Who rules the roost? Corporate vs community poultry in Africa

– Frans van Sambeek, Hendrix Genetics, 2015[1]

Not long ago, Ghana had a thriving poultry sector. After decolonisation from the Brits, the government boosted commercial production with strong public extension services to support local farmers and careful policies to control imports of foreign inputs. By the 1970s, the country was self-sufficient in chicken and even exporting to its neighbours. Then came the World Bank and International Monetary Fund with their structural adjustment policies that forced Accra to privatise and liberalise the industry – opening up its market to cheap imports from Europe, Brazil and the US – as a condition for loans. Today, Ghana imports 90% of its poultry meat needs, as local commercial production has been decimated, and the country is trapped in a bottomless pit of debt with the Washington institutions.

Despite this hollowing out of local wealth and resources, this could actually be a great moment for Ghana to move in the right direction.

Farmers’ organisations and social movements across the global South have long struggled to fight off the “Green Revolution” – a scheme cooked up by US interests to push agricultural modernisation in order to quash progressive agendas for social justice since the 1960s. Much of the organising work, from Accra to Ahmedabad, has focused on seeds, land, trade and now agroecology. But what about livestock? And what about poultry, more specifically? Today, the humble chicken is a direct target of agroindustrial expansion and philanthrocapitalist arrogance, especially in Africa. Yet like local seeds, indigenous breeds can be fiercely defended and improved upon for both immediate community needs and broader political agendas.

Chickens have long been part of our backyards, farms and food systems. The bird was domesticated 8,000 years ago in Southeast Asia, and spread quickly to other parts of the world. In Africa, chickens are fairly ubiquitous. They are an important source of income, livelihood and health, especially for women and children. Chickens provide affordable protein (both meat and eggs) and are easy to keep. They serve as a savings bank, a currency for barter or cash, a centrepiece of cultural rituals, and a gift in times of celebration or mourning. Right now, chicken is the most highly consumed meat per capita in Africa, and the one growing the fastest. The same is true across the world. No wonder then that chicken rearing is being increasingly eyed for corporate takeover.

Over the centuries, rural communities have developed a wealth of chicken biodiversity in the form of breeds that are well adapted to their local environment. Yet only since the early 1900s did poultry breeding, like plant breeding, become an industry of its own. In fact, their histories are intertwined. In the US, hybrid maize – which would become the cornerstone of industrial agriculture – was developed in the 1930s by Henry A. Wallace. Wallace was Secretary of Agriculture at the time and went on to become Vice-President of the United States. He also founded Pioneer Hi-Bred, the world’s first multinational seed company. But probably few people know that Wallace also applied the same technique of hybridisation to chickens. By 1954, his “Hy-Line” chicken breed commanded 20% of the US market for layers (egg-producing birds), and at one point accounted for three-quarters of the global market.[2]

Today, the poultry sector bears all the marks of Wallace’s vision. The push to come up with a more productive” bird that feeds well on monocropped maize and soybean has led to the industrial chicken business as we know it. Whereas in the 1960s, there were hundreds of poultry breeders playing an important role in different markets around the world, that figure has dropped to just three today. And as with Wallace’s maize, they have followed the pattern of producing hybrids that do not pass their characteristics to the next generation. This means that a farmer relying on these “improved” birds has to regularly buy fresh stock from a company. The result of this is concentration at all levels: a few companies producing a few breeds that rely on a few crops for feed and a fairly centralised supply of vaccines.[3]

After waves of mergers, just three companies control the poultry genetics market today. Tyson in the US and Eric Wesjohann Group (EWG) in Germany produce the bulk of the world’s broiler breeds, that is to say chickens raised for meat. The same EWG and Hendrix Genetics, of the Netherlands, share the market for layer breeds. In both segments, the level of market share is around 90%, evenly split by the two firms.[4] And what has become of Wallace’s famous “Hy-Line” breed? It is now owned by EWG.

The impacts of this model, with its high level of corporate concentration, are well known. Industrial poultry production in largescale facilities is often associated with widespread disease problems, animal suffering from lack of space, health problems for workers, air and water pollution affecting nearby communities, and deforestation to produce soybeans and maize in countries like Thailand or Brazil. And it is precisely this part of the poultry sector – industrial production – that is growing so fast today.

