Orville Taylor | Foreign fowl and local taste

As a non-consumer of poultry and its products, it really is not my personal fight. However, no part of the word ‘cockroach’ describes me. Chicken is singly the most common source of animal protein the average Jamaican consumes, and indeed, we taught other nations that except for the feathers and beak, all parts of the chicken is to be eaten.

In a classic question of what comes first, the average Jamaican consumer does on the surface face high prices for the staple product, including chicken back and feet, whose price keeps stepping away. But even the eggs, which produce the local chicken, are mostly foreign sourced.

Last week, newly minted Agriculture Minister Pearnel Charles Jr announced that the Government was contemplating freezing the common external tariff (CET) on chicken leg quarters. In the short term, this would likely lead to a reduction in retail price from $360 to $160 per pound.

Knee-jerk reactions are that the removal of the CET will immediately make small producers vulnerable, because they would not be able to compete with the less expensive imports. Among these is none other than the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS), who feel that the local farmers need the protection, especially given the fallout caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hopefully, we will do the math, but there are more people who consume chicken than those who produce it. Therefore, if the price of leg quarters is going to be passed on to the regular buyer of this product, then more money will be available for households to purchase other items. Of course, this assumes that the majority of people who buy leg quarters is the typical member of the working class.

CONSUMED IN GREAT ABUNDANCE

Intuitively, my gut feeling is that the poorest of Jamaicans do not purchase this higher-end item. However, chicken back and neck, upon which there is already no CET, is consumed in great abundance just above and just below the poverty line. Thus, the question is, who is truly going to be affected?

My esteem colleague, economist Damien King, whose knowledge of market forces I value, opines that continued protection of a local industry passes on the high costs of its operations on to the rest of society. Thus, “the more we spread the cost of that one uncompetitive industry, it makes every other potentially competitive industry uncompetitive”. Indeed, one can imagine, therefore, the myriad ‘pan chicken’ vendors dropping their prices, and thus for King, jerk chicken should become cheaper and more families fed. For us to be truly self-sufficient in agriculture and have food security, there has to be greater ability to compete with foreign produce.

Still, someone has been living a lie and it is both the local producers and the consumers. Now, in Jamaica, our national dish is a hybrid syncretic entity. Ackee, though naturalised, is not native to Jamaica, it came with the enslaved Africans. At least although not indigenous, like a set of Jamaicans, who shall remain nameless, it is now endemic.

Yet for all the nationalism surrounding this other Jamaican staple, our national dish indeed, the key ingredient, the salt fish, is also an expatriate. It is the same paradox in my other Caribbean ‘peyi,’ St Lucia. Their national dish, a pleasant Sunday repast, is salt fish and green bananas.

TOO MUCH FOREIGN TASTE

So, how you can be asserting your independence and national identity and be importing your most important ethnic food, which self-identifies you as a nation? True, the ‘green figs’ are a big part of what Lucians are, but we two ‘boasy’ creole people still have too much foreign taste.

It makes absolutely no sense that more than 70 per cent of all viable eggs used by the hatcheries of the largest chicken are imported. Moreover, the local farmers, who are protected, do not meet the national demand, not for eggs and not for chicken parts, such as back and necks, I am told. And here is the question: how do we increase the competitiveness of our local farmers? We have too much knowledge, and an amazing agricultural school, for us to be behind the eight ball in animal husbandry.

Stepping over the reactive political responses, Opposition Senator Damion Crawford, a trained social scientist and egg industrialist, may not have answered the ‘who came first?’ question. However, we need to understand why our local chicken meat is so expensive. True, the industry employs some 30,000 people; but if the reason that it stays afloat is because of the latex the Government puts over it, then this is a fool’s paradise.

Enough showboating and catcalls. If we can reduce the main meat that more than 80 per cent of Jamaicans admit to eating, this automatically saves millions to the ordinary consumers. I might not have attended King’s economics classes but it is easy to see the logic in letting our locals become more capable of going toe to toe with the foreign farmers but, more importantly, feeding ourselves.

- Dr Orville Taylor is head of the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.