A current example which illustrates the problems around imports is the poultry industry. South Africa produces a lot of chicken meat and consumes even more. In the last 4 years chicken meat imports have increased by 150%. Almost 80% of the imports are from South America, mainly Brazil. The remainder comes from North America, Europe and Australia.

Needless to say, those chickens don’t fly here. They have to be transported and cooled resulting in a large carbon footprint for these scrawny chicken feet. North American and European chickens are subsidised, giving them an unfair advantage in the pecking order for selling price. But another more immediate problem about the imports has already come home to roost: more than 5,000 jobs have been lost in the local poultry industry in the last 18 months, both in the form of closures of small and medium-sized poultry farms and as redundancies at large poultry producers. Hence the current move to increase South African import duties on chicken to the highest amount allowed under WTO rules. The Association of Meat Importers, of course, is gearing up for a no holds barred cock fight to prevent this and scare government and the public by saying that chicken prices would increase by 30-50%. South African retailers and fast food chains say they mainly or only use local chicken, which means such a price increase is highly unlikely. In any event – a system where jobs are being shed in order to reduce the price of a product is fundamentally unsustainable. What we save at the checkout we invariably pay for in other, less obvious ways.