The once flourishing small-scale poultry industry in Ghana has over the past two decades undergone a severe deterioration as a result of fortunes that has diverted the industry from near self-sufficiency in the early 1990s to a net importer of poultry products. Since the later part of 1990s the Ghana market has followed a steep and uncontrolled influx of cheap poultry meat from subsidized poultry producers from advanced countries (Osei, unpublished) including USA and EU, not to mention countries such as Brazil and Canada. A multiplicity of factors have accounted for the decline and mortalities of the domestic poultry industry. These include unfair competition from subsidized poultry producers from advanced countries, unfavourable and indifferent government policy direction, escalating costs of production, inefficient methods of production, lack of funds and credit, inadequate knowledge in poultry management, socio-cultural factors, lack of information needs on the part of small-scale poultry farmers, inadequate access to market, lack of processing facilities, and high rates of perishability. Therefore, the present study examines the factors that affect the growth of the small agribusiness in Ghana, focusing mainly on the small-scale poultry industry. The purpose of the study is to provide guidelines and recommendations for improving poultry farming at the level of small-scale poultry farmers in Ghana through the organized social movement (new generation cooperative movement). The study further seeks to solicit government interventions through political arguments so as to sustain and strengthen the failing small-scale poultry industry in Ghana. The purpose of the organized social movement is to bundle competencies and resources that are more valuable in joint effort than when kept separate by the small-scale poultry farmers in racing against competitors who are driving them out of business. This is due to an on-going severe competition as a result of unprotected market and political bias of trade liberalization, structural adjustment policies and deregulations on the part of the government. A sample of 120 poultry farmers was selected by a stratified random sampling approach. This was followed by 75 stakeholders through a snowball approach and data was collected by using a semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study shows that the organized social movement (SM) of small-scale poultry farmers, provision of government subsidies, placing a ban or increase tariffs on imports of poultry meat, access to cheap loans, provision of infrastructure, access to incentives and awards, training and education of poultry farmers, advertising campaign, and dissemination of information, had positive and significant impact on the competitiveness and growth of the small-scale poultry industry.

Magister Legum - LLM / The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is the only global international organisation dealing with the rules of trade between nations.1 The WTO agreements uphold certain principles; one such principle is the rule of the most-favoured-nation (MFN) obligation. This obligation requires WTO members, who grant certain favourable treatment to any given country, to grant that same favourable treatment to all other WTO members.2 However, there are several exceptions, three of which include:  actions taken against dumping (selling at an unfairly low price);  subsidies and special ‘countervailing’ duties to offset the subsidies; and  emergency measures, to limit imports temporarily - thus designed to ‘safeguard’ domestic industries. These exceptions serve as remedies both against fair - and unfair trade practices. An example of remedies against fair trade practices are safeguards, and examples of remedies against unfair trade practices are dumping and countervailing duties. Anti-dumping actions are trade remedies/mechanisms available to members of the WTO in facilitating the protection of the industries under certain circumstances. The WTO agreement, which sets out the anti-dumping remedy, is the agreement on the implementation of Article VI of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 1994 (GATT 1994), also known as the ‘Anti-dumping Agreement’.4 Article VI permits countries to take action against dumping and the ‘Anti-dumping Agreement’ clarifies and expands on Article VI. The two operate together. Dumping is viewed as price discrimination between the domestic and export markets and take place where the export price of a product is lower than the normal value of such product. The normal value is usually determined with reference to the domestic selling price in the exporting country. Adjustments have to be made to the normal value and export price for differences that affect prices at the time that such prices are set, including differences in terms and conditions of sale, taxations, levels of trade and quantities.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / As a signatory to the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) agreement, a preferential trade agreement (PTA) with the United States, South Africa derives several benefits. PTAs grant access to certain products from developing countries and, while the tariffs are sometimes not completely removed, the tariffs charged are far less than those imposed on countries that are not included in the trade agreement. There is strong evidence that PTAs increase trade and investment between member countries. South African exports of goods and services to the US under AGOA have increased by 104% since 2000. While PTAs seem to benefit developing countries at the aggregate level, not much is known about the winners and losers from preferential trade liberalisation at the level of the firm. This study assessed the PTA benefits of AGOA at the firm level within the South African poultry sector. / 2023

The increase in chicken production over the period 1910-1945 in the United States has compared favorably with the increase in production of livestock which compete with it for the farmers time and feed as well as tor a place on the table of the consumer. Turkey production has increased 252 per cent in the United States over the period 1929-1945. / Master of Science

The implications of a computerized grain trading system on the Southeast poultry firms was studied. The purposes of this study were to describe the current grain trading system, identify sources of inefficiency in the system, and infer the possible changes in efficiency due to a computerized grain trading system. A telephone survey was used to gather the information from the grain buyers. The trading practices used by the buyers were identified. The poultry firm's amount of storage, the quantity, quality, oriqin, transportation mode of the purchased qrain, and information about the selling firm was gathered. From the trade information, the pricing and technical ineff iencies plus the level of competition in the market were identified. The primary economic implications to Southeastern poultry firms if a computerized grain trading system were in place were the level of competition would increase, technical efficiency could increase from a decrease in costs of labor and information search, pricing efficiency could increase due to more structured market information, and the middle level margins could decrease and create an overall more efficient market. / M.S.

