The country’s chicken exports could go down this year due to the stiff competition posed by neighboring Southeast Asian countries, such as Thailand, according to the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI).
“I’m afraid that it [exports] will go down because of competition from emerging markets, like Thailand, which sells their products at a lower cost,” BAI OIC Simeon S. Amurao told reporters in an interview.
Amurao said the Philippines has lost a chunk of its market share in Japan when it started importing chicken from Thailand in January 2014.
“Japan started importing from Thailand since they became bird-flu free and they produce chicken cheaper than us,” Amurao said.
Tokyo announced the lifting of the decadelong ban on poultry products, including raw chicken meat, from Thailand in December 2013. Thailand’s chicken industry was nearly crippled after it was hit by bird flu in 2004.
Thai chicken meat is widely used in Japanese cuisine, such as fried chicken (karaage), chicken and egg rice (oyakodon) and chicken hot pot, and in popular Thai dishes in Japan, such as green curry, grilled chicken, kaprao kai, as well as in Chinese food.
From January to September this year, Japan imported 3,880 metric tons (MT) of chicken from the Philippines, 30 percent lower than the 5,540 MT recorded a year ago, according to the latest data from the BAI.
Aside from cost, Amurao said fowl diseases, such as chicken cholera, also prevent local producers from expanding their shipments to Japan.
“We are trying to convince them [Japan] to import more from us, but the problem is we still have a high incidence of cholera,” he said.
The BAI chief also said the lack of triple A slaughterhouses makes it difficult for the Philippines to produce export-quality chicken meat.
Amurao noted that the bulk of the country’s chicken exports come from Luzon.
The Philippines is one of the few countries in Southeast Asia that remains free from avian influenza. Manila had been banking on this status to expand the Philippines’s chicken exports to other countries, such as South Korea.
Philippine poultry exports include breeder day-old chicks to Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam Vietnam, Malaysia and Nepal; processed chicken to Hong Kong, Japan, the United States, Dubai, South Korea, Iran and the Mauritius; and fresh frozen chicken to the United Arab Emirates.