FairPlay founder Francois Baird has made a strong attack on Brazilian calls to other countries to drop their restrictions on meat and poultry imports from Brazil.
Brazil is the world’s largest meat exporter.
In an interview with South Africa’s Business Times, Ricardo Santin, head of the Brazilian Association for Animal Protein (ABPA) called trade restrictions “protectionist” and said that “there should be no borders for food”.
Santin took issue with restrictions on poultry imports imposed by the European Union over health concerns, saying Brazil’s commercial poultry market was largely unaffected by the recent avian influenza strife.
Baird hit back, noting that there had been serious scandals in the meat trade in Brazil. He said Brazil should first “clean its own house” before calling for trade rules to be dropped.
Brazil, like South Africa, belongs to the World Trade Organisation, which sets the rules for trade on all goods, including food.
“I venture to say that Brazil itself doesn’t accept food that is not sent to the country according to the rules,” Baird said.
“Secondly, would you like the free flow of food without health and safety checks and not knowing where it’s from and if it’s been checked? Would you feed your children that? This is why, on its face, this argument belongs in fantasy land.”
Baird said most of South Africa’s poultry operations are located in small towns and rural areas where unemployment is high.
While Santin said Brazil sought to complement local supply rather than harm domestic poultry industries, Baird accused Brazil of engaging in predatory trade in South Africa.
Chicken dumping hits local poultry farmers
While Santin hit out at “protectionism” blocking Brazil’s chicken exports, he did not mention the anti-dumping duties that South Africa recently imposed on imports of bone-in chicken portions from that country.
Chicken producers and importers frequently – and wrongly – call anti-dumping duties “protectionist”.
Anti-dumping duties are not trade tariffs and are not part of trade policy. They are set in terms of World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, and are imposed around the world after official investigations find imports are being landed at unfairly low prices.
The usual comparison is with the selling price in the producer country, and anti-dumping duties are designed to remedy that price discrepancy.
In Brazil’s case, South Africa’s trade regulator, the International Trade Administration Commission (ITAC), found that Brazil and four European Union countries were exporting bone-in chicken portions to South Africa at dumped prices. It found that these dumped imports were harming South African poultry producers and threatening South African jobs.
In terms of that order, South Africa has imposed varying levels of anti-dumping duties on bone-in chicken from specific Brazilian poultry producers, with the duties depending on the degree of dumping shown by the investigation.
This is not protectionism – it is action in terms of WTO rules to penalise unfair pricing and to impose remedies that ensure fair competition.
Explainer: Dumping and food sovereignty
As local producers lose market share the country risks becoming dependent on imports and loses food sovereignty. This means that the country can be held hostage to foreign supply lines and international pricing, usually in US dollars. When importers of food gain pricing power over essentials such as chicken meat, it becomes vulnerable to exploitation such as price gouging, foreign exchange fluctuations and in the case of disasters such as the Covid 19 pandemic, disaster pricing. This makes food sovereignty a national priority for each and every country.
