Rhon­da Krys­tal Ram­bal­ly

Trade union­ist and Gov­ern­ment Sen­a­tor David Ab­du­lah says the de­mand for lo­cal poul­try is on the de­cline with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of sig­nif­i­cant re­trench­ment of work­ers in the in­dus­try. He said poul­try farm­ers could be placed on the bread­line by loss of their liveli­hood. He said the in­dus­try could face a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion as the 1980s when poul­try farm­ers lost their farms and liveli­hoods.

He called on Gov­ern­ment to set up an in­ter-min­is­te­r­i­al com­mit­tee for prices of food items to be tracked from the point of ori­gin to the point of pur­chase in a su­per­mar­ket.Ab­du­lah, pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­a­tion of In­de­pen­dent Trade Union and NGOs (FI­TUN), was ad­dress­ing the me­dia yes­ter­day at the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union Hall, Hen­ry Street, Port-of-Spain.He said the union was ab­solute­ly ap­palled over the dump­ing of old chick­en.

He said frozen chick­en as old as four years, in par­tic­u­lar leg and thighs which were not in de­mand in the Unit­ed States, was be­ing piled up in frozen con­di­tions and brought in­to T&T.He said: "Some un­scrupu­lous im­porters are pay­ing some­thing like US$0.06 a pound for these frozen chick­en parts, bring­ing them and then of course charg­ing much more than that from con­sumers so they are not on­ly price-goug­ing and prof­i­teer­ing but they are al­so putting the health of cit­i­zens at risk."

Poul­try man­ag­er at Mas­ter Mix Feeds, Ge­of­frey Ros­tant, had said 3.29 mil­lion kg of chick­en was im­port­ed in­to the coun­try in Au­gust, of which 72 per cent was al­lowed in du­ty free.His es­ti­ma­tion was based on da­ta from the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try.Ab­du­lah said: "There is an­oth­er is­sue gen­er­al­ly where a few very large im­porters are price-goug­ing and we are call­ing on the Gov­ern­ment to es­tab­lish a small in­ter-min­is­te­r­i­al team - Min­is­ter of Trade, Min­is­ter of Fi­nance, Cus­toms and Ex­cise, Min­is­ter of Food Pro­duc­tion and the Prices Coun­cil - to en­sure that we can get the in­for­ma­tion to track the price of a food items from the point of ori­gin to the point of the con­sumer buy­ing it in a gro­cery or a su­per­mar­ket, as the case may be, be­cause we be­lieve that be­tween the point of ori­gin and the point of sale there is price-goug­ing and prof­i­teer­ing tak­ing place so that con­sumers are pay­ing high­er than they ought to pay."

He said key pol­i­cy fac­tors were at stake with the im­por­ta­tion of food and con­sumers were the ones af­fect­ed by un­fair pric­ing and poor qual­i­ty items.