A chicken crisis on the rise

YOU ALMOST can’t follow the media in Saudi Arabia these days without seeing or reading about the unreasonable and sudden escalating price of poultry.
Economic observers state that the increase of poultry prices has been on the rise in the local market since last Ramadan. They accuse national production companies of gradually adding more cost to poultry prices every month in hope that consumers will not notice it.
When prices reached a level of discomfort for distributers, restaurants, and most of all consumers, poultry production companies finally decided to break their silence and put the blame on chicken-feed suppliers who they claim have added more cost to their production.
Different government entities found themselves in the midst of the escalating prices dilemma and are trying to figure out who should be more involved in providing a prompt solution to this growing problem.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Commerce are trying to determine the route of the problem, be it from lack of strong regulations to organize the poultry market, or did it result due to lack of provision of sufficient support to farmers and chicken-feed producers.
But as a result of poor communication and cooperation between the concerned ministries, poultry prices continue to rise, reaching 50 percent more than their original cost in the last two weeks. Consequently even egg prices suffered.
So the suffering consumer finds himself again in the front lines fighting the battle of price hikes, after losing all faith in inept consumer protection agencies that were assigned by government to prevent such scenarios.
Popular social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook continued to be the favored channels for the people to express their dissatisfaction and resentment of what is happening to their pockets. Some even started a campaign to show their continuous demand of reasonable prices.
The campaign was aimed to urge people to boycott eating chicken and eggs to show traders that they are not satisfied with their manipulation in prices of basic food commodities. It is also an attempt to concentrate on the mismanagement of concerned government agencies that should have a larger role in monitoring prices.
Although many believe that the boycott will not have that much effect on poultry sales due to lack of alternatives, but it would surely grab the attention of government officials, businessmen and media networks, which will result hopefully in putting more pressure on major suppliers to find an immediate solution, as they did with dairy prices last year.

A Tweet: “It is very strange that we import chicken from France and Brazil and then export our nationally produced poultry somewhere else. Who will benefit from this?!”
— Rashid Al-Fowzan