16 October 2026
China’s national drive for food security, supported by massive capital investments and extensive government subsidies, has generated unprecedented surpluses across its meat and dairy sectors. With domestic consumption unable to absorb the excess supply, Chinese producers are increasingly targeting international markets with aggressively priced products. The resulting export surge is reshaping global meat trade flows and intensifying competition for established poultry exporters.
Over the past year, China became a net poultry exporter for the first time, with exports reaching approximately $2.6 billion, nearly double the value recorded in 2020. Chinese poultry companies are expanding their international presence, supplying dozens of markets across Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Europe. Their main competitive advantage is price: Chinese poultry is often sold at discounts of around $1,000 per ton compared with products from Brazil and Thailand. In destination markets, Chinese chicken breasts and leg cuts are typically priced 10%–20% below comparable Brazilian products.
This structural oversupply reflects changing consumer preferences and long-term state planning. Pork, traditionally China’s main source of animal protein, has seen per capita consumption fall by approximately 13% in recent years as consumers increasingly favor leaner protein sources. Meanwhile, per capita poultry consumption has risen by more than 50% over the past decade.
In response to earlier crises, including African swine fever and the COVID-19 pandemic, Beijing provided substantial subsidies to rebuild and modernize its livestock sector. According to OECD data, government support accounted for approximately 13% of China’s gross farm receipts between 2022 and 2024, nearly three times the level recorded in the early 2000s. This support has helped drive industrial-scale production, with poultry output increasing by 7% in the past year alone, despite a cooling domestic economy. Chinese agribusinesses are also expanding beyond meat exports, exporting their own white-feather broiler genetics to countries such as Uzbekistan and to African markets, with the aim of establishing integrated poultry supply chains abroad.
The export surge is already reshaping destination markets. China’s share of processed poultry imports into the European Union has doubled to 10% since 2022, while its share in the United Kingdom has tripled to more than 14%. In Japan, Chinese imports are gaining market share at Thailand’s expense. The influx of low-cost Chinese products is raising concerns among Western producers and trade regulators, who see parallels with China’s state-backed expansion in steel, solar panels, and electric vehicles. European authorities are monitoring import volumes, while plans are underway to tighten country-of-origin labeling (COOL) requirements for poultry products from 2027.
Thailand’s Broiler Processing Exporters Association has also expressed concern over the growing influx of low-priced Chinese poultry into Asian markets. Thailand, a long-standing leading supplier of processed chicken to Japan and other Asian economies, is facing increasing competitive pressure. International buyers are using Chinese low prices as benchmarks to demand lower prices from Thai processors, threatening profit margins across the country’s advanced slaughtering and processing sector.
