How the China-US trade war could push up the cost of British chicken dinners

Last year the UK imported 2.4 million tonnes of soya beans and “meal” (made from grounding and heating the beans after their oil has been extracted), mostly from Argentina and Brazil, two of the world’s largest exporters. One of the reasons for the high demand in the UK for soya beans is that the meal used to feed chickens has an extremely high concentration of protein, at around 48%. As part of ongoing government-funded research into the resilience of the UK food system, I have been interviewing animal feed experts, and many expressed concern that the UK does not have a domestic protein source in sufficient quantities.

Author: Theo Stanley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Environmental Geography, University of Southampton

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