Gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion to raise the tar­iff on im­port­ed chick­en could tight­en na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty, poul­try pro­duc­er Ron­nie Mo­hammed told a news con­fer­ence or­gan­ised by the T&T Poul­try As­so­ci­a­tion yes­ter­day. Mo­hammed ob­served that while chick­en im­porters can be per­ceived to do a "good thing" by mak­ing chick­en more af­ford­able to con­sumers, some of them are sub­si­dis­ing their in­come with oth­er busi­ness. "We are le­git­i­mate busi­ness­es. We have no oth­er busi­ness-nar­co or oth­er­wise," said Robin Philip, chief ex­ec­u­tive of Arawak. Philip said the plight of lo­cal pro­duc­ers was crit­i­cal and ur­gent and Gov­ern­ment had to en­sure the sus­tain­abil­i­ty of T&T's most suc­cess­ful agro in­dus­try. And there's no in­ten­tion by the lo­cal poul­try pro­duc­ers to raise chick­en prices. The As­so­ci­a­tion, he said, did not want or need a sub­sidy from the Gov­ern­ment.

All the As­so­ci­a­tion want­ed was for the Gov­ern­ment to de­fend the poul­try pro­duc­ers and the 40,000 in­di­rect jobs which it gen­er­at­ed, said Philip. He ob­served that the in­flux of im­port­ed chick­en im­pact­ed on small farm­ers who can't sell chick­en. These chick­en, said Philip, were stay­ing on the farms be­cause there's no mar­ket. He said Arawak had to close its doors for two and a half weeks be­cause there was no place to store frozen chick­en. He re­vealed that one fac­to­ry was even closed in the lat­ter half of No­vem­ber. "We no longer have time on our hands. We can ill-af­ford any de­lay in im­ple­men­ta­tion," said Philip.

Us­ing da­ta from the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try, Poul­try Man­ag­er of Mas­ter Mix Feeds, Ge­of­frey Ros­tant, point­ed out that in Au­gust 3.29 mil­lion kg of chick­en were im­port­ed in­to T&T. Of this amount, 74 per cent was al­lowed in du­ty free. Ros­tant said im­porters could have brought in the ze­ro tar­iff chick­en by ob­tain­ing a Min­is­ter's li­cence. An­oth­er poul­try pro­duc­er Ger­ry Ram­dass point­ed out that in 2006 T&T im­port­ed 1,000 met­ric tonnes of chick­en. In 2010 that amount tripled. Ram­dass ex­pects an in­crease in 2011.

And while the As­so­ci­a­tion would like the tar­iff to move to 100 per cent, Philip said they are cog­nizant that chick­en is a crit­i­cal part of the na­tion­al di­et and that the price of chick­en was an im­por­tant is­sue. Philip said that sev­er­al in­dus­tries have been al­lowed to lan­guish such as the rice in­dus­try, the co­coa and co­conut in­dus­try. He said the Gov­ern­ment has an op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­ter­vene now. "We want to re­main alive. That's all we want to do," he said. The Cab­i­net is ex­pect­ed to de­lib­er­ate the mat­ter to­day.