Swift cattle vaccination ‘should be repeated for poultry’

Rainbow, South Africa’s second-largest poultry producer, has asked for more government help to support the industry’s export drive, which is key to its long-term growth.

In a letter to shareholders reported by Business Times, Rainbow chair Pieter Louw said the poultry industry needed the government to create an enabling environment to penetrate the lucrative export market.

“South Africa’s next phase of poultry growth will increasingly depend on the ability to export. Expanding export opportunities will require government support to unlock markets and assist with overcoming veterinary and other barriers, and regulatory requirements.”

A major complaint raised by agricultural bodies was the billions lost due to state-level administrative delays, the newspaper said. Failure to streamline veterinary certification, delayed export approvals and rigorous sanitary protocols kept South African meat products locked out of prospective markets.

Rainbow CEO Marthinus Stander stressed the importance of exports for the poultry industry’s growth.

“Following the substantial import replacement since 2018, the scope for further growth through import substitution is increasingly limited.”

Stander said Africa was a particularly important part of Rainbow’s long-term growth ambition. The poultry industry had invested in quality assurance systems and customer-centred capabilities to ensure it met the standards required in international markets.

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South Africa’s food inflation rate is expected to remain low for the rest of the year, but adverse weather could push up prices in 2027.

This is the prediction of the Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy (BFAP) in its latest monthly food inflation brief.

South Africa’s food inflation rate inched up in August, but remained well below the national headline inflation for the month.

The annual food inflation rate has been at historical lows this year. The annual rate for August was 1.1%, compared to 0.9% in July.  South Africa’s headline inflation was 4.4% in August, slightly higher than the 4.3% recorded in July.

Food commodity price movements were expected to remain relatively moderate in the coming months, the BFAP said. However, the Middle East conflict, which is pushing up fuel prices, and the expected El Niño weather phenomenon, likely to bring drier and hotter weather from later this year into 2027, are already having an effect.

Maize prices increased in August for the second consecutive month. Maize is an important food source for the livestock industry, such as beef and poultry producers.

The El Niño weather cycle could affect yields, resulting in lower summer crop production heading into 2027, potentially placing upward pressure on food prices over the medium term. 

“Nevertheless, large carry-over stocks accumulated following the previous two bumper production seasons should provide some buffer against these potential price pressures.” the BFAP said.

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China and South Africa could help ensure that the BRICS group of countries delivers more for agriculture in Africa, and especially South Africa.

Photo: “18th BRICS Summit family picture” by Prime Minister’s Office (India) via Wikimedia Commons / GODL-India

This is the view of agricultural economist Wandile Sihlobo, who is South Africa’s Presidential Envoy on Agriculture and Land.

The 11 BRICS countries are Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, plus new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia.

“BRICS has potential, but action beyond major speeches is essential for the group’s economic advancement,” Sihlobo said in his blog, looking at the recent BRICS summit in India.

“The Summits can’t only end up as spectacular events for the day without tangible benefits for the various business communities. If this continues, doubts about BRICS’s effectiveness will grow.”

Sihlobo noted that China would be the BRICS chair 2027, and would be followed by South Africa in 2028. They could help to ensure that BRICS delivered material benefits from one summit to the next.

He said that while other countries were increasing tariffs and closing markets, China had embraced open markets. For African countries, it had lowered import tariffs on various goods to zero, but now needed to address phytosanitary barriers.

Sihlobo argued that China’s approach to Africa should be “marshalled within BRICS”.

“If China pursues trade matters deliberately, then when South Africa assumes the Chair in 2028, the country will build on already fertile ground. The business communities of all member countries would  also benefit from this approach,” he said.

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Africa’s poultry producers continue to fight against dumped chicken imports from Brazil, the United States and the European Union.

Ghana’s decade-long battle to rebuild its poultry industry, devastated by dumped imports from the EU and the US, is regularly highlighted by FairPlay. But Ghana is not alone – Nigeria is involved in a similar struggle.

They are among the West African countries targeted by major foreign poultry producers under free trade agreements. Frozen chicken portions poured into these countries at prices with which local poultry producers could not compete, and the local industry collapsed.

Both Ghana and Nigeria have taken measures to ban or restrict chicken imports and stimulate local production. Both are still struggling to achieve those goals, hindered by huge volumes of imports smuggled across land borders from neighbouring states. The dumping continues, just via a different route.

The basis of the problem is the preference of northern hemisphere consumers for chicken breast meat. This sells at a premium, but leaves subsidised foreign producers with huge volumes of unwanted brown meat – mostly leg quarters, and also separate cuts of chicken thighs, drumsticks and wings. 

