• Consumption Food prices will continue to rise this year after hitting a decade high in 2021

  • Inflation The CPI accelerates again and breaks forecasts by rising 8.7% in May

The supermarket shelves in Spain can run out of chicken meat

from October

.

The situation of the farmers is "critical", according to the UPA (Union of Small Farmers and Ranchers), which estimates the losses of the sector so far this year at 32 million euros and that could reach the end of 2022 with a debt up to 75 million.

The problem, moreover, is that, with inflation, consumers are paying 35% more for this product than they did a few months ago, but this difference in prices has "practically nothing" for the producers, "who are the ones who take care and they feed the chickens", denounces Lorenzo Ramos, general secretary of this agrarian organization.

"Their profitability has plummeted and right now the survival of the farms is unfeasible," explains the agrarian leader.

In addition to the

exorbitant rise

, in general, of production costs, the problem is aggravated by the heat wave that our country suffered last week, which triggers even more the need to refrigerate the farms to maintain the ideal conditions of the regulations governing the welfare of animals.

According to UPA, farmers have made the decision to start applying for loans to meet the high costs that this price crisis is causing.

MILLIONAIRES LOSES

Specifically, UPA calculates that for each chicken farmers are losing between 0.13 and 0.15 euros.

If the situation is not corrected, the losses could be

close to 75 million at the end of the year

.

"The aid that the Ministry of Agriculture has approved is 10 million euros, so this amount is just a patch for a crisis that is of enormous dimension," Ramos underlines.

UPA met last week with the leaders of the poultry employers and demanded compliance with the

Food Chain Law

, officially approved in this legislature

in Congress, but which is nevertheless proving to be very difficult to apply in many cases for the agricultural sector: covering the production costs of farmers.

"A farmer

cannot charge less than 0.55 or 0.60 euros for a chicken

," denounces this agrarian organization.

Lorenzo Ramos has also sent a message to ENESA and Agroseguro, the large agricultural insurance operators, to update the payment of the amounts insured in poultry farming.

"

Insurance is extremely expensive

and farmers have serious difficulties in contracting it. It doesn't make sense that an insurance line is impossible to contract," he argues.

PRICES

According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture for 2020, the latest published officials, last year was marked "by

strong price instability

."

At the beginning of the campaign they increased significantly due to a temporary mismatch between supply and demand, while from the state of alarm caused by the coronavirus, prices fell to levels well below those of recent years.

The low demand, especially for the product outside the home, caused the need to freeze large quantities.

This, together with a scant recovery in demand, led to a year-end with prices at levels below the average of recent years.

Specifically, the price for the last week of 2020 stood at

€1.30/100 kg

.

THE SECTOR IN SPAIN

The last year reflects an increase in the production of poultry meat, but nevertheless

the number of animals slaughtered

in Spain decreased.

In addition, in the specific case of chicken meat, a slight decrease in the tons produced is also observed, for the first time in recent years.

Specifically, a total of 800,616,000 birds were slaughtered (a decrease of -2.03% compared to 2019), while the total tons were 1,717,880 (which represents an increase of 0.74% compared to 2019).

With these provisional data, Spain remains the second largest producer of poultry meat in the EU, behind Poland (surpassing France and Germany).

In the EU as a whole, this year 2020 there would have been a decrease in poultry meat production, as the United Kingdom was no longer included.

According to official data from the Ministry of Agriculture, most of the chicken meat production is concentrated in four autonomous communities:

Catalonia, with 28.7% of the national total;

the Valencian Community, with 16.9%;

Andalusia, with 15.8%, and Galicia, with 13.1%

.

Turkey production, second in economic importance in our country, is estimated at around 116,000 MT.

With 11.8% of the total production of chicken meat,

Spain is the second European producer

of chicken meat behind the United Kingdom.

The productive evolution tends to stabilize around one million tons, with a slight supply deficit that covers, fundamentally, with imports from the countries of the community environment.

At the global level, the main producer is the US, although the world market is dominated by Brazil, which allocates the largest amount of product for export, while

the EU ranks fourth in world production

with 12.4% of the total.

Meanwhile, the number of poultry farms in Spain has been increasing significantly in recent years.

In January 2021 they amounted to a total of

20,754 farms

(+5.71%).

This increase is due to the increase in farms of other species other than chicken, which maintain a continuous upward trend.

On the other hand, this year chicken farms have fallen slightly (-0.66%), although mainly due to a drop in breeding farms.

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