The avian flu outbreak in South Africa has led to government looking into creating a temporary rebate on the import of meat, poultry, and other food items.
The trade, industry, and competition ministry has directed the International Trade Administration Commission of South Africa (ITAC) “to consider the creation of a temporary rebate provision on meat and edible offal, fresh, chilled, or frozen fowl”.
“SA is currently dealing with a number of highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks,” according to the ITAC.
The outbreaks have led to the culling of 2.6 million chickens as of September 21, according to the statement.
The ITAC has no doubt that the “impact of the depletion of locally available poultry will have severe food security implications”.
This will play a major role in the price of poultry and other poultry products going up.
EGGS
The department of agriculture, land reform and rural development said it was focused on measures to improve availability of eggs to consumers and containing the spread of the avian influenza outbreaks.
Minister Thoko Didiza met with retailers to discuss the impact of the recent outbreaks in the country earlier this week.
This followed a meeting with the South African Poultry Association (Sapa) on Friday.
The number of avian flu cases in the country is the highest reported since the first outbreaks at commercial farms in 2017, with some poultry producers reporting a loss of almost two million chickens this year, worth more than R100 million.
Sapa opposes rebate
Sapa does not feel a rebate was the answer and argued that could in fact be the "final straw" for the poultry industry also being heavily impacted by load shedding, according to News24.
South Africa’s poultry producers have been devastated by the impact of load shedding and have been reporting major losses even before the bird flu outbreak, according to Izaak Breitenbach, the general manager of Sapa’s broiler division.
He argues against a temporary rebate and states, "Rainbow Chicken, Quantum, and Astral have already published and said that combined, the total loss due to avian influenza to date, and it hasn't stopped, is half a billion rand. And that is for only three companies, so one can just imagine what it is for the total industry".
"We will see job losses, and we will see economic decline in this industry."
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