SA poultry producers are in full support of planned protest marches by the Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU), with management and staff of companies such as Astral Foods, RCL Foods and Country Bird Holdings set to join the mass action.

The marches will take place on the 24th November in Tshwane to the offices of the European Union Commission, on the 29th November to the Legislature in Pietermaritzburg, and to Parliament in Cape Town on the 30th November. Responsible for the employment of 130 000 people, with many thousands more in downstream industries, Marthinus Stander, CEO of Country Bird and chairperson of SAPA’s Broiler Organisation, says a record volume of imports, and in particularly record dumping levels of chicken portions – predominantly by the EU – is the major cause of job losses in the local poultry industry.

“Protection for our local industry is very limited, with no barriers to entry applicable to the European Union as a result of a bilateral free trade agreement,” says Stander. “This is creating jobs abroad, while shedding jobs in South Africa.”

The announcement by RCL Foods that it plans to reduce its farming and processing workforce by 1200 jobs is alarming says Stander, adding that this is not the first loss the industry has suffered recently.

“At least twelve businesses have gone out of production in the last few years, and at least three more are in serious trouble,” he says. “Most major producers have more cutbacks to come, which will result in as many as 12 000 direct and indirect job losses, to add to the thousands lost so far.”

According to Stander, while SA poultry farmers are able to produce a whole chicken for less than any EU country and for almost the same as the US, in spite of rising demand the industry is downscaling, with enterprises closing and jobs being lost.

“This is simply because the trading environment is so distorted by unrealistically priced imports dumped on our shores that local producers cannot recover the costs of production, as every business needs to do in order to survive,” he says. “To top it all, this so-called cheap chicken only benefits the handful of importers, and not the consumer.”

Given the scale of dumping, more now than at any time in South Africa’s history, government programmes to encourage emerging and smallholder farmers, especially from previously disadvantaged communities, will come to nothing if the current situation  remains.

“A small, empowered producer anywhere in SA must be competitive with the EU and US as well as the big local producers, which flies in the face of economic empowerment, rural development, transformation and job creation,” he says. “We need an enabling environment which will support the sustainability of local producers, big and small, and only government is able to provide this. We are not dealing with oil, which we have to import. The SA poultry industry can meet local demand in full, creating jobs at a time of record unemployment and delivering in the critical areas of rural development, food security and transformation.”

Source: SAPA