Holy Protein: Fowl play — how government is siding with the big SA poultry industry players

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Holly Protein: Fowl play — how government is siding with the big SA poultry industry players By J Brooks Spector parkhurst1

had been renewed by the US Congress for the next 10 years until 2025. Back then, a bit of public, albeit still-diplomatic brawl broke out between the two nations over American chicken exports to South Africa.

But a surprisingly acrimonious public shoving match over chicken imports ensued. It included dragging out the usual canards about the dire threat of insidious, disease-ridden imports from the US; fears chickmeat growers would be driven to the wall by virtue of this competition and then go out of business, and that would lead to thousands of employees going into permanent rural unemployment.

Left out of that “scare ’em to death” strategy had been several salient points. These included the fact that domestic frozen chickens were being pumped full of brine such that consumers buying frozen chicken packs were really purchasing a plastic bag containing at least 20% salty frozen water, instead of protein. Processors actually insisted the market demanded this brine on taste grounds — almost as if a person cooking up some chicken couldn’t add salt to taste, all on their own.

While the old meat board, fruit board, milk board, chicken and egg board marketing and price fixing system has largely gone away, the big domestic chicken producers has now reached out to the government for really substantial protective tariffs against all those alien invading chicken drumsticks. Their proposal is to increase import tariffs of 82% on all imported chicken. Wow, 82% to protect the nation from insidious foreign chicken bits.

Version two pits local producers of almost anything against the rapacious, evil machinations of foreign manufacturers, eager to capture local markets and drive all the virtuous local folks to the wall — and out of business.

 

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