South Africa’s lacklustre economic growth over many years now underscores the importance of industries that provide jobs and support economic activity, particularly in impoverished rural areas.
High on this list is the poultry industry, whose contribution to the national economy and to the country’s food security is massive, but often underappreciated.
Chicken feeds the nation, as the industry regularly reminds us. Poultry producers provide twice as much meat as the beef industry, and four times that of pork producers. The result is that 66% of the meat consumed in SA is chicken.
Despite government infrastructure failings and the ever-present threat of bird flu, the poultry industry is thriving. It has recovered from the devastating bird flu outbreaks of 2023 and boosted production by 4.4% in 2024. For the first three-quarters of 2025, growth continued to exceed 4%.
Poultry kept the wolf from the national food security door, even during Covid-19, when imports of chicken stalled.
Economic growth
This is in stark contrast to the performance of the national economy, which grew by 0.5% in 2024 and an estimated 1.3% last year. The International Monetary Fund has just announced that it expects SA’s economic growth for 2026 to reach 1.4%, less than half of the expected global growth rate of 3.3%.
Meagre growth means increasing millions of jobless people, as the economy will not be able either to absorb new entrants to the labour market, or to provide sufficient new jobs to make a meaningful reduction in one of the world’s highest unemployment rates.
SA’s population rose to an estimated 63 million people last year, of whom 31.9%, or 8.1 million people, were unemployed in the third quarter of 2025. The expanded unemployment rate, which includes those who have stopped looking for work, stands at 42%.
SA is a country where nearly half the people of working age are without a job, or the income to sustain a family.
This is why the poultry industry is so important. It is a huge R72-billion national asset. Not only does it supply most of the meat protein the nation consumes, but chicken is produced in rural areas, providing jobs and sustaining economies far from the country’s cities and business areas.
The industry provides jobs in all nine provinces, employing more than 58,000 people directly and another 55,000+ jobs indirectly throughout the value chain.
According to the SA Poultry Association (Sapa), the most poultry operations are in North West province (24%), followed by Mpumalanga (20%), the Western Cape (16.9%) and Gauteng (12%).
These are not city jobs. The local municipal districts containing the highest number of broiler industry farms are Mkhambathini in KwaZulu-Natal and Victor Khanye and Lekwa in Mpumalanga.
Local economies sustained
While the national economy stutters, the poultry industry is providing work far away from the main industrial areas. Local salaries feed local families and sustain local economies.
Under the 2019 poultry master plan, the industry committed to investing R1.5-billion to expand production for local and export markets. It has already spent R2.2-billion, creating more than 1,700 jobs in the process, with more investments being made over the next five years.
The poultry industry is also crucial for the survival of the grain industry, and thousands of agricultural jobs supported by maize and soya production. The poultry industry buys nearly half of the country’s maize, and 98% of the soya bean crop.
The steady supply of local chicken is critical for SA’s food security. The country is food secure at a national level, but not at the household level. The Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) has estimated that 20 million South Africans, or 63% of households, are food insecure.
The HSRC survey, published in 2024, also found that the rate of child stunting, caused by malnutrition, had risen to 28.8%. Undernourishment means that more than a quarter of SA’s children are condemned, before the age of five, to a life in which they are unlikely to reach their full physical or mental potential.
That is what malnutrition is doing to SA. It’s a shameful and horrific statistic.
It highlights the importance of chicken, the country’s most popular and most affordable meat protein. Chicken contains the essential minerals and vitamins that children need, and it is the meat most consumed by poor households.
These are just some of the reasons that poultry should be declared a strategic national industry. Doing so would help the government focus on the importance of poultry, particularly in rural areas, while national economic growth remains weak. DM
Francois Baird is founder of the FairPlay movement against predatory trade.