STRATEGY ▶▶▶
Labour shortages slow growth of Eastern Europe’s poultry sector
Poultry producers in Eastern Europe are confronted with a fully-fledged labour crisis, caused by the bustling post-pandemic recruitment frenzy, coupled with long-standing demographic issues. Worker shortages threaten to slow production growth and make some of the largest European poultry producers less competitive due to higher costs.
The labour mar- ket problems may have been exposed by the Covid-19 pan- demic but they are expected to last longer which means poultry farmers must brace themselves for worsening conditions in the years to come.
BY VLADISLAV VOROTNIKOV T
he Russian poultry industry is short of 6,000 work- ers, the Russian Agricultural Ministry reported late 2020, citing an estimate provided by Russian poultry farmers’ organisations. During a meeting, the Minis-
try specifically confirmed a worrying shortage of personnel in the production facilities of the largest companies, Cherkizovo and GAP Resource. GAP Resource said on its own behalf that the problem is associated with a gradual exodus of the Rus- sian population from small cities, where most of the Russian industrial poultry farms are based, to large metropolises. Cherkizovo added that the booming e-commerce industry was luring some workers away from poultry farms because
the migrant workers they normally relied upon couldn’t travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “The current situation could cut a range of poultry products normally available on the Russian grocery shelves, while under a negative scenario it could cause a decline in output altogether,” GAP Resource warned. Sergey Lakhtyukhov, general director of the Russian Union of Poultry Farmers, commented that the labour crisis in Russian poultry farming reached a peak at the end of the summer of 2021. “Today, slaughterhouses and processing facilities es- pecially, have workforce issues. The farming sector has been affected by this issue to a lesser extent,” said Lakhtyukhov, adding that some measures have been implemented by the Russian Agricultural Ministry to attract more migrants from within the CIS region.
Competitive labour market “The expanding e-commerce segment, where salaries are sky high, was drawing workers away from the poultry sec- tor,” Lakhtyukhov noted, adding that this problem is seen in Russia and beyond. The picture is similar in Poland, Europe’s largest poultry exporter. Krzysztof Hajłasz, an expert for the Polish Export Centre, said that in addition to travel restric- tions, quarantine and distancing mandates, labour costs had jumped due to general inflation. “This has the greatest impact on blue-collar workers and drives them to seek higher salaries. Luckily, smaller companies often employ mostly fam- ily members. They are less likely to leave a family business, so these operations are less impacted by the migration to higher wage jobs. Large-scale production and slaughterhouses are experiencing the greatest impact, as a significant percent- age of their workforce comprises non-EU citizens – mostly Ukrainians,” Hajłasz said. The distancing requirements and quarantine measures imposed to prevent the spread of Covid-19 have driven up labour costs, as well as increasing the competition for work- ers which is getting fiercer. Anatoly Nasenya, a member of the Belarussian National Assembly, said that the country was experiencing a labour shortage, as the number of vacancies
32 ▶ POULTRY WORLD | No. 2, 2022
PHOTOS: VLADISLAV VOROTNIKOV
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