French NGOs Push to Save African Chicken Farmers from Europe

PARIS: African chicken farmers risk ruin from massive imports of European frozen poultry at less than a third of their prices, say organisers of a campaign by French non-government organisations to protect the homegrown African market. The movement, launched this month, is seeking to pressure European decision-makers to ensure the right of African agricultural markets to protection as part of international trade negotiations.

For example, in the marketplaces of Dakar in Senegal or the Cameroon towns of Yaounde and Duuala, poultry from local smallholdings sells at between 1.80 and 2.40 euros a kilogram and so cannot compete against frozen European imports selling at only 0.50 euros per kilogram. In Cameroon, frozen imports jumped from 978 tonnes in 1996 to 22,154 tonnes last year. In Senegal, they have multiplied tenfold in five years, and 40 per cent of Senegalese chicken farms have gone out of business, campaigners say.

The French pressure group set up to help Africans calls itself "Chicken exports - Europe rips the feathers off Africa" and is led by a Roman Catholic anti-famine initiative called Agir Ici and the French Committee for International Solidarity. It is targetting the Europe's poultry industry's practice of selling to Africa those chicken parts it cannot sell back home.

The petitioners say the African market is "coveted by the multinationals," and attack what they call the "logic of low costs" and trade deals forcing Africans to open up their markets to foreign competition. French business has done well out of the prevailing business logic. Prices are set entirely according to supply and demand, said Alain Melot, chairman of France's poultry trade association.

He expressed surprise at the campaign to curb European sales, pointing out that Africans were free to impose import duties if they wished to, and citing the case of Nigeria, which does not import any European chicken meat.

But Caroline Doremus-Mege of Agir Ici said the Nigerian regulations contravened the rules of the World Trade Organisation, which seeks to lower trade barriers. Nigeria had made an "illicit decision," she noted, stressing that it was precisely the aim of her group to make such protection measures legal in order to help the Africans.

A major poultry group executive, who did not wish to be named, said: "Introduction of protective tariffs is a way of protecting markets." But selling local chicken meat at higher prices was no solution, he insisted. European imports represented "a good way of feeding a population with weak purchasing power." Melot pointed out that husbandry in the African countries concerned was almost entirely in the form of smallholdings: "If they close their borders they'll have to build up their own production, and where will the money come from?"

But Doremus-Mege insisted Cameroon could be self-sufficient, while in Senegal, the poultry sector had been "pretty phenomenal before it was ruined by these massive imports."

Gilles Hirzel of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said competition was almost impossible between "the agriculture of the North which is subsidised and whose productivity is about 1,000 times higher than that of sub-Sahara Africa." He said the initiative to help African chicken breeders represented the principle of balance in fair exchange, as sought by his own agency.

Less than a fortnight after its launch, the new campaign had got off to a good start, said Agir Ici. Correspondence had been raining down on the French external trade ministry and the European Union agricultre and trade commissioners in Brussels. But by mid-month the decision-makers had yet to respond.