Agriculture

Chicken importers still can’t count

Chicken importers have yet to retract their inaccurate statement that South African chicken prices rose 10% a year for 10 years until 2021. It’s just not true, but they won’t admit it.

They made the charge presumably to imply that rising import tariffs had caused a large part of the increase. That’s not true, either.

FairPlay has pointed out that SA Poultry Association calculations from official StatsSA numbers show that average prices, at both producer and retail level, rose by 10% or more in only a few years between 2011 and 2021, but not in all years, and certainly not for 10 years in a row.

Told that they were wrong, Chickenfacts, a subsidiary of the Association of Meat Importers and Exporters, said on Twitter that their stats came from the National Agricultural Marketing Council (NAMC). So we checked for ourselves, and it turns out that these NAMC figures just prove them wrong, all over again!

Chickenfacts produced graphs showing prices of fresh and whole chicken from 2010 to 2021. They didn’t bother to calculate the percentage increases, but we did.

These figures show that fresh chicken only rose by more than 10% in three of the 10 years and whole chicken in two of the 10, while in one year it declined. 

So the truth is that these supposed 10% annual increases for the past 10 years just didn’t happen.

Two respected institutions, StatsSA and the NAMC, agree that chicken prices rose by less than 10% in most years between 2011 and 2021.