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.
