Poultry sector decline

Our nation is in danger of losing the poultry sector, an industry that used to contribute an annual Lm13 million (Lm6 million egg layers, Lm7 million meat) to our economy. Today our islands have lost more than 55 per cent of the local poultry production.

Since May 2004, both the Opposition and the poultry industry operators had begun to inform the PN government that the local poultry processing and production sectors were suffering a serious crisis .

In 2004 the Opposition led a motion in Parliament to debate this crisis. However, the PN Parliamentary Group deliberately voted against the motion in order to support Environment Minister George Pullicino and Parliamentary Secretary Frans Agius who both declared that there was no crisis in the poultry processing sector.

They also claimed that their policy was sufficient to avoid any crisis. As a matter of fact the PN government did guarantee two important options to avoid this crisis.

First was a guarantee that if there was a 10 per cent distortion in price and production on local markets, the government would apply safeguards to protect the local producers (herdsmen) and processors, from both non-EU and EU imports.

Secondly, to sustain this guarantee and to back this policy, the PN government declared that they would be making ongoing monitoring reports on price and production distortions to ensure these guarantees be given to both processors and producers. So we must ask: What happened to these guarantees?

Who are the officials directly responsible for such monitoring reports? Who appointed them? What qualifications and experience do they have to carry out this "monitoring"? With whom are they monitoring? What is the monitoring system and benchmark? And what are the aims they are hoping to achieve by this monitoring?

It is now an acknowledged fact that between 2003 and 2006 there has been a 55 per cent drop in local poultry meat production, which means that local consumers are consuming half of the fresh local poultry meat that they used to eat before.

So may I ask who is going to compensate this 55 per cent loss directly suffered by the producers and processors, along with job losses? I ask this because the government did not respect its own guaranteed policies.

Could the public and the Labour opposition be given an answer as to why Mr Pullicino, Mr Agius and their officials deliberately failed to keep the firm written promises made by the former Prime Minister and former Minister of Agriculture regarding the safeguard clause?