Engineering News reports that the Department of Trade and Industry’s (DTI’s) action task team is in the process of identifying several interventions to resolve the current crisis surrounding chicken dumping in SA’s poultry market.
Around 1,350 jobs were lost recently at the RCL Foods chicken plant, in Hammarsdale, KwaZulu-Natal. The DTI is seeking out measures to boost trade, competitiveness, value-addition and technology upgrades; provide export support, industrial finance and incentives; and promote growth and transformation of the industry. Meantime, the Food and Allied Workers Union (Fawu) and the SA Poultry Association this week delivered a memorandum of protest to the European Union’s (EU’s) offices in Pretoria over the claimed dumping of chicken in SA. The local chicken industry also hit back at comments by EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström that the “real problem” in the SA chicken industry was not EU imports but structural problems affecting its competitiveness, saying the local industry was “modern, efficient and well able to compete effectively against fair competition.”
- Read this report in full at Engineering News
- Read too, The real reason chicken farmers are struggling, and it’s not about imports, at BusinessLive
Get other news reports at the SA Labour News home page