LETTER: There’s no sense in letting dumpers wreck SA’s poultry industry
Neva Makgetla ("Chicken imports have benefited the poor", Business Day, 17 January) seems to ignore a basic economic principle of making enough profit to make business worthwhile. How much profit is debatable, but it is must be more than the local industry is able to realise right now, or else we would not be closing operations, retrenching staff and cutting back. You cannot prioritise cheap over employment and you cannot import a country to economic growth; jobs are a national imperative. We employ more people than similar sized EU companies, resulting in economic growth with employment, not jobless growth. If we mechanised processing more, we could have a similar cost profile but a much smaller workforce, something government and the unemployed would not want. Rather than tariffs, we are asking for a safeguard, a mechanism designed to deal with a shock to the system. In 2009, the EU supplied less than 0,5% of the bone-in products, yet today they supply more than 80% of these -and ...
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