South Africa’s chicken imports have been declining from a peak in 2018 and that trend has continued this year.
Despite some monthly spikes – the latest comes in July’s official statistics – the total for the first seven months of the year remains below 2023, which was the first time in four years that chicken imports had increased. Another annual decline looks possible.
Does this mean that the South African poultry industry’s imports crisis is over?
Unfortunately not – it is probably more of a lull, with a resumption of high-volume dumping a constant threat. And even at lower levels, import volumes and dumping hurt the local poultry industry.
Chicken imports are down for two main reasons – one fixed and one temporary. The fixed reason is that the industry has secured anti-dumping duties against nine major poultry producing countries, which will help to keep import volumes down for five-year renewable periods.
The temporary one is possibly a bigger reason for the decline – the spread of bird flu around the world. This put the brakes on imports from the European Union, formerly the leading supplier, and the United States, which has imposed on South Africa a huge annual quota of imports free of the anti-dumping duties they would otherwise attract.
EU import volumes are slowly recovering after dropping to near zero as bird flu hit every one of the countries licensed to export to South Africa. Now four of them have been cleared, and three more want their bans lifted.
Bird flu is still severely restricting import volumes from the US, with 31 states affected by South Africa’s bird flu bans.
But, as and when they recover, they will join EU countries in the quest to land ever-higher volumes of dumped chicken in South Africa.
Brazil is so far unaffected by bird flu, and has become the dominant source of South Africa’s chicken imports. Brazil supplied more than 80% of these imports in the first half of 2024.
This means that current low import volumes of bone-in chicken – the brown meat portions such as leg quarters which are the subject of all nine anti-dumping orders – are not low forever. It’s only a reprieve.
