Poultry products might be in short supply this festive season, Namib Poultry warns
Due to the current ban of chicken products from South Africa and Namib Poultry’s inability to produce more chicken, Namibia might experience shortage of poultry products during the loomingt festive season.
A few months ago when South Africa was hit by Avian Influenza, Namibia placed an import ban on all relevant poultry products from South Africa. In the meantime, Namib Poultry cannot produce more with the current facilities, “as it is running at full capacity”, putting the supply of chicken meat under pressure due to the Festive Season’s higher demand.
This was said by the Chief Executive Officer of the Namib Poultry, Ian Collard in a statement released this week.
“We would therefore like to ask customers to keep this in mind, Namib Poultry Industries remains committed to supplying local customers with the same volumes as in the past, and we ask that customers have some empathy and understanding towards the current situation in terms of the market’s supply of chicken and the far-reaching effects of this bird flu,” Collard said.
The immediate result of the import ban of chicken products from South Africa was that Namibia could no longer import any eggs or raw poultry meat from South Africa. Namibian importers thus had to change the origin of imported chicken meat from South Africa to either Europe or Brazil.
According to Collard, the ban also made the supply chain of poultry products longer as the origin of imports were further away from Namibia.
“This was however compensated for in the granting of additional import quotas to importers in order to facilitate the change in origin. The tonnages was also increased to the maximum for November and December 2017, to attend to the expected peaks in the festive season,” he added.
Namib Poultry highlighted the need for the expansion of the local production of chicken as Namibia cannot rely, at all times, on the importation of South African products.
According to the poultry giant, production on its farm has been improved to current world standards, meaning that the current production is around 450 tons of poultry meat per week (1,950 tons per month multiplied by 4.33 weeks per month).
