Poultry Industry Faces $50 Million Loss as COVID-19 Exposes Sector Vulnerabilities

The last three months have been very difficult for poultry slaughterhouses. ANAVI talks about a heavy cash flow deficit and a new peril for the ecosystem. Nearly 5,000 direct jobs and more than 12,000 indirect jobs have been taken hostage. But in reality, Covid-19 has only revealed a crisis that was already latent in the sector. According to the association’s press release, "the slaughterhouses were in an inappropriate situation marked by a very large uncontrolled market operating under non-regulatory conditions, which has been exacerbated by the coronavirus crisis".

The difficulties are not just organizational. During the crisis, prices fell by more than 25% on average, putting the slaughterhouses in an extremely tight cash flow situation. Yet since 2007, the date of the promulgation of law 49/99, the umbrella associations, as well as the supervisory authority, have made efforts to raise awareness about compliance with safety standards in slaughtering. But this does not seem to be yielding the expected results. "We are not even able to cross the 10% threshold of controlled chicken slaughter in our country," the ANAVI press release states.

It is in the face of all these difficulties that compromise the sector that ANAVI calls on the authorities to react. For the association, the application of the law governing the sector could save it. "More than a dozen slaughterhouses out of thirty have already stopped their activity in the last ten years, a dozen others operate intermittently and others are currently considering stopping, while the country needs about thirty regional slaughterhouses. Covid will only be an accelerator, but it is also a strong alert on communicable diseases transmissible to humans by animals. No one has forgotten the avian flu," ANAVI points out.