Kurdistan poultry sector lagging, despite great potential, expert says

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraq’s Kurdistan Region has a “great” infrastructure for raising poultry, with the potential to meet domestic demand, cut on imports and even become an exporter, a Kurdish livestock expert said.

 

“The Kurdistan Region has a great poultry industrial infrastructure, without any shortcomings,” Ramazan Mohammed, head of the livestock assets department from the Kurdish agriculture ministry in Erbil, told Rudaw.

 

He stressed that help from the government was needed to boost poultry production in Kurdistan and become an exporter.

 

“There are many poultry projects, including factories, slaughterhouses and egg laying houses.  If the government and associated parties help us, we could operate all these sectors and fill all the domestic needs with a suitable price and we will not need any imported goods,” he said.

 

Mohammed strongly criticized the government because it still “imports eggs and chicken worth millions of dollars" from the neighboring and foreign countries.

 

He said that had hurt domestic producers, forcing them to find markets in other parts of Iraq for 80 percent of the eggs they produce.

 

The market in Kurdistan, he claimed, is dominated by business clans, and is further hurt by aggressive foreign imports.

 

Salah Mustafa, head of the Kurdistan Poultry Development Organization, says that a “shared market” should be established to help domestic producers.

 

“To halt the influx of imported poultry goods, we are calling for the establishment of a shared market between the government and the private sector,” he said.  “This is to resume domestic projects, market their products and limit goods being imported into Kurdistan.”

 

“The shared company should purchase products from the domestic poultry farms and sell them to the people of Kurdistan in a cheap price," he suggests.

 

The company has to be the only “licensed company to permit the import of chickens and its products in order to keep the balance between domestic products and needs of the people,” he explained.

 

Meanwhile, the KRG’s minister of agriculture revealed that his ministry has tried to help domestic production by placing tariffs on imported poultry goods.

 

“To protect the industrial poultry sector, we have put tariffs on the imported poultry goods and we have suggested to reduce the imported by 50 percent,” said the minister, Abdulstar Majeed.

 

He said the ministry also had allocated 6 billion Iraqi dinars to promote marketing, but that no partner could be found because the ministry would pay by cheque, not cash.

 

“Our purpose  for this project was to do marketing for  domestic products and operating projects, including slaughterhouses. But unfortunately there was no demand. We even offered tenders, and no company was ready to take them.”

 

Despite the situation faced by local poultry farmers, the KRG’s interior, social affairs, Peshmerga and health ministries depend on imported goods, buying thousands of poultry products each year.

 

“We have written to the council of ministries several times and informed them that they should purchase domestic good, but we have not received an answer from them,” said Majeed.