High cost of production hit poultry industry

Despite concerns that a drop in demand from schools is negatively affecting Ghana’s poultry industry, a member of the Poultry Farmers Association says the industry’s struggles are due to the high cost of production.

Mordecai Odoom, the General Secretary for the Poultry Farmers Association in the Bono Region, traced this to the increase in the price of feed and the subsequent increase in the price of eggs.

“In December, it went well for us and just after December, people refused to buy the eggs because the price of eggs had gone up, and they couldn’t afford the products,” Mr. Odoom recounted on the Citi Breakfast Show.

He suggested that attributing the current struggles to the inability of schools to purchase their eggs was misplaced because “the school is one of our markets, but I wouldn't say it is a major market”.

He said restaurants, hotels and the general public were more significant patrons of their produce.

Mr. Odoom is certain that the high cost of production is the main issue.

According to him, farmers are also being forced to reduce the prices of items needed for the feed, but they have refused to back down.

To address these challenges, Mr. Odoom said the government needed to make it easier to prepare feed for the poultry.

“The things that we import like the concentrate and the Soyabean, the taxes that are being put on them should be reduced so that at least, we can afford to buy it and then use it to prepare our feed then we can sell it for an affordable price for any other person to buy.”

A marketer of poultry products and the CEO of Meannn, Charity Annan Adupong, also noted that schools may not be as critical to their operations.

She even said she stopped supplying schools with eggs because of their unreliability to pay.

“Private schools will pay you but for the public schools, it is always a struggle, so I stopped that. Even the hotels do the same thing for us, so I cut off all hotel supplies,” she said on the Citi Breakfast Show.

But she also agreed that the industry had fallen on tough times.

“I have had to lay people off because you just cannot keep up with the overhead,” Charity added.

—citinewsroom