A container ship is docked at Ghana’s Tema port, stuffed to the brim with frozen food products, including thousands of metric tonnes of poultry parts recently arrived from Brazil. These are unloaded into cold storage facilities until they can be transported to the capital, Accra, or elsewhere in the country.
And then the electricity goes out.
In several West African countries, like Ghana, electricity isn’t constantly provided. This creates a major health risk as imported poultry partially or completely defrosts, allowing bacteria such as salmonella to flourish, before the system goes back online, according to Zakaria Yakubu, programme coordinator for Grassroots Africa.
Based in Accra, this international NGO works on food security issues and nutrition. It has been campaigning locally to reduce frozen poultry imports for health reasons.
Once imported poultry leaves the port, matters can get even worse. Its next destination is usually middlemen who sell the meat to shopkeepers or stallholders in local markets; these traders also have difficulties keeping the poultry frozen. Supermarkets like those seen in wealthier countries are rare in many parts of Africa, even in capital cities.
“Chicken sold in local markets is often sold in the open sun, which is not only unhygienic, but the chicken often defrosts in the sun before it is sold. The unsold chicken is put back in freezers overnight, set out in the sun again the next day to be sold, then reverts to the freezers. This process can go on for months,” says Yakubu.
Imports destined for the north of the country, he adds, are packed up in open trucks cooled by ice cubes or ice blocks, rather than in the freezer transport trucks seen in developed nations. As a result, the meat is poorly cooled or defrosted before it even reaches its destination, which is often hundreds of kilometres and many hours’ drive away.
Poultry parts
Africa has become the main destination for poultry parts: the chicken left over once high-value breast meat has been removed. African consumers prefer “on-bone” meat, so poultry producers from Brazil, the European Union and the United States are exporting what they can’t sell in their home markets to Africa cheaper than poultry can be produced there.
Those exports of frozen poultry have flooded many African markets, leading to the collapse of local poultry production.
Certain countries, such as Cameroon and Nigeria, have made moves in recent years to stop imports altogether in an effort to rebuild the damage done to local poultry sectors. But others — including Ghana, Togo and Sierra Leone — have been unable to block imports, and their economies are suffering.
Cees Vermeeren, Brussels representative for the Association of Poultry Processors and Poultry Trade in the EU, says the problem of substandard cooling facilities in ports and retail outlets is something that needs to be dealt with locally. But, parties abroad may also have a role to play.
“Though it’s up to the governments to resolve the infrastructure issues, since exporters have an interest that their produce is handled well, they might be open or able to give some after-sale service support,” he notes. “Local producers marketing poultry meat have an interest in proper chilling equipment and facilities as well.”
Pledge of assistance
The EU has pledged to help developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (referred to as the ACP) develop their domestic infrastructure so they can better participate in world trade — this under the auspices of economic partnership agreements.
These accords must be in place by the end of 2007 to bring ACP-EU trade into compliance with the World Trade Organisation’s regulations — and would see ACP markets being opened to European goods. However, some fear that nations in the ACP will not be able to withstand competition from these goods.
“The only way the poorest countries can cope with aggressive and legitimate exports … is by organising themselves and their own internal markets,” says Thijs Berman, a Dutch member of the European Parliament who recently drafted a report on animal welfare in poultry. He is also a member of the Parliament’s agriculture committee.
“We need to develop general infrastructure in these countries like better ports, rail transport, roads, even broadband internet, and especially cooling facilities for meat industries,” he says. — IPS