FEATURE COVER-STORY
Poultry production The Moral - Read the Fine Print Before Signing Trade Agreements!
may have overlooked when signing so-called economic partnership agreements with the EU or EU countries. The EU demanded the systematic removal of both tariff and nontariff barriers in Africa to EU poultry meat products.
The lesson to be drawn from the decimation of local chicken production in African countries by cheap poultry imports from Brazil and the EU is the importance of thorough due diligence prior to signing trade agreements.
In his analysis fair trade proponent, Chris Ward, a Canadian-based health policy and international development consultant and a member of FairPlay, laments the scale of the oversight and the naivety of the decision: “Seduced by EU promises of barrier-free access to trade with Europe, many African countries have been cajoled into lowering their own trade barriers, which protect sensitive agricultural industries such as poultry. “This observation coming from someone who was Government House leader and minister of education in Canada should not be taken lightly.
By Nick Barnes
I
f there is one moral - if one would call it that -from the devastating impact of chicken portion imports on Africa’s poultry industry is the need to read the fine print in future bilateral trade agreements between individual countries and the EU. African countries overlooked this and their cost of this oversight has been colossal. In the atmosphere of high emotions, it is easy to blame EU or countries in other parts of the world with huge poultry industries. However, as it has emerged, African countries are complicit in the creation of the current crisis or co-authors of their own fate when one considers decisions that then then ministers of trade took over two decades ago.
20 | March - April 2021
African countries were overexcited for their poultry products to have access to lucrative markets of the West, which they could not previously without barriers. The US dollars gained would translate in more revenue in local currency, so they ingenuously assumed. Agreements were signed without necessary due diligence. This would turn to be mortgaging the sovereignty of the local poultry industry to, at best, the lowest bidder, or at worst, for free. The biggest oversight Palpably, the biggest oversight was ignoring the reality that the playing field in was not level in poultry production. Poultry producers are highly subsidised in EU, and indeed, most western countries. This is a fact which African countries
Later, the hasty signing of agreements would turn to be carte-blanche for unfettered dumping of large volumes of brown meat portions (unwanted frozen chicken parts and offal) in African countries at prices which bear little relationship to production costs in the EU and/or lower than they are selling the same product in their home markets. In South Africa, prior to COVID-19, the GM of South African Poultry Association (SAPA)
