Tyson Foods to Focus on Brazil, India, Other Emerging Markets

(MoneyWatch)  There's not much left for Tyson Foods to do in the U.S., founder and former CEO Don Tyson told the AP in a recent interview. Instead, the world's largest meat processor will focus on emerging markets like Brazil, India and China, following "the expanding footprint of fast food chains."

But Tyson can't simply export its U.S. model of huge-scale factories to other countries:

In India, for example, nearly 65 percent of the population still makes a living off of agriculture and the government restricts the size of farms, said Peter Hobbs, adjunct professor of agriculture at Cornell University.

As companies like Tyson enter India, they face pressure not just to produce meat profitably, but also to provide employment to a rural population that dwarfs that of the United States.

"What would you do with 65 percent of 1.2 billion people? Where would they be employed? I don't think the Tyson-type model would be able to employ that many people," Hobbs said.

The company is aided by Don Tyson's unusual position: he controls 70 percent of all shareholder voting power through a special class of stock. He told AP this gives the company more freedom:

"It lets you do long-range plans. It lets you buy a little company in India and know that the best it's going to do for a couple years is break even," he said. "If you're a real public company, that's got to have quarter to quarter (expletive) increases, somebody is going to be on your ass about what the hell did you buy India for."

In the past year, Tyson bought two poultry companies in Brazil, announced three joint ventures in China, and acquired majority ownership in India-based Godrej Foods.