In 2016 dumped chicken imports reduced Ghana’s poultry industry to 5% of its local market. The government has since spent millions to rebuild local poultry producers, but now imports are mounting once again. Development economist Dr Ralph Nordjo suggests some solutions.
Ghana’s chicken imports have skyrocketed, leaving local farmers in the dust. But what’s behind this trend, and how can we reverse it?
Ghana’s political leaders and other decision makers must examine the country’s imports and assess the degree at which trade should be liberalised or restricted. This should be done taking into consideration the priority sectors of an economy.
Take the agriculture sector: we know that industrialised countries formulate agricultural policies and programmes that are backed by finance to help their farmers to grow and then export farm and food products to markets around the globe.
Farmers in African countries especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) do not have such opportunities, despite the fact that the agricultural sector has the highest level of employment and is described as the backbone of the African economy.
Ghana should be concerned by the spike in chicken imports. Ghana was once on the verge of self-sufficiency, if not fully self-sufficient, in chicken meat production. However, it is currently one of the countries in Africa that is heavily importing chicken meat, thus collapsing the local production.
Official statistics show chicken imports increasing at a rate that kills private sector development and growth. Chicken imports in Ghana increased by 161% from US$ 83.1 million in 2021 to US$ 216.7 million in 2022. Over three years from 2021 to 2023, Ghana spent US $471.2 million on importing dumped chicken as well as US $37.8 million on live chickens.
The over-dependency on chicken imports contributes to Ghana’s negative trade balance and to the country’s foreign exchange woes and it leads to high prices of chicken meat.
Ghana’s political campaign season has begun and politicians are making ambitious promises to win votes in the December election. According to a Ghana News Agency report, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) is “poised to revitalize poultry sector with strategic interventions” that will ensure 40% of chicken is procured locally to generate a market of US$ 110 million. This means the other 60% will still be imported.
Meanwhile, for the past decade, Ghana’s production of chicken meat is estimated to be less than 25% of total consumption; meaning 75% or more is imported. The NDC is seeking to increase domestic production by a minimum of 15 percentage points.
Obviously, that sounds like a step in the right direction. However, this requires critical analysis of the cost of increasing local production by 15 percentage points vis-a-vis the social and economic benefits. Politicians should work out what the country gains from spending taxpayers’ money on a particular policy. They must make well-informed decision based on the evidence available before making promises that fail prior to implementation.
The recurrent economic mismanagement of most countries in Africa coupled with the negative effects of Covid-19 as well as the Russia-Ukraine war, have largely contributed to a strained resource basket of most countries and the widening of poverty. This must remind the politicians of the importance of setting national priorities to transform African economies and put them on the path to sustained economic growth and development.
The question has been, how do we set national priorities? Identifying the costs and benefits of policies is certainly a way to go, we must embrace it.
Investment in the agriculture sector has been identified as a promising way to restore African economies and reduce poverty. This includes investment to increase agricultural output that would meet local consumption and reduce imports.
Chicken meat production is one sector that requires such investment. Ghana has done it before and is capable of doing it again to meet growing local demand by removing the bottlenecks affecting domestic production. The fundamentals are there to revisit and build on. It can be done.
As the country struggles to reduce its reliance on imports, I hope the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) could also provide a much-needed boost to poultry production by creating a single African market for Africa’s poultry farmers.
