Patterns and determinants of urban chicken consumption in Haiti and Cameroon: similar contexts, differentiated prospects

Since the beginning of 2000s, in order to let poor people accede to meat consumption, several African and Caribbean countries have opened their domestic chicken market to foreign imports, by reducing import tariffs. Thus imported frozen pieces of chicken from the European Union or America compete with local chicken meat, causing the collapse of many poultry husbandry and the loss of many jobs in the local chicken food chain. In order to highlight the determinants of urban consumer’s choice relative to chicken types, and assess the opportunity for local chicken to restore its market share, investigations have been done in 2005 in Yaoundé (Cameroon) and in 2006 in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) applied to 180 urban households in each country. While imported frozen pieces of chicken have almost entirely substituted for the local chicken which has already quite disappeared in Port-au-Prince, Yaoundé consumers still prefer the local flesh chicken to the imported ones, at least for particular uses.