A director of an egg production enterprise with 1.2 million fowls admitted that imports are cheap which has made domestic products uncompetitive.

His herd of laying hens is relatively large. When the egg laying period ends, the hens will be sold as culls. The business once was very good. He could sell hens at VND74,000 per kilogram.

However, that changed over the last year because of mass imports from Thailand. At Ha Vy, the largest poultry wholesale market in the north, 20,000 chickens from Thailand were traded at a very low price, just VND47,000 per kilogram.

To compete with imports from Thailand, he has had to lower selling prices to VND54,000 per kilogram.

The noteworthy point is that market demand has dropped dramatically. The prices of poultry eggs sold to catering units have decreased by 30-40 percent. 

Chicken meat is also selling very slowly because it is less competitive in comparison with imports.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD), as of the end of April 2023, Vietnam had imported $407.5 million worth of meat, meat by-products and edible post-slaughter by-products, up 1 percent compared with the same period last year.

The price of imports is always at low levels. In January 2023, the average import price was $2,092 per ton, or less than VND50,000 per kilogram.

Meanwhile, in 2022, Vietnam spent $1.52 billion to import meat and by-products, up 9.1 percent.

A report of the Vietnam Poultry Association (VIPA) showed that in the last two years, poultry imports grew by 60 percent, while domestic production grew by only 6.14 percent.

In 2021, imports of poultry products were 225,000 tons. In 2022, Vietnam imported 246,575 tons of slaughtered products and 6.603 tons of live chickens for domestic slaughter, up 100.8 percent.

In 2022, chicken legs were imported in the largest quantity (100,441 tons). Vietnam also imported chicken feet (43,695 tons), chicken wings (22,628 tons) and other products.

Since the beginning of the year, Vietnam has imported 51,000 tons of chicken.

VIPA chair Nguyen Thanh Son stressed that these figures are official statistics and don’t include hundreds of thousands of tons illegally brought to Vietnam across border gates.

VIPA estimated that in 2022, chicken imports accounted for 20-25 percent of the total meat consumed domestically, a very high volume, which put pressure on the domestic production, especially as demand is on the decrease and supply is on the rise.

What does the livestock industry want?

According to Bui Duc Huyen, CEO of Viet Tin Nutrition JSC, Vietnamese consumers prefer chicken legs to chicken breasts, though the latter has nutrition content higher by three times than the former. 

Cheap imported chicken legs always have a position in the market.

“A company supplying food in Hanoi told me that they import 200 tons of chicken legs a month, but they only buy 20 tons of fresh chicken legs from CP,” he said.

According to Son, frozen culls without heads, feet and offal from South Korea and other countries are selling for only VND32,000 per kilogram in Vietnam, which is a threat to domestic fowl production.

Imported pork is also surprisingly cheap. Pork ribs are priced at VND65,000 per kilogram; and pork heart and tongue VND42,000 per kilogram. Imports are mostly used by catering companies thanks to their low prices.

Phan Van Trung, from a livestock company in Hanoi, said catering units in industrial zones mostly use imported meat to prepare meals for workers.

“The meals have low prices, so they have to choose materials at reasonable prices,” he explained.

An importer noted that it is difficult to import pig breeds to Vietnam because importers have to provide a lot of documents and undergo complicated quarantine procedures. But it is easy to import meat.

According to the Dong Nai Livestock Association’s Chairman Nguyen Tri Cong, the prices of products imported via official channels are very high. However, there is no barrier to by-products. Therefore, farmers find it hard to compete with imports. 

Son said that as Vietnam is a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and has signed many free trade agreements (FTAs), it must open the market to imported livestock products. If Vietnam doesn’t take measures to protect domestic production, it will become the market of low-cost livestock products.

Tran Chung