In 2010, a US NGO worker in Uganda, disillusioned with the aid industry, moved to Ethiopia to join a friend who thought they could make money with chickens. As his partner put it, they were “a couple of suburban kids with zero poultry experience trying to launch a poultry business in Africa.”[5] In their eyes, Ethiopia was a land of “15 million smallholder farmers using nondescript breeds that don’t produce enough eggs.”[6] So they set up a company called Ethiochicken, and in less than ten years became a major day-old-chick producer serving smallholder farmers across the country.

The two US men were blessed with massive financing from abroad. Their corporate map reads like a Who’s Who of agribusiness financiers, from the Gates Foundation and private equity firms to development banks and Emirati investment houses. (See Graph 1.) The role of Bill Gates in this venture is especially noteworthy. Through his partnership with Ethiochicken, Gates is able to target small-scale farmers and deliver technology as a springboard to improved livelihoods. The technology here is improved genetics, in the form of young chicks. But hidden from view in this fairy tale are a few important facts.

The chicks that Ethiochicken markets are a breed called “Sasso”, which is the exclusive property of Hendrix Genetics, run by a private equity group. Sasso is a cross between local African birds and European stock. It’s an exotic hybrid, that can be grown both for meat and eggs. Ethiochicken’s business model is to replace local breeds with Sasso T451, which they have an exclusive licence on. Like patented seeds, Sasso chicks have to be bought anew – a farmer can’t breed them further, because their performance breaks down.

This business of providing elite chicks to farmers often means the chicks are vaccinated (with drugs from multinational pharmaceutical companies) and have special feeding requirements (which often means soy or maize meal laced with nutritional additives). In fact, feed is the most important expense for farmers that buy and raise corporate chicks. Ethiochicken specifically targets smallholder women, who need inputs at a specific price point, to raise chickens in backyard conditions. But this focus on the poor hasn’t stopped the company from making huge financial returns for its investors – one of them called the company “wildly profitable” – and expanding into five more African countries, quickly becoming a multinational corporation itself.[7]

Nor has it stopped its key investor, Bill Gates, from investing at the same time in largescale poultry operations. In 2024, he went into business with Sheikh Mohammed Al-Amoudi, an Ethiopian-Saudi investor often cited as Africa’s richest businessman.[8] Al-Amoudi owns MIDROC, an Ethiopian firm that runs the largest poultry farm of Ethiopia, part of Elfora Agro-Industries. Elfora is a vertically integrated and highly intensive farm outfit producing chicken meat, eggs and day-old chicks. (The infograph below shows the overall map of Gates’ expanding involvement in the poultry business in Africa.)

Elite poultry breeding opens the door to larger farms, more specialisation and ultimately corporate takeover. As operations grow bigger, we tend to see more devastating impacts from disease and sanitary conditions. South Africa just experienced a nightmare of this sort at one of its largest poultry farms. Daybreak Foods, run by the country’s pension fund, ran into a sudden financial crisis. Workers stopped being paid and in no time hundreds of thousands of chickens starved to death.[9]

Another hidden cost associated with corporate concentration in the industrial poultry sector in Africa is economic stranglehold. Analysts rightly point out that European and US regulators are to blame for corporate concentration that Africans have to face, since they are the ones who approve agribusiness mergers at the global level.[10] That concentration brings collusion, cartels and abusive power to fix prices in Africa. Zambia, Malawi and South Africa have seen overpricing, price swings and even the collapse of certain markets due to concentration in poultry genetics and coordination with feed suppliers. In 2024, analysts found that the feed industry in Zambia was paying soybean farmers such low prices, just to pocket the fattest margins for themselves, that farmers stopped planting, causing a market collapse.[11] Small scale producers, they point out, have zero bargaining power in this set-up. Corporate concentration plus climate change are turning into a powder keg for poultry producers in Southern Africa.

The financial drive to expand this lucrative business in Africa is “on”. For it is the industrial segment of the business where the growth, investment, profit margins, subsidies and policy support are concentrated. The accompanying data show the biggest chicken producers and importers in Africa by country, as well as some of the key corporate players and their financiers. (See Graphs 3 and 4, and Table 1.) This gives us a picture of how both supply and demand for industrial chicken are currently taking shape.

Despite the appeal (for some) of industrial production models, 85% of poultry flocks in Africa today are still indigenous birds raised in backyard systems. (See Box 1.) These birds are mostly kept by women and children, fed by scavenging and household scraps, with little external inputs. Productivity of these birds is low, because of little breeding work, and when they die young it’s usually from a local disease or predator. While they constitute the majority, these birds do not count much in policy discussions or trade statistics. Yet, Africa’s indigenous chicken biodiversity has so much to offer!

