Job creation and job preservation must be South Africa’s top priorities as the country seeks to rebuild its economy after huge job losses from the Covid-19 lockdown. 2020 has been a miserable year for workers, here and around the world. The situation in South Africa is critical because before the pandemic, we already had one of the world’s highest unemployment rates. Now poverty and joblessness have become an economic pandemic.
That is why every government department must put job creation at the top of their lists. It is crucial for our economic recovery and for future national prosperity that the government supports projects that create jobs, from infrastructure to agriculture.
As a new food and agriculture-focused trade union, the Agricultural Food and Allied Democratic Workers Union (AFADWU) seeks to prevent job losses and to promote job creation in the agriculture sector and its associated value chains. The interlinked poultry and maize industries are among the areas on which the union is focusing.
Poultry is the largest component of the agricultural sector, and the industry purchases nearly half of the maize and most of the soya produced in this country. That’s a vital combination for the economy and a vital area for the protection and creation of South African jobs.
That is why AFADWU and FairPlay believe it is important to prioritise the implementation of the Poultry Sector Master Plan signed last year with the objective of expanding our internationally competitive poultry sector. It aims to create nearly 5000 jobs in the poultry and grain industries by 2023. It hinges on trade measures such as tariffs to curb the high volumes of predatory imports, much of which are dumped, and have plunged the local chicken industry into a crisis, costing thousands of jobs.
The objective is to increase local production by 10% over the next few years through investment by local producers in job creating improvements and expansion. South African chicken producers have pledged to invest R1.5bn in these projects, of which some R1bn has been spent. The plan has a number of interlocking and job-creating components, all of which will contribute to the ultimate goal of a healthy and growing domestic chicken industry serving expanding local and export markets.
Firstly, it is vital that decisive action is taken, as the plan promises to end “unfair forms of trade and any attempts to dump products in our market”. The local industry has applied to renew anti-dumping duties against three European Union countries, and is considering anti-dumping applications against Brazil and four other EU nations.
These applications need to be finalised and acted upon speedily. The master plan says chicken imports increased fourfold in 20 years, and this will certainly resume once demand recovers as coronavirus restrictions are lifted. AFADWU will support anti-dumping duty applications when they are lodged.
Another important component is to promote local demand. We are very pleased to see that a decision to require government departments and state-owned entities to buy local chicken may be imminent. Our public servants, hospital patients and those in our prisons should be eating South African chicken. Remember too that SA chickens eat SA grain grown by SA labour, foreign chickens don’t.
Steps have also been taken against unfair trade practices such as vague labels of origin on some imported chicken. The government has ended a dispensation that allowed South African consumers to be told that the chicken portion in a supermarket pack could have come from any one of nine countries. Unlike local chicken, which complies with strict labelling requirements, this imported chicken would be impossible to trace in the event of contamination.
We hope action is taken soon to end two other food safety problems. The first is the thawing of bulk frozen imports and repackaging and refreezing them into smaller packets for local distribution. Thawing and handling meat imports is safe only when done under very strict safety protocols.
The second is the need for increased health inspections at ports of entry. The health authorities are understaffed and random checks are insufficient to give the public the food safety assurances they need. Also, we need increased excise inspections at ports and borders to stop the under-declaration or false declaration of imports to avoid taxes, and the round-tripping of imports between South Africa and neighbouring states in which imports labelled for one country end up in another.
There are plans to increase production for export, though this will take longer to achieve, particularly for EU markets. The master plan notes that, despite duty-free access to EU countries, South African has been unable to export to chicken there, because the country lacks the systems needed to provide the required health certificates. Creating and staffing these facilities, and then obtaining EU approval for them, will take time.
The poultry industry master plan is a jobs’ plan. Every step that increases local production increases local jobs and the plan must be implemented urgently.
- Pukwana is general secretary of the Agricultural Food and Allied Democratic Workers Union (AFADWU), an affiliate of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
- Baird is founder of the FairPlay movement, which was founded nearly four years ago to counter unfair trade practices such as dumping, and to campaign on behalf of the workers impacted by dumping.