Thesis (D. Tech)--Central University of Technology, Free State, 2008 / The global, one-world economy has arrived and South Africa is part of it. Business needs to understand the challenge of global competitiveness. This study reflected the prominence of managing diversity in establishing service excellence and performance management for professionals in the mediumsize chicken breeder/broiler industry in South Africa, following the increased importance of the breeder/broiler industry in providing an affordable nutriment/commodity to the poor and needy South African population. The ongoing variables in the political, social, cultural and technology domains in South Africa also affect the chicken breeder/broiler industry. It necessitates the scientific evaluation of the effect of the external political and socio-political environment; internal training and development, leadership styles, literacy levels, employment equity, resistance to change, reverse discrimination and cultural diversity on service excellence and performance. Country Bird (Pty) Ltd., a significant role-player in the food production industry, was thus selected as the object of this study. The role of management and the workers was examined to determine the level of impact in attaining service excellence and organisational performance. Attention was also focused on the development of a service excellence and organisational performance management model that can be used in the chicken breeder/broiler industry to improve organisational performance and sustainable profits.

Thesis (M. Tech.) - Central University of Technology, Free State, 2009 / The production of poultry meat at abattoirs implies a tremendous amount of organic matter that requires environmentally and biologically safe disposal or utilisation. As a result, waste management is a concern in poultry abattoirs worldwide. Problems with proper storage, handling, management and utilisation of by-products have come to the forefront in planning, establishing and operating of poultry abattoirs. The rationale for this study centres on the need for the review of poultry abattoir waste management practices, by-product production and environmental implication at South African high-throughput abattoirs. The need for this review stems from the rapid growth of the poultry industry over the past ten years. The industry has responded to this growing demand with larger and faster processing lines and more employees. This has led to the generation of high loads of waste material associated with negative environmental impacts. Poultry waste is of great concern as it plays a major role in environmental affairs over and above the present crisis with waste in South Africa, especially in rural and peri-urban areas. The primary objectives of the study were to identify the existing waste management practices in relation to the sources, type of waste material generated, and the methods of handling (collection, storage and disposal) as well as to ascertain whether there is any in-house treatment methods practised. In addition, to identify any environmental impacts resulting from waste management practices. To obtain data, site visits were conducted countrywide and abattoir personnel were interviewed through a questionnaire, in detail about the operation and waste management practices of their respective abattoirs. Their experiences in the industry regarding waste management were determined as well. From a total of thirty-four registered and operating high-throughput poultry abattoirs, twenty-six (76.4%) were visited. Huge amounts of wastes are generated at South Africa high-throughput poultry abattoirs, and these amongst others includes blood, feathers, feet, intestines, trimmed meat off-cuts, faecal matter, condemned chickens and waste-water. Waste handling practices varies according to abattoir preferences. Different collection facilities are used for different types of waste, 50 - 750_ containers and blood troughs are used for blood (table 4.5), crates, wheelie bins, conveyors, black rubbish bags for feathers (table 4.6). Waste is either stored at the dirty area of the abattoir or in an open space next to the abattoir under strict supervision prior to disposal or by-product processing. Since not all abattoirs dispose off generated waste, some abattoirs have by-products processing facilities either on site or outside abattoir premises. Examples of by-products produced (table 4.3) include poultry (carcass) meal, feather meal, poultry oil and blood meal. Disposal methods used differs from burial, rendering, land application, municipal landfill, collection by farmers (animal feeding), burning, composting depending on waste type. It should however be noted that some of disposal method used are not legally approved in South Africa although legally permitted in other international countries as per literature review. Three environmental implications were identified by the respondents included in the study (table 4.14) and these included air pollution, water pollution and land/soil pollution. Recommendations are made to encourage the safe disposal of abattoir waste, minimisation of environmental implications and to limit the methods of disposal to those that are internationally permitted and suggested.

No description available.

