EARLY WARNING WANTED
Abattoirs in the poultry industry want Eskom to give an eight-hour power cut notice
LOCAL chicken producers will ask the government to help them guarantee electricity supply to the nation’s biggest abattoirs as almost-daily power cuts are harming the birds’ welfare and creating health risks.
The slaughterhouses, some of which can process as many as 13 000 chickens hourly, can’t rely on generators as they are not able to create sufficient power for their needs, South African Poultry Association (Sapa) chief executive Kevin Lovell said.
The birds are typically stunned unconscious by electrocution before they are decapitated while hanging upside down, he said.
Back alive
When power cuts interrupt the process, the birds “have been stunned but they haven’t been killed; they’re hanging upside down and they’re coming back alive”, he said.
“It’s a real problem. And it’s a huge waste problem because everything that stops in the process, sometimes hundreds of tons, has to be cleared.
While rolling blackouts follow schedules, they are sometimes imposed at a few minutes’ notice.
There were rolling blackouts on 20 days in June, according to data using alerts from Eskom.
Abattoirs belonging to producers, including RCL Foods and Astral Foods, slaughtered about 958 million chickens last year, Lovell said.
Sapa will approach the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries about asking Eskom and municipali- ties to directly control power supply to 20 of the largest slaughterhouses, which process about 80 percent of the country’s production, and provide about eight hours’ notice before cuts are introduced, Lovell said.
“Anywhere in the slaughtering process, the freezing process and the storage process, any break in that and you have a food-safety problem,” he said.
Eskom would attempt to accommodate the needs of the poultry industry once producers had made an approach, Khulu Phasiwe, a spokesman for Eskom, said on Tuesday.
A company operating in the Western Cape had arranged that it got forewarned about planned disruptions and switched off supply to its feed mill during the day in exchange for not having electricity to its abattoir cut, Lovell said.
“Maybe that’s the sort of solution we can come up with,” he said.
Sufficient warning would limit losses and help processors and farmers plan transportation of the birds more efficiently, he said.
“Farms need to be no more than two hours away from abattoirs as that’s the sort of time period that the chickens can safely be contained in those crates” on trucks, he said.
“If it starts to take longer than that, you start to get mortalities.”
About 58 percent of Eskom’s electricity sales are direct to customers such as mines and factories, while the rest is sold to municipalities who then distribute to residents and businesses, according to the company’s 2014 annual report. – Bloomberg