The solution: dump it in foreign markets where those cuts are popular. South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon were among the countries flooded with dumped chicken portions.

In 2016, Ghana’s then president John Mahama, told the United Nations that chicken imports had reduced local production to 5% of the local market. 

However, despite an expensive  “Broiler revitalisation programme”, Ghana’s local market share was back to 5% last year, according to WATT Poultry, and new resuscitation measures were needed.

Earlier this year, Nigeria banned poultry imports from all countries except members of the regional ECOWAS economic union. That blocked chicken from the EU, the US and Brazil but not – despite heightened efforts of Nigerian customs officials – from neighbouring countries.

The ban was not working, according to Nigeria’s Business Times. “Poultry operators argue that the unchecked inflow of cheaper imported products is eroding profitability and discouraging investment in the sector,” it reported.

In an analysis, Poultry Hatch said that, while Nigeria was Africa’s sixth largest poultry producer, it produced less than a third of the country’s 1.5 million tonnes of annual chicken consumption.

Nigeria’s poultry industry was “competing with smuggling on an industrial scale”, it said. “According to the Feed Practitioners Association of Nigerian, nearly 1 million tonnes of chicken meat are smuggled into Nigeria every year.”

The Nigerian poultry industry’s travails and potential revival were detailed in a lengthy article last year in the US-based Current Affairs magazine.

The experiences of Ghana and Nigeria hold a lesson for South Africa, which experienced its own crisis from dumped chicken imports nearly a decade ago. 

The threat of dumped chicken imports has not gone away. It has receded, with import volumes reduced by anti-dumping duties on nine producing countries, and by outbreaks of bird flu which have resulted in South African trade bans on imports from the affected countries.

The reality is that the world’s major poultry producers – the US, the EU and Brazil – are still looking for places to dump bulk packs of unwanted chicken leg quarters. Ghana and Nigeria are on that list. So is South Africa.

Dumping therefore remains a real threat. So do rising volumes of under-priced chicken imports, as FairPlay highlighted last week. 

No country can compete with dumped imports. Ensuring fair competition is going to require eternal vigilance from customs authorities and by poultry executives scrutinising import prices, ready to sound the alarm.

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South African agriculture minister Willie Aucamp is involving the private sector as he tries to make the country’s agriculture and agro-processing master plan more effective.

Aucamp told Business Day that he wants to translate the plan’s policy framework into measurable outcomes.

He said his department is working with organised agriculture and the private sector to address bottlenecks, including in infrastructure, farmer support, market access and regulatory delays.

Aucamp intends to create an environment that encourages private sector investment rather than relying solely on government initiatives, Business Day reported.

It said an immediate priority was to bring government, farmers, organised agriculture and the private sector together to tackle agriculture’s multiple constraints.

“We are tackling all of them together,” Aucamp said.

The National Agricultural Marketing Council has been tasked with co-ordinating the implementation of the master plan.

The agriculture department is working with organisations including Business Unity South Africa and the Agricultural Business Chamber of South Africa.

Initiatives underway include a pilot project together with the African Farmers Association to transfer title to 100 farmers per province who are currently renting state-owned agricultural land. This would give them greater certainty and improve their ability to access commercial loans, Aucamp said.

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FairPlay says chicken importers are making contradictory claims over South Africa’s chicken import tariffs.

In a letter in Business Day, FairPlay founder Francois Baird took issue with Paul Matthew, CEO of the Association of Meat Importers and Exporters (AMIE).

Matthew had said in a Business Day article that South Africa’s poultry industry can only be “more productive, competitive and export-orientated” if anti-dumping duties on chicken imports are removed. 

However, AMIE had recently argued that because the poultry industry is profitable and competitive, import tariffs are no longer needed.

“Matthew cannot have it both ways. Either it can grow, as it is doing now with tariffs and anti-dumping duties in place, as AMIE acknowledges, or it cannot grow while those remain, as Matthew tells Business Day.”

Baird also pointed out that AMIE was a signatory to the poultry master plan.

“That plan aims to curb chicken imports, act against illegal imports through the anti-dumping duties Matthew wants removed, and produce more chicken for the domestic and export markets.”

Matthew’s article was part of an AMIE campaign against the renewal of anti-dumping duties on chicken imports from Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

“He does not concede that there might be a reason to renew those anti-dumping duties, which were imposed because a flood of dumped imports harmed the local industry, and can be renewed if lifting them would restore that harm.

“And nowhere does he say that if import tariffs are removed, chicken importers will make a huge amount of money,” Baird concluded.

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