Tonight, the Belize Poultry Association is alerting the public that starting on Monday, October 31, the price of chicken, the cheapest and preferred source of meat protein for Belizeans will go up.
That announcement came from a press release that the Association sent out this afternoon. In that statement, the Association says that due to the high prices of the grains, corn, and soybean - the feed for fowls, which farmers use to rear their birds - they have had to make the difficult choice to raise the price by 6.5%.
This evening, we spoke via Zoom teleconference with Armando Cowo, the Manager of the Belize Poultry Association about the increase. He told us that farmers have been absorbing the high costs of grains, hoping that those prices would go down. But now, poultry producers will have to pass on that production cost to consumers:
Armando Cowo - Manager, Belize Poultry Association
"Currently, we're looking at an average cost for corn of 38 cents a pound, as compared to last year, which was 32 -33 cents a pound. And then soybean currently is at almost 60 cents a pound; it fluctuates between 59 and 60 cents a pound, but towards the higher end of 60 cents. Last year, we were at 48 to 50 cents fluctuation - a big fluctuation - and we can't absorb it. We have been absorbing and absorbing, and we will reach a point where you need to adjust to make sure that you don't run yourself out of business by trying to help the consumer. At the end of the day, we do appreciate our consumers, and we know that Belizeans love their chicken. We're not trying to take that away from them. What we're trying to do is give them a tool to measure your cost of living, to say, listen, mister retailer, whoever is selling it to them. But, at the end of the day, it's still affordable; it's still available to the public. And it shouldn't be a scenario where certain business people would take advantage of and just raise the price through the roof, as I would say."
This evening, Cowo also told us that the members of the Poultry Association want to alert the general public early. They hope that informed customers can resist any attempts at price gouging from the grocer at the corner store near you. They are trying to avoid a similar situation to the increase in the price of eggs, which happened back in July.
According to Cowo, that 6.5% increase from Monday should be reflected exactly in the price you pay for your chicken at the store. Here's how he made that point:
Armando Cowo - Manager, Belize Poultry Association
"All right, That price is - how should I say? It's a general increase. It's a general adjustment that should be reflected throughout the chain, and this is the reason for the press release. I'm hoping that nobody takes that and adds to it along the chain. Like, okay, the retailer bought it for 6 cents more per pound. You know that the wholesaler will get a discount. Let's get real. So, he doesn't need to sell it at 6 cents a pound to the other fellow buying from him. So, the wholesaler gets it for, let's say, 5 cents a pound. He sells it to the other guy for 6 cents. So, the 6 cents starts trying down until it reaches the end to the consumer. It shouldn't reach the end consumer at 25 cents. And we're doing this because of the experience you had previously with the eggs. When we adjusted the egg prices to reflect the cost of the grains, people who were buying were saying that people were selling the eggs at 50 cents for one. So, we don't want that to happen with poultry products. We are now adjusting it basically by six and a half cents, which would give us like $0.25 for a 4-pound bird, and you're - instead of adding now a dollar, for example, right. So, let's say if you're paying for a whole chicken twelve dollars, you should now be paying twelve twenty-five, not thirteen fifty or fourteen dollars, which is what some people will do anyway. But, if the consumer knows, has information, and can tell them, 'Look, why are you doing this to me?' Let's face it, we don't have the resources in this country to police all the products that are sold out there and at what price they're being sold. So, the best police are the consumer, and by informing the consumer, we will get the result that we all want. Yes, the farmer needs that increase to sustain himself a little bit more with the grain prices, and yes, the consumer can still have the product at the cheapest possible rate that we can put it on the market for them."
Cowo tells us that the increase in grain production costs comes from the fertilizers that farmers use to grow their produce. He explains that the countries of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus - currently in the throes of unrest and military conflict - are the largest producers of fertilizers in the world. The shortage created by the war in the Ukraine is driving up food production costs. The hope is that there won't be a need for another price increase within the next 12 months and that the price of fertilizer will stabilize.
