As a Member of Parliament I see my primary responsibility as taking decisions and promoting ideas that will improve the quality of life of my constituents and Jamaicans. Our paramount objective as policymakers should be to create the economic environment that will ultimately increase our citizens’ per capita income and reduce their living costs at every opportunity.

Jamaica is a part of the global economy in which free and open markets provide avenues for countries to trade, especially with exports, and earn vital foreign exchange for their goods and services.

Aggressive competition among sellers in an open marketplace gives consumers (individuals and businesses) the benefits of lower prices, higher quality products and services, more choices, and more significant innovation.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States promotes competition while enforcing rules of the competitive marketplace; for example, antitrust laws ensure that the rights of consumers are protected from large monopolies which may seek to use their power to hike prices or unfairly take advantage of the markets in which they operate with anticompetitive mergers and business practices.

This FTC investigates anyone and everyone it believes violates the rights of the consumers. It does not matter if it is Google, Amazon, Microsoft, banks, utility companies, book publishers, food companies with excessive sugar, or health-care providers, they will “come after you” if it suspects you are exploiting consumers unjustly.

A case in point was when the FTC and 17 US state Attorneys General sued Amazon.com Incorporated on September 26, alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopoly using interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to maintain its monopolistic power illegally. According to the FTC and its state partners, “Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.”

It follows naturally that lack of competition in the marketplace leads to abuse of the consumers, with higher prices and service fees.

In Jamaica, we have the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) and the Fair Trading Commission, which are intended to protect our consumers, but do they?

In all cases brought forward by the FTC, the “lawyers fighting monopolies have argued that concentrating industry power in the hands of just a few companies would lead to higher prices and harm consumers”. Here in Jamaica, instead of breaking up monopolies and oligopolies, some of our policies actually encourage them.

In previous articles I have focused on the unfair practices of our banking sector. Today I want to pay specific attention to our chicken/poultry industry in which there are two leading local producers — Jamaica Broilers and Caribbean Broilers.

Both companies are protected by very high import duties of 200 per cent to restrict competition from imports. Local supermarket shelves carry many goods produced in Trinidad, Barbados, Belize, and Guyana; however, we do not import chicken from those markets even though the import duty from Caricom would be zero per cent.

So, in 2021, two years ago, Jamaicans (with a lower per capita income) were paying more than 200 per cent more for chicken than the retail consumer in the US (See Table 1) and more than 181 per cent more than the citizens of Belize (See Table 2) for a whole chicken. Today, depending on the supermarket, the price per pound may range from US$2.88 to US$3.09.

The raising of conventional-bred broiler chickens is not difficult. Most of the chickens available in the stores today are ready for harvest in approximately 48 days. Chicken feed is usually corn and a mixture of other grains. The data show that the weight of a chicken is approximately 60 per cent of corn consumed, and feed costs account for between 60 per cent and 70 per cent of the cost of poultry meat production. Therefore, a chicken’s price directly corresponds with the corn or feed price. Or at least it ought to.

Unfortunately, this is not so in Jamaica. Here, when the price of corn goes up, the price of chicken goes up, but when the price of corn goes down, the price of chicken in Jamaica does not. Corn prices have fallen 31 per cent over the last year, but chicken prices in Jamaica continue to rise.

Even our imported chicken neck and back, which is basically dumped here, is more expensive than in other Caricom countries.

I say without fear of contradiction that a duty structure of 200 per cent has done nothing to improve the lives of the Jamaican people meaningfully. On the other hand, it has undoubtedly done a lot to improve the lives of the producers.

You may hear that these producers need this protection because they invest with other small chicken producers locally and then buy back their chickens.

Furthermore, Caricom has mandated the ‘Twenty-five by Twenty-Five’ policy to foster the reduction of extra-regional imports, thereby enhancing food and nutrition security and eradicating poverty among Caricom people. This is a step in the right direction.

As such, Jamaica must have a policy intervention that guarantees a more integrated poultry industry to give our consumers better prices. I suggest we examine the models in Belize and Guyana, where the population pays 181 per cent less for a whole chicken.

In the meantime, we should ensure that local companies operating as monopolies or oligopolies are regulated, especially those with significant protections for building and protecting local industry.

As we say, “One hand cyah clap.” In our quest to protect local producers we have caused considerable harm to Jamaican consumers who can no longer afford basic locally produced food. Therefore, it is time we begin to make more products affordable to our population. Let’s start with chicken.

Lisa Hanna is Member of Parliament for St Ann South Eastern, People’s National Party spokesperson on foreign affairs and foreign trade, and a former Cabinet member.