POULTRY DUMPING IN SACU – REPORT

MBABANE - The International Trade Administration Commission (ITAC) is said to have concluded a preliminary investigation of dumping of poultry products into SACU region.

ITAC is the de facto trade regulator for the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) market.  Eswatini is a member of SACU, alongside Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and South Africa.
Namibia’s newspaper, New Era, reported that ITAC made a preliminary determination that the subject products originating in or imported from Brazil, Denmark, Ireland, Poland and Spain are being dumped into the SACU market, causing a material injury to the SACU poultry industry. “As a result, ITAC requested the relevant authorities to impose provisional measures (anti-dumping measures) on imports of the subject products for a period of six months. The South African Revenue Services (SARS) has gazetted the measure on March 4, 2022, to be implemented with retrospective effect from December 17, 2021, up to and including June 14, 2022,” reads the report. SARS, by implication, also manages the implementation of the SACU’s customs tariff system.

Dumping

In trade terms, dumping occurs when the exporting country sells the subject product in SACU at prices less than the normal value in the countries of origin. An anti-dumping action is normally initiated by the domestic producers, through a submission of application to ITAC. Because of the dumping of the subject product from those countries, the SACU industry was experiencing material injury in the form of price undercutting, price depression during the 2017/18 – 2018/19 period, price suppression, the decline in profit, decline in return on investment, decline in capacity and capacity utilisation and increase in inventory.  “ITAC’s procedures only require that a substantive portion of the domestic industry or market be affected for it to act.

The South African poultry sector is deemed sufficiently large to meet this requirement on its own, without the need for poultry industries in other countries in SACU to be taken into account,” highlighted the report. Whether all SACU members participate or not, the outcome and its implementation directly affect all SACU members, since SACU has a common external tariff, making it a common customs territory or in simple terms, one market. Meanwhile, a recent National Marketing Agricultural Board (NAMBoard) report (2019/2020) had highlighted that the country’s poultry imports were over E140 million.

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