SOUTH AFRICA – South Africa has imposed provisional anti-dumping duties against bone-in chicken meat imports from Brazil and four European Union countries – Denmark, Ireland, Poland and Spain.

The directive was issued by South African International Trade Administration Commission (ITAC) highlighting that the named countries will be subjected to provisional anti-dumping duty from January 2022 until June 2022.

This decision comes as a result of an application made by the South African Poultry Association (SAPA) in January 2021.

SAPA alleged imports of bone-in chicken meat imported from the five nations were being dumped on the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) market.

On December 8, 2021, ITAC announced that they have found sufficient information to indicate that dumping is taking place and local industry is experiencing material injury or threat to material injury caused by the alleged dumped imports.

As a result of this review, an anti-dumping duty, which provides lower rates to specific companies from each country, was imposed on all five countries.

This is the second announcement of anti- dumping duties on poultry issued in recent months.

In August 2021, anti-dumping duties were announced for bone-in chicken imports from the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

With this, South Africa is now imposing anti-dumping duties against all nine countries that have regularly exported bone-in chicken portions to this market: the United States, Brazil, Spain, Poland, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Prior to these, the listed European countries exported to South Africa duty-free due to their Southern African Development Community European Union Economic Partnership Agreement with South Africa.

The United States continues to face a 62 percent duty on bone-in portions sand is restrained by the Tariff Rate Quota imposed since 2000.

If the quota is filled, additional imports from the U.S. will be charged an anti-dumping duty of 9.40 Rands per kilogram.

The anti-dumping tariffs are part of the country’s Poultry Master Plan signed in 2019, intending to increase productivity in the poultry sector and protect the local domestic producers from alleged unfair trade practices and imports.

SAPA’s goal is to enable the industry to increase production by a minimum of 10 percent in the period of 2019- 2022.

However, USDA in a recent GAIN report projects production to increase just 5 percent during this period due to the myriad of challenges associated with the pandemic and economic downturn in the 2020-2021 period.

Despite of that, 2022 is set to be a brighter spot for the industry as these investments along with economic recovery will return poultry production to a faster pace of growth.

So far, South Africa’s imports of poultry have declined by 63 percent in the past three years.

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