Challenges in the Poultry Industry's Production Value Chain

The poultry industry, due to its close association with live animals throughout all stages of production, is constantly exposed to various risks.
These types of risks can be categorized into two groups: known and previously experienced risks over time, and risks that arise at specific times for which there is no prior experience.
Known and experienced risks can be listed under the following headings:
1. The breed of the parent flock, which significantly affects the hatch rate of production.
2. The outbreak of diseases in the flock, which can result from various factors such as proximity of farms and disease transmission between them, lack of access to or knowledge of using quality medicines or vaccines, failure to maintain appropriate flock density, and inability to create a suitable physical environment for the flock in terms of air circulation and humidity levels.
3. Limited availability of adequate logistics facilities for the transportation and transfer of raw materials and products.
4. Failure to comply with necessary standards to protect farm premises, feed production units, and hatcheries from disease outbreaks.
5. Incorrect policies by uninformed government managers sometimes disrupt the consistent utilization of production units' logical capacity due to the lack of economic justification amid the imposed fluctuations in the final product pricing.
These five mentioned risks relate to challenges that experienced industry stakeholders are somewhat familiar with and have equipped themselves to handle.
However, there are also risks that arise alongside exceptional events in the production-to-consumption cycle of this industry, which no experienced industry professional has encountered during their career, including:
1. Truck drivers’ strikes that disrupted the transportation cycle of raw materials and products. This disruption affected the shipment of raw feed materials from ports, delivery of prepared feed to poultry farms, and distribution of products to consumption centers, completely altering the production-to-consumption chain.
2. The twelve-day war, which affected all normal life cycles, including production, distribution, and consumption.
3. One of the effects of the recent war was the widespread displacement of populations from high-risk war zones to areas perceived as safer. Naturally, production and distribution factors align with the population volume of each region. Severe fluctuations in this displacement undoubtedly caused shortages and supply disruptions in some areas, as well as unabsorbed surpluses in others. This phenomenon severely impacted the production and distribution chains of most goods, especially food products.
The occurrence of these events in the production of one-day-old chicks caused many production units to be forced to destroy their products, and in some cases, they had to sell their products to broiler farms at up to one-quarter of the production cost.
In any case, this has been an experience that may occur again in the future, and the involved stakeholders must be prepared to accept it.
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