This thesis addresses issues related to surveillance for disease in commercial and non-commercial poultry populations. The motivation for this work has largely arisen from the unprecedented outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 that have occurred in 52 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe since 2003. A series of studies are presented using data derived from two countries, Vietnam and New Zealand. The two Vietnamese studies provide in-depth epidemiological analyses of the outbreak of HPAI H5N1 from December 2003 to March 2004. The three New Zealand studies deal with issues related to the development of effective surveillance strategies for HPAI — informed both directly and indirectly by the findings from the Vietnamese studies. This approach provides an example of how ‘lessons’ learnt from countries that have experienced large scale infectious disease epidemics can be used to assist in the design of surveillance activities in (as yet) unaffected countries. The descriptive analyses of the 2003 – 2004 outbreak of HPAI H5N1 in Vietnam indicate that the epidemic was seeded simultaneously in the north and south of the country in the later part of 2003 with 87% of provinces affected by February 2004. HPAI risk was concentrated around the Mekong and Red River Deltas. The broad scale spatial distribution of disease is likely to have been associated with regional differences in the poultry farming, trade in poultry, and environmental conditions such as the presence of bodies of water which would support reservoir species for the virus. A Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model was used to quantify the influence of environmental and demographic factors on the spatial distribution of HPAI positive communes. In areas where disease was reported, our results show that HPAI risk was positively associated with the presence of irrigation and negatively associated with elevation. After controlling for these fixed effects, a single large area of elevated risk in the Red River Delta area was identified, presumably arising from similarities in the likelihood of reporting disease or the presence of factors increasing disease transmission and spread. Further investigations to elucidate likely transmission mechanisms, targeting this area of the country, would be a profitable area of future research. The second part of this thesis presents three studies that address issues related to the development of effective surveillance strategies for HPAI in New Zealand. The first was a cross-sectional study to enumerate the prevalence of backyard poultry ownership in two areas (one urban and the other rural) close to a large provincial city in the North Island of New Zealand. The prevalence of poultry ownership was 2% (95% CI 1% – 4%) in the urban area and 19% (95% CI 12% – 30%) in the rural area. The relatively low numbers of land parcels where poultry are present indicates that these areas, in the event of an infectious disease incursion, would be unlikely to pose a risk for spread of infectious agent. A cross-sectional survey of all members of the Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand was conducted in the later half of 2007. Respondents were asked to document contacts made with other enterprises related to feed, live birds and hatching eggs, table eggs and poultry product, and waste litter and manure. Patterns of contact were analysed using social network analyses. Each of the four networks had scale-free properties, meaning that for each movement type there were small numbers of enterprises that had contacts with large numbers of enterprises (potential ‘super-spreaders’ of disease). The presence of an undetected infectious disease in enterprises with super-spreader characteristics increases the likelihood that an epidemic will propagate rapidly through the population, assuming there is a directly proportional relationship between the number of contacts an enterprise makes and the probability that disease will be transferred from one location to another. While the finding that feed suppliers had large numbers of poultry farm contacts in the feed network came as no surprise, what was of greater interest was that there were small numbers of poultry farms that reported off-farm movements of feed. This should serve as an important reminder for disease control authorities: movement (and other) restrictions applied during the course of an animal health emergency should be applied across a range of industry sectors, recognising that some industry participants may practice activities that are not entirely typical for their enterprise type (e.g. poultry farms on-selling feed to other farms). In the absence of perfect and up-to-date network data, knowledge of the characteristics of individual enterprises that render them more likely to be atypical (e.g. size, type, and geographic location) would be of value, since this information could be used to inform a risk based approach to disease surveillance and control. A scenario tree model was developed as an approach for evaluating the effectiveness of New Zealand’s passive surveillance system for HPAI. The model was developed in two stages. In the first, factors thought to influence the geographic distribution of NAI risk of introduction and spread (and therefore surveillance strategy) were combined to create a spatial risk surface. In the second stage, a scenario tree model of the passive surveillance system for NAI was developed using the spatial risk surface and the HPAI surveillance strategy prescribed by Biosecurity New Zealand. The model was most sensitive to farmers reporting the presence of suspected cases of disease. This implies that the sensitivity of the system as a whole stands to increase if the importance of reporting suspicious clinical signs is reiterated to poultry producers. The studies presented in this thesis have presented a range of techniques and methodological approaches that are sufficiently generic to be used in any country to inform the design of surveillance strategies for a variety of animal diseases, not just those of poultry. Although epidemiology, as a discipline, is endoured with a vast range of analytical techniques that can be used to enhance the understanding of factors influencing the spread of disease among animal populations, the quality of data used to support these techniques is often lacking. The challenge in the years ahead, for both developed and developing countries, is to set in place the appropriate infrastructures to collect details of animal populations consistent in quality over time and space.

