Most American hamburgers are in fact not entirely American.
The pasties grilled in barbecues in the back garden or turned in fast food restaurants are often a mix of ground beef, both native and imported from other countries, especially Brazil. In school cafetarias and home kitchens, this global mix of beef is brought up every day, fried and successful in millions of tacos, meatballs and lasagnas.
Now that President Trump’s dismantling of the worldwide trading system is leading to shifts in trade that can make winners from countries such as Brazil that produce raw materials that desire the world.
When it comes to beef – crucial for satisfying the hunger of Americans to cheap pieces of meat – rates will make Brazilian beef more expensive.
But at the same time, Brazil is suddenly a more attractive source for China, another huge consumer of beef, because his trade war with the United States – and the high rates that the two countries have imposed on each other – China are looking for other countries with sufficient stocks of cheap meat.
While American Meatpackers, probably anticipating escalating prices, have the Brazilian beef in recent weeks, according to trade data, the Brazilian beef export to China has also increased in April.
As a result, the prices for raw materials beef from Brazil have risen by around 20 percent since the beginning of April, trade experts say.
“The moment, from our point of view, has never been more favorable for Brazil,” said Luiz Gustavo Oliveira, the vice president of Grupo Fribal, a Brazilian meat company. “And the world has its doors open to Brazilian meat.”
We meat processors, on the other hand, struggle to struggle with higher beef prices and what they mean for their bottom line and how much their customers will be asked to pay.
In an attempt to keep prices low, Kent Sander, whose family owns a meat processing company in the countryside of Indiana, started mixing pork, which is less expensive, in the beef burgers he sells. “I try to give people an affordable option,” he said.
Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef, which has surpassed the United States for the past 20 years. With enormous parts of agricultural land where huge cattle births can graze, and lower labor and other related costs, Brazilian farmers have conquered the world market by producing beef on a larger scale and much cheaper than its competitors.
China and the United States are the top two buyers of Brazilian beef, in which both countries greatly increase in recent years to keep the growing domestic appetite for lean, cheap meat that neither of them can meet.
“Brazil is in a unique position,” Roberto Perosa, the president of the Brazilian association of meat enforcement industry and a former trade secretary for the Brazilian government. “No other country in the world can meet this demand.”
While the United States is still the world’s largest producer of beef, the cattle – fat assembled on a soy or corn diet – is better suited for expensive, marbled steaks that are famous for their rich taste, according to American experts in industry.
Part of this cattle is slaughtered to produce cheaper pieces of beef. But a large part is converted into premium steaks such as Filet Mignon or Rib-Eye, which are consumed at home and to steakhouses, or are exported to the rest of the world. China, the third largest buyer of the American beef, imported $ 1.6 billion in meat in 2024.
To make the cheaper minced beef that many Americans eat daily, mixed American meat singers moisture, local beef with slimmer, grass -fed varieties from abroad.
“Not all beef is the same,” said Glynn Tonsor, a professor in the agricultural economy at Kansas State University. “And in the US we consume more ground beef than we produce.”
To meet the demand, the United States increased its beef import from Brazil from 2023 to 2024 by more than 50 percent, with a record of $ 1.3 billion.
But Brazilian beef is now subject to the rate of 10 percent that Mr Trump has applied to just about every American trading partner, and the longer the rates will maintain, the greater the chance that they reform the global beef trade in sustainable ways.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from Brazil recently said that he did not want to “make a choice” between China and the United States, the two largest trading partners in the country.
“I want to negotiate with everyone,” said Mr Lula, who visited China this month. “I want to sell and buy.”
But the top adviser of Mr Lula, Celso Amorim, told a Brazilian newspaper that now offers China “more opportunities and fewer risks” of Brazil than the United States.
And after China had withdrawn the export licenses of more than 390 American meat processing companies as a retribution for American rates, the Brazilian Minister of Latin America said that the Latin American country wanted to fill.
“Someone will have to deliver this meat that was supplied by the Americans,” said the minister, Carlos Fávaro.
In China, a long-term preference for cheaper pork has given way in recent years for a new taste for steaks and hot pots of beef, as the middle class of the country has grown.
The import of the Chinese beef rose from less than $ 100 million in 2010 to more than $ 13 billion in 2024, with the country bought almost half of its beef from Brazil last year.
Most Brazilian beef was already subject to steep American rates, set up for the first time in the 1990s to protect US cattle farmers against a stream of cheaper imported beef. Now Mr. Trump’s recent rates have pushed the levy to 36 percent. For comparison: Brazilian beef is confronted with rates of only 12 percent in China.
Because China usually stops the import of American beef, supply chains for “this raw material completely shocked,” said André Ferreira, a maritime transport specialist based in Brazil at DMS Logistics. “So China will now look at Brazil.”
Some Brazilian beef producers already make ambitious plans for the future.
For Grupo Fribal, who appears beef, slaughter and packaging for domestic and international markets, things have been followed in recent years because exports to China and the United States have risen.
Now the company is planning to raise its cattle herd to 60,000 from 40,000 against next year, partly to take advantage of an even stronger question stimulated by rates. “The moment is now,” said Mr Oliveira of Grupo Fribal.
But breeding, parenting and greasy make more cattle for beef takes time and money, making such plans a long -term bet that demand will continue to grow.
Brazil, an immense nation with a mild climate that prefers agriculture, has more cattle than people. Since the 1970s, both large-scale farmers and family business have spread throughout every region of the country, including the Amazon Register forest.
Nevertheless, back-to-back droughts have taken a toll, whereby the beef production of Brazil is expected to shrink by almost 5 percent in 2025, according to Safras & Mercado, a consultancy.
And even if some Brazilian livestock farmers can increase production in the short term, they may have difficulty sending more beef abroad as large Brazilian ports work almost at full capacity.
In the United States, trade experts say that American farmers will be difficult under pressure to replace the import of beef from Brazil and struggled with other challenges before the rates. American animal husbandry has fallen to a lowest layer of 73 years, partly due to drought and rising costs of animal food.
The demand for cheaper beef is expected to increase as economic jitters pull our consumers away from expensive cuts and to hamburgers, which increases prices. The prices of the ground beef in American cities have risen 43 percent in the last five years, according to the American agency or Labor Statistics.
Even with rates, the United States will most likely continue to rely on Brazilian beef because there is no other similar big source for the American market, experts said.
This can be good news for the cattle farmers of Brazil, Mr. Perosa said, of the Meat Exporting Association, but not for our consumers. “It is the American society that has to pay the bill,” he said.
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