VietNamNet Bridge – Hundreds of livestock households in the southern region have been on tenterhooks, because they still don’t know if the outsourcing contracts signed with foreign invested enterprises would be extended. They have also been incurring losses due to the chicken imports being dumped on the domestic market.

“Emivest Company collected fowls from my farm on October 21. Today is the 25th day after the collection day, which means that we have got enough 25 isolation days for the farm sanitation. However, we still have not heard anything about the new farming,” said Tran Quang Hung, the owner of the farm with 120,000 fowls in Dat Do district of Ba Ria – Vung Tau province.

“I don’t know if the company would continue outsourcing the farming to us,” he complained.

Not only Hung, but other hundreds of households in the southern region have become worried stiff when hearing that the three foreign invested livestock enterprises have decided to cut down the numbers of farmed fowls. If they do, the thousands of people would become redundant or go bankrupted after they made heavy investments to develop the farms.

2 trillion dong may become wasted

Hung said that two years ago, his family borrowed 10 billion dong, or 50 percent of the total capital needed, to build the farm which can meet the requirements set up by Emivest to be able to breed fowl for the company.

Under the cooperation contract, the company would provide breeders, feed, veterinary medicine and give technical support, while farmers breed the fowls, spend money on material facilities, electricity, water and other expenses. The company would collect fowls for processing and pay farmers for the breeding.

Twenty billion dong is really a huge sum of money for Hung and other local families. Hung estimated that he needs to breed five farrows of chickens a year at least to make profit.

Therefore, Hung has got shocked when hearing that the company plans to scale down the breeding just one year of the farm development. If so, Hung would surely go bankrupt and fall into insolvency.

“The farm costs me at least three million dong a day because I have to pay to workers, electricity and water bills and management expenses. I would take a loss of 24 million dong for every day of delay,” Hung said.

Do Minh Hieu, the owner of a farm with 160,000 fowls, has become redundant. Hieu also said that Emivest collected fowls one month ago, but it has not mentioned about the new farming.

Meanwhile, other farm owners in the region said they have been informed by foreign invested enterprises about the extension of the leisure time between two crops and reduce the number of fowls by 30-50 percent.

“In the past, we started a new crop just after 15 days or a month after finishing the previous crop. But now we have to wait two or three months,” Hieu said.

Meanwhile, though the farm is left idle, Hieu still has to spend 30 million dong to pay to 34 workers and other expenses to maintain the farm.

Anti-dumping lawsuit to be raised

Farmers have estimated that since March 2012, live fowl market prices have always been lower by 30-50 percent than the prices from their farms, which means that farmers have been incurring the loss of 20,000-30,000 dong for every fowl.

Fowl farmers have blamed the loss on the chicken imports which have been sold at the prices lower by 20-30 percent than the domestic products. It is estimated that imports account for 30 percent of the total supply.

Pham Duc Binh, Deputy Chair of the Eastern Fowl Association, has called on management agencies to tighten the quarantine barriers and tariffs.

Binh said that the imports can be sold at low prices only if the importers evade tax and the products have low quality. Therefore, fowl farmers may petition to the Competition Administration Department about the dumping.

SGTT