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Foreign birds get the worm
Locals are choosing cheap imported chicken over more expensive domestic poultry.
Chicken-rice restaurateur Nguyen Quang Chien now buys imported chickens from supermarkets rather than the domestic poultry he used to buy at local slaughterhouses.
“They’re cheaper,” he says.
More restaurants, hotels and household consumers are opting for imported frozen chickens because of their comparatively low prices, according to several supermarket managers.
At major supermarket chains including Big C, Metro and Coop-Mart, foreign frozen chickens cost just two thirds what local poultry costs.
A 522-gram box of Vietnamese chicken legs sells for VND44,370 (US$2.60), almost the price of a 900-gram box from Brazil.
Big C’s public relations manager Duong Thi Quynh Trang told a local newspaper that Ho Chi Minh City’s four Big C outlets are now selling a total four tons of imported chicken wings every month, a 30 percent increase year-on-year.
Metro’s three outlets in HCMC saw a 30 to 40 percent increase in foreign frozen chicken sales over the first four months of this year.
A Metro supermarket manager who wished to remain anonymous said household shoppers now accounted for an equal share of foreign frozen chicken sales at his outlet as restaurants and hotels.
He said restaurants and hotels used to be his major buyers.
Mai Thanh Ha, who runs meat-importer Mai Thanh Holding Company in HCMC, said foreign-bred chickens are cheaper than domestic ones because of lower breeding costs at industrial farms.
But here, epidemic diseases such as bird flu have pushed up the breeding costs of chickens as well.
“With such high costs, we simply can’t sell cheap,” chicken farmer Nguyen Van Tuan said.
The prices of imported chicken began dropping in July 2007 when Vietnam reduced the tariff on imported meat from 20 percent to 12 percent in an effort to curb inflation.
In the first eighth months of this year, the country imported a total 21,000 tons of chickens, a 150 percent year-on-year increase.
A large portion of these imports, mostly from the US, were wings and legs.
Deputy Head of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD)’s Animal Husbandry Department Nguyen Thanh Son said in major chicken exporting countries like the US, Brazil, Mexico and the Republic of Korea, consumers prefer chicken breasts to legs and wings.
That also explains why foreign chicken legs and wings are so cheap, Son said.
Ha said another reason is that many local importers have imported large amounts of chicken in anticipation of rising demand since the government lowered chicken import tariffs last summer.
This has resulted in oversupply of foreign chickens, according to MARD. Deputy Chief of HCMC Customs Office Tran Ba Thong said the city’s ports are currently inundated with 200 containers of frozen chicken.
“Importers have been slow to retrieve them and we have no idea when they’ll be cleared,” he said.
Ha said some importers are dumping prices to speed up sales and avoid high storage costs.
Thanhnien
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