LETTER: Dumped chicken hits small farmers harder
Big companies have the means to adapt but small businesses and contract growers end up losing orders and laying off workers
The impact of dumped imports is not only a problem for SA’s major chicken producers “Dumping Hits RCL’s Sugar and Chicken Businesses” (March 5). Chicken farmers such as myself are potentially hit even harder. The RCLs of the world can adapt their business model to support a loss-making chicken business through tough times. Small-scale farmers, subsistence farmers and contract growers don’t have the flexibility of multiple operations. When dumped chicken takes away the market that we supply, that’s it. We end up laying off workers and having to find a different way to put food on the table. The biggest irony is that the imported chicken is not even much cheaper in the shops. We are aware that the dumped chicken comes into the country at much lower prices than our production costs, but somewhere along the line the prices get inflated so that I see chicken from Brazil in the shops at prices only just lower than local prices. So when feed costs or electricity prices or wages go up, the ...
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