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The American Feed Industry Association’s Mallory Gaines and Gary Huddleston recently brought staff from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service on a tour of the Kent Nutrition feed mill in Hagerstown, Md., as part of the AFIA’s Feed 101 Program.

On both the domestic and international fronts, we are being asked how feed additives and ingredients can mitigate offsets, such as methane, and support sustainable and nutrient-dense animal protein diets. The American Feed Industry Association prides itself on its commitment to being the voice for the animal food industry at the international level and has invested more time and energy into the sustainability and climate change space over the past few years. This is also one reason why the AFIA is engaged in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM4C), and participated in the meeting held in Washington, D.C., a few weeks ago.

Last year, I wrote about the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s (APHIS) Veterinary Services Form 16-4 (VS 16-4) and how if it was not updated, it could hinder exports for animal-based products in the event of a foreign animal disease outbreak on U.S. soil. We recently celebrated APHIS’s progress on updating this form, and are now turning our attention to going country-by-country, product-by-product to remove any diseases not relevant to those products.

U.S. animal nutrition products hold a valuable place in the global marketplace. In 2022, the overall export value for feed, feed ingredients and pet food was $7.5 billion and the total volume of exports of these products was 9 million metric tons.

Not many know what happens behind the scenes here at the American Feed Industry Association. This well-oiled machine may look easy-breezy-lemon-squeezy (as my Pilates instructor says) from the outside, but behind our closed doors, you’ll find dual, sometimes triple, computer monitors; multiple Excel spreadsheets open with trade data and colorful graphs; dozens of browser pages open with research; partially drafted Word documents; scribbled post-it notes; and LOTS and LOTS of caffeine. Well, I can’t speak for the rest of the AFIA, but that’s what it looks like at my desk, and I can tell you, it is all worth it when we score a win for our members and industry.

Imagine that all the different countries in the world are Greek gods and goddesses. As Americans, we would likely think ourselves as the almighty Zeus and maybe we would say our brethren the European Union (EU) would be Poseidon, brother of Zeus and god of the sea. Even though Zeus is all powerful, Poseidon is no slouch; he bestowed many gifts, seduced many nymphs and sent many sea monsters to ravage those who betrayed him. All the gods and goddesses meet on Mount Olympus and here is where we make our analogy stretch to the United Nations (UN).

IFIF, or “If-If” as it is called outside the United States, is not just something you say when you are “iffy” about something. The American Feed Industry Association is not at all iffy about IFIF and its mission. The International Feed Industry Federation (IFIF) provides a unified voice and leadership for the global animal feed industry. Additionally, IFIF represents the global feed community in multilateral forums such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), World Trade Organization (WTO), World Health Organization (WHO), World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) and the Codex Alimentarius (Codex).  

If you or your customers export animal-based feed or pet food, you know how heavily the industry relies on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). In many cases, you can’t export a feed or pet food without some form of APHIS health certificate or approval. In recent years, getting the documentation needed to export has been more than a headache due to ongoing agency staffing and funding issues, the pandemic and the ongoing highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) crisis.