Little has been done to uplift indigenous chicken biodiversity at the local level. In fact, scientists say the biggest threat to local breeds in Africa is indiscriminate cross-breeding between native and exotic birds.[12] The phenomenal work going on with seeds shows that farmer-led approaches to breeding, facilitated by peasant organisations and NGOs, and supported by progressive scientists, can have amazing impacts. Why not open more programmes like these with a focus on livestock, like chickens? With appropriate funding, there is ample space to safeguard Africa's poultry genetic heritage before it’s too late. Improving local breeds with local communities could strengthen local markets, including workers involved in retail and food service, as we’ve seen in Burkina Faso, where the government has been trying to champion the small-scale indigenous chicken industry.

Public policies can indeed have tremendous impact. Numerous African governments have made the move to stop the importation of frozen chickens – “poulets morgue” or mortuary chickens, as the Beninois call them – into their markets by trading partners, be they international or within Africa itself. This trade is often “dumping” in disguise, and has replaced local poultry production, leading to dependency, market loss for farmers and even health problems. Benin, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and others have taken the bold step to either ban or limit these imports and seen the effects that this can have in supporting local producers. (So, what is holding the government in Accra back?) Strong regulatory action is also needed to reorient subsidies and fiscal packages away from the corporate sector in favour of small producers, and to prosecute collusion and break up corporate oligopolies in the poultry sector.

Finally, it would be wise to close the door on Gates and his private equity buddies, with their skewed ideology about what “modernisation”, “development” and “progress” are. These groups are pushing their own interests for their own benefit. African communities should set the agenda to achieve their own visions of food sovereignty and liberation. Let’s hope that indigenous livestock, like poultry, have their place in that vision.

[2] John C. Culver and John Hyde, “American dreamer: A life of Henry A. Wallace”, W.W. Norton & Co., 2001, https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393292046

[3] The poultry vaccine market has five firms accounting for 65% of the market according to GM Insights, “Poultry pharmaceuticals market”, July 2025, https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/poultry-pharmaceuticals-market

[4] Mehroosh Tak et al, "Identifying economic and financial drivers of industrial livestock production - the case of the global chicken industry", Tiny Beam, 2022, https://www.issuelab.org/resources/40548/40548.pdf

[5] John Aglionby, “EthioChicken: Ethiopia’s well-hatched idea”, Financial Times, 16 Mar 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/54b45d84-e4e2-11e7-a685-5634466a6915

[6] Idem.

[7] These are the words of Jacqueline Novagratz, CEO of the private equity firm Acumen, speaking to The Economic Club of New York on 29 September 2020: https://www.econclubny.org/documents/10184/109144/2020NovogratzTranscript.pdf. The German development cooperation sector more sanguinely calls it “low risk, high return”: https://wirtschaft-entwicklung.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Downloads/Studie_Milch-_und_Fleischwirtschaft/Ethiopia_country_analysis.en.PDF

[8] The ranking changes. See https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/mohammed-al-amoudi/

[9] National Council of SPCAs, “More than a million chickens abandoned and starving / Daybreak Foods”, 6 May 2025, https://nspca.co.za/more-than-a-million-chickens-abandoned-and-starving-daybreak-foods/

[10] Sumayya Goga and Simon Roberts, “Multinationals and competition in poultry value chains in South Africa, Zambia, and Malawi”, Centre for competition, regulation and industrial development, Johannesburg, Aug 2023, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52246331e4b0a46e5f1b8ce5/t/6551d99f893a2c0601c82a57/1699862946752/Poultry+Antimonopoly+WP_SGSR.pdf

[11] Arthur Khomotso Mahuma and Namhla Landani, “High soybean prices in Zambia and Malawi may make chicken costly too: lack of competition is to blame”, The Conversation, 18 March 2025, https://theconversation.com/high-soybean-prices-in-zambia-and-malawi-may-make-chicken-costly-too-lack-of-competition-is-to-blame-250322

[12] Such practices are said to lead to the loss of adaptive traits in indigenous poultry populations, reduced diversity, unpredictability for small farmers and ultimately lower resilience. “Poultry in the 21st century”, FAO, 2008, https://www.fao.org/4/i0323e/i0323e01.pdf.