LETTER: Half a story falls fowl of the truth

David Wolpert does not tell the whole story about chicken imports and the local poultry industry (“Import duties are frying the poor”, November 3).

After a swipe at government and trade regulator Itac over antidumping duties on imported potato fries, he switches to the poultry industry and asks a seemingly logical question.

The poultry industry claims chicken importers are making fat profits instead of passing low import prices on to consumers, he says, and if this is true local producers are not suffering from dumped chicken imports.

“Why then do we see one tariff investigation after another aimed at punishing importers, and in the process consumers?” he asks.

It is a question to which Wolpert knows, or should know, the answer. Chicken imports are priced at, or just below, local chicken products. As producers have explained in many applications for antidumping duties, the result is price suppression (they cannot recover rising input costs), cost build-ups, decreased production and sales, and lower profits.

This is a form of predatory trade practice to drive out local competition, as indeed has been the case with small-scale farmers and retrenchments at bigger producers. Job losses heap more misery on communities in impoverished rural areas.

The evidence submitted of this material injury has resulted in antidumping duties against nine producer countries (not “punishing importers” but ensuring fair trade and compliance with international trade rules). If Wolpert has studied these applications as he says he has (and for years he headed the importers’ association, which opposed the applications), he would know this well.

Local potato producers are presumably making similar arguments. Yet Wolpert feigns ignorance and asks what harm is being done to local chicken farmers, when they have set this out in great detail over many years. It is not a fair question when you only give readers half of the facts.

Francois Baird, Founder, FairPlay

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