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Chicken wars: SA industry feels the heat from EU imports

6 Mar 2017

This story starts at the dinner table. A European dinner table, to be precise, where well-heeled, health-conscious diners are tucking into yet another portion of chicken breast with trimmings. For reasons of taste, health, and weight, these days Europeans are not eating the other bits of the bird: the drumstick, the thighs, the wings, and the gizzards. Or, at least, not as much as they used to.

negativespacedesign via pixabay

But here’s the catch: you can’t yet grow chicken breasts independently of all the other portions (although scientists in Frankensteinian labs are desperately trying to solve this problem). So while European farmers are making a tidy profit from chicken breasts, they’ve got mountains of other cuts that they need to find another market for.

One of those markets is South Africa. Nearly half of this country’s poultry imports come from the European Union, mostly in hefty frozen bricks which must be thawed and repackaged before they can be sold in South Africa in supermarkets and butcheries. They come cheap, too, at just R15 per kilo, which keeps the price of chicken down for consumers.

Read the full article on Daily Maverick.