South Africa has renewed anti-dumping duties on dumped chicken imported from the US. However, due to the Agoa trade deal, these anti-dumping duties are largely meaningless.
South Africa renewed anti-dumping duties on US chicken imports to defend local producers, but the duty-free allocation mandated by the Agoa trade deal allows these imports to enter South Africa without penalty.
This contradiction is the result of the US strong-arming South Africa to accept a huge duty-free allocation of US chicken – US negotiators made it a condition of the renewal of South Africa’s Agoa trade deal benefits from 2015 onwards.
No duty-free chicken quota, no Agoa benefits for the rest of the country, including South Africa’s automotive, steel and fruit exporters. Those were the terms the US set, so South Africa’s poultry producers “took one for the team” and US chicken portions flowed in, at dumped prices but without any penalty.
After exporting only 330 tonnes of poultry to South Africa in 2015, the US secured a duty-free quota of 65 000 tonnes for 2016, and the allocation has risen every year since then. The current quota, for the year to March 2024, is 71 963 tonnes.
Nearly all poultry imports from the US are bone-in chicken portions such as leg quarters to which anti-dumping duties would have applied.
For the first three years, US imports exceeded the quota, so the excess would have been subject to the R9.40/kg anti-dumping duty which has been in operation since 2000. It is that duty which has just been renewed.
However, since 2020, imports of US chicken have been below the annual quota – substantially so from 2022 onwards as bird flu has spread through the US and limited production. The total to March this year will be another low one.
It is bird flu that has protected South Africa’s poultry producers from US chicken imports, not the anti-dumping duties which the US has circumvented. And, when bird flu recedes, those duty-free dumped imports will increase again.
