The Growth of Brazil’s Poultry and Pork Exports and Their Logistics

In animal protein trade, the headline rarely tells the whole story. Volumes can rise even as key markets lose momentum, a sanitary incident can reshape competition across a region, and a conflict thousands of miles away can suddenly force exporters to redraw shipping routes. That is why reliable trade data matters.

Datamar’s DataLiner shows Brazil’s poultry and pork exports started 2026 with solid growth, but the numbers also reveal a market in transition. Poultry meat exports reached 63,977 TEUs in January and February, up 6.1% year on year, while pork exports totaled 12,784 TEUs, a gain of 14.7%. Beneath that performance lies a more revealing picture: Gulf demand remains strong, East Asia is no longer moving in lockstep, and Brazil’s maritime cold chain has become even more central to export competitiveness.

Chart 1 – Brazil Poultry Meat Exports | Jan 2023 – Feb 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

Chart 2 – Brazil Pork Exports | Jan 2023 – Feb 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

The poultry figures make it clear that Brazil’s export base remains broad, but the center of gravity is shifting. The United Arab Emirates ranked first in January-February 2026 with 6,463 TEUs, followed by China with 6,221, Japan with 5,286 and Saudi Arabia with 5,022. South Africa, the Philippines and Qatar also posted strong performances, with Qatar rising 46.5% from a year earlier. In practice, Brazil’s chicken exports are being supported by a combination of Gulf demand, selected Asian markets and growing purchases from parts of Africa.

Table 1 – Top Destinations for Brazil’s Poultry Exports | Jan-Feb 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

The Middle East stands out for more than just volume. In the first two months of 2026, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar together absorbed more than one-fifth of Brazil’s containerized poultry exports. That concentration reflects long-standing structural factors rather than a temporary spike in orders. Gulf markets are highly dependent on imported food, Brazil has spent years building credibility as a halal supplier, and trade ties in the corridor are reinforced by both certification systems and corporate investment.

Official Brazilian export guidance to the UAE highlights poultry as one of the country’s main food imports from Brazil, while USDA’s Dubai office expects UAE chicken imports to rise again in 2026, supported by population growth, tourism, construction activity and stronger consumption.

On the industrial side, Brazilian companies are deepening their presence in the region. JBS said in January that it plans to double output at its chicken plant in Jeddah by the end of 2026, in step with Saudi Arabia’s broader push to strengthen domestic food production. Together, those elements help explain why halal shipments to the Middle East have gained momentum: the trade is backed not only by demand, but by an established commercial and regulatory framework.

Conflict and bird flu are adding new trade risks

That said, the corridor has become more difficult to operate. The conflict involving Iran, Israel and the United States has added friction to a trade lane that had been one of Brazil’s most dynamic outlets for animal protein. In late March, Reuters reported that Brazilian exporters were rerouting beef and chicken cargo through the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and overland connections to keep serving buyers in Iraq, Qatar and the UAE, even as transport costs and risk exposure increased.

DatamarNews later reported that Brazilian exports to the Persian Gulf fell 31% in March, with poultry meat and byproducts down 13.8%, as disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz hit trade flows. The January-February DataLiner snapshot is important precisely because it captures the strength of Gulf demand before the conflict fully fed into shipping decisions, insurance premiums and sailing schedules.

Sanitary risk remains the other major variable. USDA says Brazil’s commercial poultry plants are currently free of highly pathogenic avian influenza and expects exports to rise in 2026 as the country opens new markets and negotiates regionalization clauses that could preserve trade even if outbreaks occur in specific areas. That stronger footing comes after a turbulent period.

In 2025, Brazil faced its first HPAI case in a commercial operation, triggering temporary restrictions from major buyers before trade gradually resumed. Elsewhere in South America, outbreaks continue to affect the regional playing field. In April 2026, China suspended poultry imports from Chile after a new bird flu outbreak there. The result is a more competitive environment in which sanitary status directly shapes market access.

East Asia is fragmenting as a demand engine

Asia, meanwhile, is no longer behaving like a single demand bloc, and that shift deserves close attention. In poultry, China fell 13.0% in the January-February DataLiner figures, while Japan rose 25.1% and South Korea gained 7.6%. The pork numbers are even more striking. China dropped 39.6%, Singapore fell 21.0% and Vietnam declined 35.3%, yet Japan climbed 71.4% and South Korea surged 74.7%.

The pattern suggests that East Asia is fragmenting from Brazil’s perspective. China is pulling back, some smaller Asian destinations are also softening, and the growth offset is increasingly coming from Japan, Korea and markets such as the Philippines.

That change matters because China has long been too important to treat as just another customer. USDA’s Beijing office expects China’s pork imports to keep falling in 2026, citing ample domestic supply, weak price signals and muted incentives to import. USDA’s broader global meat outlook also projects a 16% decline in Chinese pork imports this year. Those fundamentals help explain why Brazil’s pork trade is rotating away from China and toward other Asian markets. The same logic helps illuminate the poultry picture: even where China remains a relevant buyer, it no longer looks like the same reliable engine of incremental demand it once was.

