A Fowl Industry
With apologies to the pun-allergic.
There’s been some talk in Old Limbe Town lately about the unfortunate evolution of the local poultry market. As recently as a few months back, chickens and eggs came to people in Limbe the same way plantains or cassava did, via some small producer who grew a bit and sold it at one of the local markets, or even out of their home. The last time (only time really) I needed a whole chicken on short notice, we called up a colleague of mine who keeps about 40 ‘table birds’ (chickens and ducks) in his back garden, ready for slaughter on short notice. Great.
But over the course of a few short months the local market has been completely flooded by the birds and eggs of a certain non-national, who has started a battery farm in a certain other town, and has proudly declared that any chicken you eat in a Limbe restaurant these days is his (I’m told). Now our yolks are paler, our breasts more meager and our local producers are presumably in big trouble.
I have just left Limbe for good, but it seems the same thing is going on with chickens right now on a national scale. The other night in Yaounde I met a Canadian who was brimming with excitement at his new Cameroon-wide battery chicken venture. Apparently by 2010 we can expect the whole inhabited country to be dotted with high-tech battery operations churning out 30 000 birds per day, each. He could barely contain his glee about the coming era of higher meat-to-bone ratios and industrial sanitation standards (proudly insisting “our chickens NEVER see the light of day”!). To my very predictable query about effects on local producers he gave a very predictable answer about hiring locals in the factories and paying them well.
For me this is a gloomy little story how headless and steamroller-like development can be. Why can’t we choose what to include and what to leave out? Given the choice between a localized organic food market that provided a little income to a lot of people with minimal eco-footprint and animal cruelty, and a foreign-owned, small-farm-squashing poultry monopoly, I don’t think most people would have to think very long or hard. Even the Canadian in question, who seemed nice enough, would probably go with the local/diverse/healthy economy option if one had asked him some time last year when he was a web-designer.
