South Africa’s energy crisis becoming an everything crisis

THE most severe power cuts ever experienced in South Africa are threatening food and water supplies and disrupting the lives of millions of people, including chicken farmers.

In the poultry industry, electricity outages have forced factories to pause round-the-clock operations for as long as half a day at a time. As a result, over 10 million birds designated for slaughter are still alive and consuming feed, creating a backlog that companies fear they won’t be able to fix.

“We actually have enough chickens on farms around the country, but we can’t supply the market because we can’t slaughter the chickens,” Izaak Breitenbach, Chief Executive Officer of the South African Poultry Association, said in an interview.

As a stopgap measure, producers have begun using generators, which cost the industry about 75 cents above the normal price of production per kilogram of chicken.

In response to these pressures, KFC temporarily shuttered some