Africa, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Europe, Headlines

EUROPE: What Comes First, Chicken or Africa?

Ann De Ron

BRUSSELS, Jan 23 2007 (IPS) - Europeans love chicken breast. That leaves the question what 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 last week. He was invited by Green MEP Carl Schlyter, who wants to support Faraggi in drawing attention to this dubious export.

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 breast anyway, and even with the shipping cost, export 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 900 XAF (Communaute Financiere Africaine franc, or 1.37 euro a kilo, while whole local chicken costs 1,300 XAF (1.98 euro) a kilo, Jean-Jacques Grodent from SOS Faim told IPS. 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. It collected 62,481 signatures in 2005 for a petition against such dumping, and handed the petition to the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

“The competition from cheap imported chicken from Europe made 92 percent of small chicken farmers in Cameroon lose their main income source between 1996 and 2003,” Bernard Njonga of the Cameroon NGO, the Association Citoyenne de Défense des Intérêts Collecitifs (ACDIC) told IPS. ACDIC leads a campaign against the chicken imports and now has more than 10,000 members – farmers and also consumers.

“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. He was in Brussels to attend the screening of the documentary.

Import of European frozen chicken peaked in Cameroon in 2003 when it imported 22,153 tonnes of frozen chicken, according to customs figures. The bulk was shipped from Spain (9,779 tonnes) and Belgium (9,559 tonnes).

The chicken import in Cameroon rose suddenly from 1995 onwards. Not because people suddenly began to crave European frozen chicken legs, but because the Marrakech agreement came into force Jan. 1 that year, Grodent said.

The Marrakesh Agreement, signed in Marrakech in Morocco Apr. 15 1994, established the World Trade Organisation. It includes also 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 told IPS.

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 percent of imported frozen chicken in Cameroon was unsuitable for consumption because it was often de-frozen and then refrozen.

The campaigning so far has made a difference. Cameroon now imports 2,600 tonnes of frozen chicken a year – only 10 percent of the amount in 2003, SOS Faim said.

“This is thanks to the tax raise from 27 to 43 percent the Cameroon government imposed on frozen chicken,” said Grodent. “On top of that they have installed a private observatory to control the quota. And the consumers have become afraid of the illness frozen chicken might bring. The actions by Njonga’s ACDIC, both with the government and the public, were very important in achieving these results.”

But according to Grodent and Njonga, the export simply moved to other African countries, such as Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana and Gabon. Nigeria and Mali have forbidden the import.

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 enter 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. His organisation ADCIC has started networking with other organisations in Gabon, Tsjaad, Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville to stop such import.

“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.”