Southern Africa's poultry industry is lopsided, Ishmael Sunga, chief executive of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (Sacau), writes in a signed column for Food for Mzansi. Thousands of small producers struggle from one cycle to the next, while large integrated firms dominate feed, chicks, processing, logistics and formal markets. Between them, he argues, lies an empty "missing middle" of professional, medium-scale poultry enterprises. The views are the writer's own.
These in-between entrepreneurs, Sunga writes, are too advanced for basic start-up grants but not yet bankable enough for commercial lenders. They have ambition, some experience and market potential, but lack working capital, shared infrastructure, technical support, buyer confidence and professional systems. Support, in his view, has gone either to micro-projects that rarely scale or to firms already strong enough to attract finance.
He sees poultry as one of the most practical routes into inclusive agribusiness: demand is strong and production cycles are short, and the work reaches well beyond the farm, into feed distribution, hatcheries, veterinary services, housing construction, slaughtering, cold storage, transport, packaging and marketing, all of it open to youth- and women-led businesses.
But young people cannot simply be told to "go into poultry" and then left to face high feed costs, disease risk, weak infrastructure, informal markets and hostile finance, he writes. What they need is professionalisation: records, standards, biosecurity, business planning, cost control, quality assurance, contracts and digital tools, with training that builds competence and finance that follows performance.
Sunga calls for a "new compact" of blended finance, enterprise clusters, shared hatcheries and cold rooms, practical certification, digital business systems, public procurement, private-sector offtake and patient mentorship. He singles out young women, active in food trading and local distribution but often kept at the lowest-value end of the chain, as the ones who could move into formal ownership across production, processing and marketing.
"Future-proofing poultry means future-proofing ownership," he concludes. Leaving the middle empty, he argues, will keep reproducing exclusion; filling it deliberately could make poultry an engine of youth employment and women's economic empowerment.
Ishmael Sunga is chief executive officer of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (Sacau).
Source: Food for Mzansi
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