Kingsley Imasuen is a former chairman, Poultry Association of Nigeria, Edo State chapter. In this interview, he spoke on the challenges faced by poultry farms, as while poultry and its products are on the high side; economic downturn is affecting the farmers among others.
How will you describe the challenges of the price of feeds?
In my years of poultry farming, every location has its own challenges; those that are close to where poultry feeds are produced, their challenges are not as high as those of us in Edo State because those who bring it here will still need to add transport charges. Now, the price of a bag of feed is N20,000 and above for the layer and N18,000 and above for the broiler. So, the feed is one of the biggest challenges and because of this, a crate of eggs is now N4,000 and above.
The ingredients are not available locally and the cost of the imported items and other materials for feed is high. In Edo, apart from these challenges, we also have the challenge of labour because our boys have gone to Italy and other European countries, so we have to bring boys from other places. But they are not reliable and they often come back in the night to steal from the farms.
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All these are adding to the cost of production and because of it, farmers will add the cost therefore the poultry and its products will be on the high side. The costs of all the material for feeds, drugs, vaccines and others for the production of birds have increased. Now labour has increased too, as no farm attendant takes less that N30,000 and now that the federal government has increased minimum wage, they will demand for increase too.
So how are the poultry farmers coping with these challenges?
Many people are leaving poultry business in Benin and the big poultry farms are not expanding because of the downturn of the nation’s economy. As a result, many people have no capital to start or improve their farms. If you don’t have money to buy poultry feeds, it would be difficult for you to produce. And because of the economic hardship, it is only the rich and the affluent family that buy chicken and eggs now.
If you have 100 boilers and you want to process them for sale, you will not get buyers and there is no light to store them in cold room. People who have cold-rooms don’t have the fund to run them because of the high cost of diesel and fuel.
If you use diesel to power your cold room to store them, you can’t even sell them because the price will increase higher and you will not get buyers. Diesel is about N1,500 per litre and fuel is about N900 per litre. If you add these up, nobody can buy birds. By the time the average and the lower class workers can’t buy, definitely we can’t sell and the upper class who can pay any amount are very selective and don’t buy in every farm.
The people that hold the market are the average and lower classes who are salary earners and Edo State is a salary state and there are no big industries here; the only thing here is buying and selling which will not help the farmers. That is what poultry farmers are suffering in Edo State.
Is poultry farming declining or growing in Edo?
Poultry farming is declining because very many people have closed their farms while many others are selling their farms, facilities and products and relocating to Canada and other European countries where they believe their way of living have been standardized. Here, what you buy N200 in the morning, in the evening, the price will be increased to N400.
Poultry business is seriously affected because the number of people that are eating eggs and birds has reduced drastically. It is only those that know the value of eggs that still manage to buy and those that were buying crates before now buy four eggs while those that were buying one, it has become a luxury for them as it has difficult for them to buy.
So very few people are now in the business and that is why the price has appreciated. A crate of eggs now is between N3,500 and N4,500 in the farms.
What do you think government should do now to salvage the poultry business?
Government needs to mobilise massive investment in feed production and poultry farming if it really wants to help poultry farmers, because we are now going into a situation in which birds will be imported largely from other countries.
If we can’t meet the quantity demanded by Nigerians, definitely, the supply will come from other countries.
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