city's well-being. If violent crime heads up seriously, it will destroy New York. It almost did in our recent memories. And here is the latest bad news: the NYPD's crime statistics show that 215 people were murdered in the five boroughs between January 1 and May 25. This is up from 202 murders in the same period last year.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, a long-time editor and writer on urban affairs, is the former director of the Citizens Jury Project at the Vera Institute of Justice. She is now writing a book entitled The Conscience of the American Jury.