Europeans love chicken breast. That leaves the question — what do you do with the legs? The current answer is to freeze them and ship them to Africa, where they sell at a price far cheaper than fresh local chicken.
Television journalist Marcello Faraggi has put this chicken-and-Africa story in a documentary shown at the European Parliament in Brussels. Faraggi took Cameroon as a case study, but said much the same is going on with other African countries. The export makes European (and recently also Brazilian) producers happy, because they make their profits on the breasts. Even with the shipping costs, exporting to Africa is more profitable than destroying chicken legs back home, the documentary shows.
African producers are less happy. In Cameroon, imported chicken parts are selling at the equivalent of â,¬1.37p/kg, while whole local chicken costs around â,¬1.98p/kg, Jean-Jacques Grodent from SOS Faim reports. SOS Faim is a Belgian- Luxembourg NGO that supports farmers’ movements and microfinance organisations in the south. The NGO has been campaigning on this issue for some time.
“The competition from cheap imported chicken from Europe made 92% of small chicken farmers in Cameroon lose their main income source between 1996 and 2003,” says Bernard Njonga of the Cameroon NGO, the Association Citoyenne de Défense des Intérêts Collecitifs.
“That meant 645 farms going under. Typically, four to six families depend on each farm. These people lost their jobs and were dumped into poverty,” Njonga said.
Imports of European frozen chicken peaked in Cameroon in 2003 when it imported 22 153 tonnes of frozen chicken. The bulk was shipped from Spain (9 779 tonnes) and Belgium (9 559 tonnes). The chicken imports in Cameroon rose suddenly from 1995 onwards — not because people suddenly began to crave European frozen chicken legs, but because the Marrakesh Agreement came into force on January 1 that year, Grodent said.
The Marrakesh Agreement, signed in Marrakesh in Morocco on April 15 1994, established the World Trade Organisation. It also includes the Agreement on Agriculture, which has been criticised for reducing tariff protection for small farmers while allowing rich countries to continue to pay their farmers massive subsidies.
Cameroon was not the only country affected. “The same dumping of frozen chicken happened in other countries with weak governments on the west coast of Africa,” Grodent said. Many companies are involved. “It is hard to point a finger at specific companies, as chicken raising and selling involves a long chain of companies, ending with brokers who basically will sell and ship anything,” Faraggi explained.
African consumers could also be taking a health risk. Faraggi filmed the unhealthy conditions in which frozen chicken parts are sold. The Centre Pasteur du Cameroun, member of a global network of 24 foreign institutions dedicated to addressing medical problems in developing countries, had reported in 2003 that 83,5% of imported frozen chicken in Cameroon was unsuitable for consumption because it was often thawed and then refrozen.
The campaigning has made a difference. Cameroon now imports 2Â 600 tonnes of frozen chicken a year — only 10% of the amount imported in 2003, SOS Faim said. “This is thanks to the tax raise the Cameroon government imposed on frozen chicken — from 27% to 43%,” said Grodent. “On top of that they have installed a private observatory to control the quota. And the consumers have become afraid of illness that frozen chicken might bring.”
But according to Grodent and Njonga, the practice has simply moved to other African countries, such as Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana and Gabon. Nigeria and Mali have banned chicken imports.
Cameroon itself may become more of a dumping ground again. Central Africa is on the verge of signing an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union that is due to come into force in January 2008. “If the EPA is signed the way it is now designed, Cameroon would no longer be allowed to have such a high tax on frozen chicken,” said Grodent.
Njonga, a member of the Cameroon comité national du negocations EPA — the national committee which involves non-state actors in the negotiations — is campaigning again to stop that happening. They have started networking with other organisations in Gabon, the Central African Republic and Congo- Brazzaville to stop such imports. “We want to help them from our own experience, and stop it starting all over again in Cameroon.”
Back in Brussels, filmmaker Faraggi says he now has problems eating chicken breast. “These things have an impact on daily life too. But the real solution is better economic rules. Free trade is okay, but not without rules.” — Â