The war in the Middle East has halted the sale of South African processed poultry to the United Arab Emirates, scuppering the industry’s drive to increase exports after largely snuffing out dumping from several countries that had left local producers on the brink of collapse.
Under a master plan launched in 2019, the industry is now on a firmer footing after clamping down on dumping — when foreign producers sold poultry products in the country at lower prices than their normal value.
But efforts to boost exports, which account for just 2%-3% of annual output, have been knocked by the disruptions wrought by the conflict pitting the US and Israel against Iran, said Izaak Breitenbach, CEO of the Broiler Organisation at the South African Poultry Association.
“The major impact is that we would have actually met with countries in the Middle East in May, but all those potential export discussions were cancelled,” he told Business Day.
“The second impact is that we are actually exporting cooked poultry to the United Arab Emirates, but those exports have now stopped due to the war.”
Boosting exports is a key component of the second phase of the poultry master plan, which turned around the fortunes of an industry that had grappled with cheap exports from Brazil, the US, UK, Germany, Hungary and Poland.
“If we look at the period pre-2019, the industry for 10 years was in distress and imports escalated. With the master plan, we diagnosed that the root cause of the problem was dumped chicken,” Breitenbach said.
“Brazil was a big one. They were dumping chicken significantly, at about 30%-50% of their own production cost. So it was heavily subsidised.”
“Since then we’ve applied for antidumping duties against nine countries and that has stopped the flooding of unfair trade. And since we’ve stopped unfair trade, the industry has grown 26% and has, to a large extent, replaced imports.
“We’re now globally competitive; Brazil is marginally more competitive than us, but we’re not concerned about normal imports. We do have an antidumping duty against Brazil and that mitigates the problem.”
The industry is still fighting against a rebate given to the US since 2015 which exempts that country from paying antidumping duty on 65,000 tonnes of poultry imports in exchange for South Africa getting tariff-free access to US markets for selected commodities under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).
“That is still an issue that we deal with, but even though it’s affecting us and we are fighting against that we still, as an industry, are now doing incredibly well,” Breitenbach said.
At the launch of the second phase of the poultry industry master plan last week, the department of trade, industry & competition also touted the success of the first one, which it said had seen a “remarkable” advancement in transformation across the sector with more black players entering.
We’re not exporting enough. We need strategically to change this industry from a local industry to an export industry as well.
— Izaak Breitenbach, CEO of the Broiler Organisation at the South African Poultry Association
“The core pillars of phase two include achieving exports of cooked meat and local demand increase strategies, ensure effective trade measures, ensure biosecurity measures for local and export markets, and transformation of the entire value chain of the poultry industry,” it said.
The main priorities for the industry are to maintain the trade reforms in place and avoid a regression, to vaccinate against the highly pathogenic avian influenza and accelerate exports of cooked meat to the UK, the EU and Saudi Arabia, Breitenbach said.
“We’re not exporting enough. We need strategically to change this industry from a local industry to an export industry as well,” he said.
“We only export about 2% to 3% of total production and that would be 50,000 tonnes per annum. That is quite small and all of that product will go to our neighbouring African states.”
Total poultry output is about 2-million tonnes per annum.
According to the trade department, the R74bn poultry industry is the largest contributor to South Africa’s agricultural sector, employing more than 110,000 people across its extended value chain. It had a total annual gross value of production of almost R87.95bn in 2024, R72.09bn of which was meat while R15.86bn was eggs.
In 2019-25 the industry invested more than R2.1bn while production increased by 26%, from 19.7-million to 23-million birds slaughtered per week. During that period exports of aggregate chicken meat grew 9%.
Notably, this growth has been achieved despite significant challenges, including elevated raw material costs, the bird flu outbreak in 2023 and persistent infrastructure constraints related to ports, roads, water and electricity.
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