This thesis addresses issues related to surveillance for disease in commercial and non-commercial poultry populations. The motivation for this work has largely arisen from the unprecedented outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 that have occurred in 52 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe since 2003. A series of studies are presented using data derived from two countries, Vietnam and New Zealand. The two Vietnamese studies provide in-depth epidemiological analyses of the outbreak of HPAI H5N1 from December 2003 to March 2004. The three New Zealand studies deal with issues related to the development of effective surveillance strategies for HPAI — informed both directly and indirectly by the findings from the Vietnamese studies. This approach provides an example of how ‘lessons’ learnt from countries that have experienced large scale infectious disease epidemics can be used to assist in the design of surveillance activities in (as yet) unaffected countries. The descriptive analyses of the 2003 – 2004 outbreak of HPAI H5N1 in Vietnam indicate that the epidemic was seeded simultaneously in the north and south of the country in the later part of 2003 with 87% of provinces affected by February 2004. HPAI risk was concentrated around the Mekong and Red River Deltas. The broad scale spatial distribution of disease is likely to have been associated with regional differences in the poultry farming, trade in poultry, and environmental conditions such as the presence of bodies of water which would support reservoir species for the virus. A Bayesian zero-inflated Poisson regression model was used to quantify the influence of environmental and demographic factors on the spatial distribution of HPAI positive communes. In areas where disease was reported, our results show that HPAI risk was positively associated with the presence of irrigation and negatively associated with elevation. After controlling for these fixed effects, a single large area of elevated risk in the Red River Delta area was identified, presumably arising from similarities in the likelihood of reporting disease or the presence of factors increasing disease transmission and spread. Further investigations to elucidate likely transmission mechanisms, targeting this area of the country, would be a profitable area of future research. The second part of this thesis presents three studies that address issues related to the development of effective surveillance strategies for HPAI in New Zealand. The first was a cross-sectional study to enumerate the prevalence of backyard poultry ownership in two areas (one urban and the other rural) close to a large provincial city in the North Island of New Zealand. The prevalence of poultry ownership was 2% (95% CI 1% – 4%) in the urban area and 19% (95% CI 12% – 30%) in the rural area. The relatively low numbers of land parcels where poultry are present indicates that these areas, in the event of an infectious disease incursion, would be unlikely to pose a risk for spread of infectious agent. A cross-sectional survey of all members of the Poultry Industry Association of New Zealand was conducted in the later half of 2007. Respondents were asked to document contacts made with other enterprises related to feed, live birds and hatching eggs, table eggs and poultry product, and waste litter and manure. Patterns of contact were analysed using social network analyses. Each of the four networks had scale-free properties, meaning that for each movement type there were small numbers of enterprises that had contacts with large numbers of enterprises (potential ‘super-spreaders’ of disease). The presence of an undetected infectious disease in enterprises with super-spreader characteristics increases the likelihood that an epidemic will propagate rapidly through the population, assuming there is a directly proportional relationship between the number of contacts an enterprise makes and the probability that disease will be transferred from one location to another. While the finding that feed suppliers had large numbers of poultry farm contacts in the feed network came as no surprise, what was of greater interest was that there were small numbers of poultry farms that reported off-farm movements of feed. This should serve as an important reminder for disease control authorities: movement (and other) restrictions applied during the course of an animal health emergency should be applied across a range of industry sectors, recognising that some industry participants may practice activities that are not entirely typical for their enterprise type (e.g. poultry farms on-selling feed to other farms). In the absence of perfect and up-to-date network data, knowledge of the characteristics of individual enterprises that render them more likely to be atypical (e.g. size, type, and geographic location) would be of value, since this information could be used to inform a risk based approach to disease surveillance and control. A scenario tree model was developed as an approach for evaluating the effectiveness of New Zealand’s passive surveillance system for HPAI. The model was developed in two stages. In the first, factors thought to influence the geographic distribution of NAI risk of introduction and spread (and therefore surveillance strategy) were combined to create a spatial risk surface. In the second stage, a scenario tree model of the passive surveillance system for NAI was developed using the spatial risk surface and the HPAI surveillance strategy prescribed by Biosecurity New Zealand. The model was most sensitive to farmers reporting the presence of suspected cases of disease. This implies that the sensitivity of the system as a whole stands to increase if the importance of reporting suspicious clinical signs is reiterated to poultry producers. The studies presented in this thesis have presented a range of techniques and methodological approaches that are sufficiently generic to be used in any country to inform the design of surveillance strategies for a variety of animal diseases, not just those of poultry. Although epidemiology, as a discipline, is endoured with a vast range of analytical techniques that can be used to enhance the understanding of factors influencing the spread of disease among animal populations, the quality of data used to support these techniques is often lacking. The challenge in the years ahead, for both developed and developing countries, is to set in place the appropriate infrastructures to collect details of animal populations consistent in quality over time and space.