A poultry development fund could be Ghana’s surest bet for arresting the rising level of poultry imports and creating much-needed jobs through the sector, a report by the African Centre for Economic Transformation (ACET) has proposed.

Currently, only 42% of domestic consumption is said to be supplied by domestic production, which is well below the West African average of 86%.

Although the Export Trade, Agricultural & Industrial Development Fund (EDAIF) has been created, the acute nature of the poultry sector’s difficulties require a specialised fund, the Ghana version of the report titled ‘Promoting Rural Sustainable Development and Transformation in Africa’ noted.

“Perhaps the funds levied on poultry imports and collected by EDAIF can be carried into this separate fund,” the report said in favour of a sector that is currently being threatened by reported cases of bird flu infestation, with farmers calling for compensation.

In 2007, government doled out some GH?1.5million as compensation to farmers who lost their birds to a bird flu outbreak.

The sector’s troubles however go beyond outbreak of diseases to include high cost of production, inefficient production methods, limited know-how, lack of funding, and processing fallibilities, the report noted.

“The domestic poultry sector remains largely uncompetitive against imports; rising demand has been met by rising imports. Imported products tend to be 30-40% cheaper than locally produced chicken,” the report said. According business solutions provider -- Technoserve -- Ghana’s importation of poultry products from America and Europe reached an estimated US$179miilion in 2012, up from US$4.5 million two years before.

This forty-fold increase, the ACET report said, is partially because of the challenges confronting local producers and the huge domestic deficit from consumer demand for poultry products.

Chicken consumption, meanwhile, is said to have increased rapidly and become an important part of the Ghanaian diet. Technoserve estimates that consumption grew at an annual rate of 12.6% between 2007 and 2011, from 21 million tonnes to 110 million tonnes.

The report, which is part of a larger study of five African countries including Burkina Faso, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, identifies fewer than 20 large-scale poultry operators (over 10,000 birds) in Ghana, which mainly produce eggs.

Speaking at the report’s launch in Accra, Dr. Julius Gatune, a Senior Policy Advisor at ACET, said upgrading the poultry value-chain in Ghana will involve increasing productivity on the supply side, and developing linkages to modern marketing channels.

Productivity improvement, he said, will require feed improvement and cost reduction, better disease management, and better day-old chicks.

ACET also proposed the use of used fridges to make hatcheries in a bid to reduce the importation of day-old chicks.

“The success of locally-based fabricated cassava-processing equipment from scrap metal by local artisans shows that Ghana has what it takes to develop cheap local hatcheries,” the report said.