By Abel Ariza, managing director of Malaysia and Singapore, Sodexo
Who can forget Malaysia’s ban on chicken exports to Singapore in June 2022? Suddenly, Singapore’s national dish — chicken rice — became a luxury, quite literally. Prices of fresh chicken started soaring, attributed to Malaysia’s reliance on feed imports which drastically rose in prices, even as eateries scrambled to find other fresh chicken sources. Malaysia supplies about one-third of Singapore’s chickens, roughly 3.6 million chickens each month.
The ban was eventually lifted in Oct 2022. It may have been four months — mitigated, fortunately, by imports of frozen chicken and alternatives such as canned chicken from other countries — but the ban was long enough to impact the earnings of poultry suppliers at wet markets, a few of which were prepared to shutter their business.
More importantly, the chicken shortage raised a key concern for Singapore: can the country do more to secure its food supplies?
The full article can be found here.
