This year, Kazakhstan’s poultry farmers will continue to face difficulties in the sale of poultry meat and eggs, the President of the Union of Poultry Producers of Kazakhstan, Ruslan Sharipov, told Trend.

He said: “There is an overstock of stored poultry product on many farms. The data for 2 February, presented by poultry farms, show that there remain 11,000 metric tons of meat and 53 million eggs on the farms.”

Mr Sharipov added that 148,000 metric tons of poultry meat and 4.2 billion eggs were produced in 2014.

He explained that the problem of overstocking is related to the appearance of fairly cheap poultry products in supermarkets in Kazakhstan due to the fall of the Russian ruble.

He said: “Large manufacturers from neighbouring countries are dumping and trying to push Kazakh producers from their own market. It is of concern that the selling prices of products imported from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and other countries are lower than the domestic ones.”

He noted that the price of the Russian poultry meat was 397 Tenge (KZT) per kg, and the price of one egg was KZT19 until November 2014 (US$1 is valued at around KZT184.5).

Mr Shapirov said: “Over the past three months from November 2014 until January 2015, the price of the poultry meat dropped to KZT280 per kilo and to KZT14 per egg.”

He added that the cost of the production of the domestic poultry meat is about KZT400 per kilo and KZT13.8 per egg, while the selling prices is around KZT468 and KZT14 to 15, respectively.

“The first cost of the domestic poultry products is affected by the lack of breeding base, veterinary drugs, premixes and more others, to be imported from other countries, which has a significant impact on the selling price,” he added.

“The key role in the final pricing is played by intermediaries who trade in the markets. They mainly set the price policy, although they don’t bear any material load except for the delivery and storage of products,” he told Trend.

Mr Sharipov said that Kazakhstan’s poultry farmers are concerned about the inaction of Kazakhstan Agency for Protection of Competition and other services that have to keep track of unjustified rise in prices and the over-saturation of the trade chains of imported products.

He also said the government of Belarus adopted a draft law on 12 December 2014, which stated that the optimal ratio of imported and domestic goods in Belarus’s market should be approximately 20 per cent to 80 per cent.

If Kazakhstan were to introduce such a restriction, Mr Sharipov said, Kazakh citizens could see an increase in domestic natural products rather than those of unknown origin- at times unnamed and unlabelling.

“Now the poultry farmers have to reduce the volumes, and some are even suspending the production,” Mr Sharipov added.