St. Ann South Eastern MP Lisa Hanna
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Lisa Hanna, Member of Parliament for St. Ann South Eastern
By Prince Moore
Member of Parliament for St. Ann South Eastern, Lisa Hanna, is calling for the government to re-examine the duty protections on importation of chicken meat.
She says this is important for Jamaicans to be able to afford healthy forms of protein.
In a post to X, Ms. Hanna said too many Jamaicans are not able to afford the prices of chicken meat despite a reduction in the cost of the product on the global market.
She is challenging the logic of providing excessive duty protection to any product with a local input of less than 10 per cent.
She has suggested a reduction in the 260 per cent duty on importation of chicken for the benefit of small farmers.
"Reduce the duty on chicken to 50 per cent, which would still be twice the international norm, and use the duty collected - because we actually don't collect the duty now - and use that duty to purchase baby chicks and distribute them free to small farmers."
"You could also eliminate the duty on feed and allow anyone, if they need a permit, to bring in container loads to bring in chicken. It should not be only the big people who get permits. The result of such a policy or suggestion would not only lower the prices for chicken, but more people would be engaged in raising chickens," she argued.
Ms. Hanna believes the current policy on importation of chicken is not in the interest of the wider population.
"[It] only benefits two chicken producing monopolies, and it puts the nation at a health risk and then imposes on the general poor public to pay a high price for chicken, thereby having an unhealthy diet," she reasoned.
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