Brazil signs agreement to facilitate the sale of meat to Egypt

Brazil reached an agreement to facilitate exports of beef, pork and poultry to Egypt. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (Mapa), the Brazilian government obtained this Tuesday (13) the “Meat Inspection Systems Equivalence Protocol”, known as “pre-listing”, that is, a pre-listing for the qualification of slaughterhouses exporting meat to Egypt.

Before the conclusion of the agreement, the renewal of the authorization of Brazilian establishments for export, as well as the approval of new processing units, depended on in-person audits by the Egyptian authorities.

“The procedure not only implied high costs for Brazilian exporters, but also overloaded Mapa’s Federal Agricultural Tax Auditors and limited the number of establishments authorized to export to Egypt. Since 2019, around 30 Brazilian establishments were on the ‘waiting list’ to obtain authorization”, said the ministry, in a note.

The decision was announced one day before President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT)’s official trip to Egypt. The Brazilian president arrived in the African country in the early hours of this Wednesday (14). Lula will have a meeting with the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, to discuss the conflict between Israel and Hamas and discuss commercial and technical cooperation agreements between the two countries.

Mapa’s Secretary of Commerce and International Relations, Roberto Perosa, stated that the ‘pre-listing’ reflects the “high degree of confidence in Brazilian health control, especially in the Federal Inspection Service (SIF), whose excellence is recognized by more than 150 importing countries”.

According to the ministry, in 2023, Brazil exported more than US$1.7 billion in products to Egypt, of which US$384 million, around 22%, were meat, totaling more than 130 thousand tons exported. Perosa highlighted that Egypt is “one of the six largest importers of beef from Brazil in the world” and leads the “import of poultry meat from our country”.

Mapa highlighted that the formalization of the pre-listing has been carried out by the Brazilian ambassador in Cairo, Paulino Franco de Carvalho Neto, by the agricultural attaché Rafael Mohana and by the Minister of State for Agriculture and Land Recovery of Egypt, Mohamed Sayed El-Quseir .