Pork exports are finding growth beyond China

Pork, in fact, deserves to be read as its own export story rather than as an appendix to poultry. Brazil does export pork, and at a rising pace. DataLiner shows containerized pork exports reached 12,784 TEUs in January-February 2026, up 14.7% from a year earlier, after totaling 83,523 TEUs in 2025, a gain of 9.5%.

The Philippines led by a wide margin with 4,539 TEUs and 35.5% market share, followed by China with 2,178 and Japan with 2,132. USDA’s Brasília office says the Philippines overtook China as the main destination for Brazilian pork in 2025, while its global outlook continues to place Brazil among the world’s leading pork exporters. The United States is forecast to remain the world’s largest pork-exporting country in 2026, while the European Union exports more as a bloc rather than as a single nation.

Domestic demand in Brazil is also on the rise: USDA projects pork consumption at 3.07 million metric tons carcass-weight equivalent in 2026 and cites an industry estimate of record per-capita consumption of 20.2 kilograms in 2025.

Table 2 – Top Destinations for Brazil’s Pork Exports | Jan-Feb 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

Brazil’s southern reefer corridor underpins the trade

The maritime logistics side is just as important as the market story, especially because poultry and pork are reefer trades. These products do not move through ports like generic dry cargo.

They depend on refrigerated containers, steady power supply, specialized yard operations, fast gate coordination and reliable vessel space. DataLiner shows poultry exports are highly concentrated in a handful of terminals: TCP handled 31,969 TEUs in January-February, equivalent to 49.97% of the total, followed by Itapoá with 10,053, Portonave with 6,842 and JBS Terminais with 5,449.

Pork follows a similar geography, though in a different order: Portonave led with 4,402 TEUs, followed by Itapoá with 2,992, TCP with 2,369 and JBS Terminais with 2,020. What emerges is not a dispersed national export network, but a specialized southern reefer corridor.

Table 3 – Top Poultry Export Terminals | Jan-Feb 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

Table 4 – Top Pork Export Terminals | Jan-Feb 2026 | TEUs

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

That concentration reflects where Brazil produces animal protein. USDA says the South accounts for 57% of the country’s chicken production, with Paraná alone responsible for 34% of national output in the third quarter of 2025.

In pork, 73.4% of production was concentrated in the South in 2025, with Santa Catarina accounting for 32.3% of slaughter, followed by Paraná with 21% and Rio Grande do Sul with 20%. The terminals topping the Datamar rankings are extensions of Brazil’s core poultry and pork producing belt.

Their infrastructure helps explain why they matter. TCP says it has 5,268 reefer outlets, the largest reefer yard in South America, 24-hour reefer gate operations and the largest number of maritime services in Brazil. Portonave reports 3,210 reefer plugs, while Porto Itapoá has been expanding its refrigerated capacity in phases, adding hundreds of additional outlets.

In an industry like animal protein, those are not minor technical details. Export competitiveness depends on the ability to keep cargo powered, monitored and moving without interruption. A terminal’s reefer capacity can be as important as the market demand waiting at the other end.

The exporters behind Brazil’s animal-protein flows

The company rankings add a final layer to the export picture. In the containerized poultry and pork flows tracked by DataLiner, Seara Alimentos is the leading real cargo owner in both segments in January-February 2026, with 17,757 TEUs in poultry and 3,514 in pork. BRF ranks second in poultry with 16,564 TEUs and third in pork with 2,035, while Aurora appears prominently in both trades. In the broader corporate landscape, JBS remains Brazil’s largest meat company and one of the biggest in the world. But within the poultry and pork container flows covered here, Seara is the leading exporter in the Datamar rankings at the start of 2026.

What trade data is revealing about the market ahead

Taken together, the numbers point to something more nuanced than simple export growth. Brazil’s poultry and pork trade is expanding, but on a different map than before. Gulf markets remain central because of halal-certified supply, food-security demand and long-established commercial ties continue to pull volume. East Asia still matters greatly, but it no longer functions as a single engine: China is retreating in both proteins, while Japan, South Korea and the Philippines are taking on more weight. Underpinning all of it is a maritime cold chain that remains highly concentrated, highly specialized and deeply tied to the geography of production in southern Brazil.

That is what the Datamar figures make visible. Brazil’s animal-protein export machine is not simply moving more containers. It is adapting to a new commercial landscape — one shaped by halal demand in the Gulf, softer Chinese buying, sanitary pressures across South America and a reefer logistics system whose efficiency has become inseparable from export performance itself. Trustworthy trade data is what makes those shifts visible early, before they turn into lost market share or missed logistics windows.

Learn more about South America’s most trusted trade data source here: https://www.datamar.com/en/products/dataliner