However, export of poultry meat from Croatia is still strong despite the loss of the CEFTA market.
Poultry meat production has seen a stagnation in the last five years, according to data made available by Croatiastočar, an economic interest association for the production, processing and marketing of livestock, livestock products and animal feed, reports Glas Slavonije on August 9, 2016.
However, if total production of meat in Croatia is compared with the number of day-old chicks then the production actually shows an increase of 5 percent, which is still significantly less than in the other EU member states, especially if we take into account the new EU members that have managed to increase production by more than 30 percent.
All these years, businesses in the poultry sector have not been using capital grants from the state budget, and they have only modestly used the investment support from the European Union pre-accession funds. In addition, in Croatia, as well as in Europe in general, there were no direct subsidies provided to businesses engaged in poultry production.
Figures related to the production in the sector of poultry meat in the last seven years indicate that there has been a continuous increase in the production of day-old chicks, with an increase in both exports and imports. The export actually exceeded the import of day-old chicks in the past few years. “As for the turkey meat industry, an evident decline has been seen in the production during the same period and it was mostly due to the cessation of the production of turkey meat in Istria in 2012", the Croatiastočar report said.
The export of poultry meat from Croatia, despite the loss of the CEFTA market in 2013, has again shown a growth tendency in the last two years. CEFTA is the Central European Free Trade Agreement, covering Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldavia and Serbia. Croatia left CEFTA after its accession to the European Union.
Despite excellent technological advances and high quality domestic production of poultry meat, the entire sector is faced with a very serious, in most cases unfair competition regarding some categories of poultry meat that are coming from countries with large production surpluses which have significantly higher net sales prices in their home markets, and from the countries where this production is subsidized with various forms of state aid.
