Characterizing demand for domestic versus imported chicken in developing countries: the case of Haiti and Cameroon

Since the beginning of 2000s, imports of frozen pieces of chicken from the European Union or Brazil have considerably increased in several African and Caribbean developing countries, competing with local chicken meat. Obviously, imported chicken has replaced domestic one in households’ consumption. The level of substitution between imported chicken and the several domestic chicken types is not specifically known. In order to focus on this point, investigations have been done in 2005 in Yaoundé (Cameroon) and in 2006 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti). Because of a lack of available statistical data, we surveyed 180 urban households in each country, showing that imported frozen pieces of chicken have widely substituted for the local chicken which has already quite disappeared in Port-au-Prince, but is still appreciated by Yaoundé consumers. This article aims to assess the impacts, on such an evolution of i) socio-economic features of consumers and ii) of chicken consumption habits of households. Without data on income, and to deal with a large number of qualitative variables, we implemented multiple correspondence analyses to build asset indexes usable in our econometric regressions.