The timing here is the whole point. An EU audit of Brazilian poultry producers was Brazil’s last realistic chance to preserve EU access before new antimicrobial rules took effect on 3 September. The audit finished on 4 September, one day too late to matter, and Brussels has given no timeline for restoring access even if the outcome is favorable.
Brazil has been through a version of this before. The EU suspended Brazilian poultry imports from May to September 2025 after the country’s first commercial HPAI case, and exporters had to find alternative outlets then too. That experience should work in Brazil’s favor this time, since the playbook for redirecting volume already exists, so the domestic price impact in Brazil is likely to be smaller than last year’s shock even though the fundamental hit is just as large.
Volume can move, product mix is harder
Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Mexico are all established Brazilian chicken buyers, which makes them the obvious places to look for extra volume. The product mix does not line up as cleanly. The EU is overwhelmingly a market for boneless breast, and specifically for salted chicken breast. Japan buys mainly leg quarters and dark cuts. Saudi Arabia and the UAE mostly import whole halal-certified birds rather than cuts. Mexico’s Brazilian volume is a small breast-and-wing niche worth well under 2% of Mexican consumption, dwarfed by US leg-quarter imports. All four can plausibly take more Brazilian chicken in aggregate; none is a natural home for the breast fillet the EU ban displaces.
The UK is the open door. It is not automatically mirroring the EU measure and is not expected to rule on Brazil’s compliance until December. The precedent is direct: after the May 2025 suspension, Brazilian shipments to the UK rose 84% year on year in July and 130% in August, according to ABPA. If that repeats, UK prices should come under renewed downward pressure as diverted volume lands, widening the gap with an EU market moving the other way.
Northwest Europe is already full
Dutch and Belgian prices did not move at all last week, and the pressure underneath is building. The free-market broiler price in Barneveld held for a third consecutive week at €1.09 to €1.11 per kg and the VCN contract notation was unchanged at €1.04. Both sit well below last summer, when Barneveld peaked at €1.29 to €1.31, and the much larger supply now coming out of Poland, Romania and Hungary keeps that level out of reach for now.
Supply is more than ample while offtake is sluggish, and sellers report growing competition from cheap fillet out of Eastern Europe. Birds are also arriving heavy at around 3kg after the warm spell gave way to fast regrowth, and slaughterhouses are pushing for delivery weights of 2,700 to 2,800 grams. Feed and day-old-chick costs keep climbing at the same time, squeezing grower margins from the other side.
Spain is the exception, with ex-slaughterhouse prices up 1.2% on the back of the recent heatwave and a sense that the Newcastle disease situation is stabilizing. Across the core monitored countries the HPAI picture is essentially unchanged since week 35.
