The campaign by chicken importers against the renewal of anti-dumping duties on poultry imports from three countries has confused some journalists.
What the Association of Meat Importers and Exporters (AMIE) hasn’t been telling the media is that, if their campaign fails and the import duties remain in place, nothing changes.
Importers want the duties scrapped, and often bring price into their arguments. This led the Afrikaans-language radio station RSG to report that “The Association of Meat Importers and Exporters warns that South Africans could soon pay substantially more for chicken imports from Europe”.
Wow! A substantial price increase in the near future from all chicken imports from Europe! Except that the journalist has got it all wrong.
Has AMIE made such a claim? They would know it could not be true. But clearly, these claims are spreading confusion, intentionally or not.
It was left to Izaak Breitenbach of the SA Poultry Association (SAPA) to point out the errors. He told RSG that chicken imports from Europe and the United States were very low at the moment because of bird flu outbreaks.
He pointed out that, if the duties on three European countries stay the same, as SAPA hopes, South Africans will not pay more for chicken.
“There will be no change in the tariffs and there will be no impact on prices,” he said.
Obvious and true. But it should not have been necessary for him to say so.
