Monitoring the impact of COVID-19 in Myanmar: Yangon peri-urban poultry farmers - Early July 2020 survey round

Some temporarily closed broiler farms reopened their businesses in early July to meet the recent increasing demand for chicken, but other temporarily closed farms shut down permanently. The share of closed layer farms further decreased by 2 percent, cumulatively by 17 percent compared to 2019. With very few new poultry farms established, the supply of broilers and eggs is likely to be significantly less in coming months compared to 2019. The price of broilers has gradually decreased from its peak of 5,350 MMK/viss in early June to around 3,300 MMK/viss in mid-July. Supply shortages of day-old broiler chicks continues to be the main problem preventing broiler farms from fully recovering their operational capacity. It was also the most important challenge reported in our open-ended question to poultry farmers. Cash flow worsened considerably for broiler farms in early July due to the recent price increase of day-old-chicks and the price decrease of broilers. The number of hired regular workers in operational poultry farms remained similar compared with June, which is still much lower than before the outbreak of COVID-19 . Since March, the total job loss among the 275 surveyed farms was 793 workers – 35 percent of the total labor on those farms. All recommendations in our first two policy notes still stand – temporary income support to poultry farms; participation in government credit guarantee schemes; temporary waiver of the import ban on day-old-chicks; tax exemptions or deferrals for poultry farmers; and further lifting of restrictions on transportation of livestock and livestock products. The temporary waiver of the import ban on day-old-chicks by the Myanmar government should be continued. However, to protect domestic breeder farms and related businesses, the total supply of day-old-chicks should be monitored and the import waiver phased out when domestic breeder farms return to normal production capacity. We estimate this should be in two to three months.