Argentines Cry, ‘Fowl Play!’ Over Imported Chicken Deal

Some call it Chickengate, others prefer Rotten Chicken Scandal. Not a few Argentines suspect foul play.

At issue is the government’s purchase of 38,100 tons of imported chicken in 1986 and whether the deal cost Argentine taxpayers millions of dollars. Lately, it has become more than a mere economic question. There are rumors of nuclear danger.

Some of the chicken was imported from Hungary, and somehow speculation arose that the birds may have been contaminated in the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear accident. Furthermore, 108 tons of the imported chicken went bad, and the carcasses were buried in landfill areas surrounding Buenos Aires. Newspapers mused: Did the landfill constitute an unauthorized nuclear poultry dump?

The government has spent two weeks denying that and other rumors. Despite the denials, public concern that unwholesome birds may be on the shelves has led to a 23% fall in chicken sales, according to the Frozen Poultry Federation.

Among the more serious accusations is that the chicken ended up costing up to $1,400 a ton, including storage and shipping fees, while the domestic price is below $1,000 a ton.

Another complaint is that the imported chicken is tougher and smaller than Argentine poultry and, therefore, not as salable. Consumer resistance to the chicken has slowed attempts to market it, and it is approaching the end of its usable life after two years in storage.

Alberto Albamonte, an opposition member of Parliament, says the government has lost somewhere between $20 million and $50 million in the purchase. Albamonte, of the Union for the Democratic Center, a centrist party, calls the venture an example of the government’s failed interventionist policies.

Making his point with a man-sized Styrofoam chicken at a recent appearance outside the Commerce Ministry, Albamonte said the government could have unloaded the chicken last year to a foreign bidder for $420 a ton and cut its losses. Now prospective buyers are offering even less, he said.

Others also have seized on the matter to question the reasoning behind importing chicken in a country with a healthy domestic poultry industry.

The conservative newspaper La Nacion called it “another demonstration of the mistaken orientation of an omnipotent government that involves itself in businesses that are not its own, and for which it is not qualified.”

Ricardo Mazzorin, the domestic commerce minister responsible for the deal, says such imports allow the government to regulate the domestic prices of poultry and other products. If the domestic price rises sharply in times of lower output, the government sells from its frozen stock onto the market, increasing the supply and lowering the shelf price.

Chicken goes for about 30 cents a pound in Argentina, half the price of the country’s famed beef. The governing party, the Radical Civic Union, searched in 1984 for possible sources of imported beef for similar regulating efforts, but could not find anyone that produced beef more cheaply than Argentina.

Federico Storani, a leader of the governing party, the Radical Civic Union, told a party gathering that had just eaten a chicken dinner: “This meal is proof of the degree of your support. If you ate this chicken Mazzorin a la Hungary, it shows your loyalty is unshakable.”

Mazzorin has said that none of the imported poultry will go to waste. He suggested that what cannot be sold will be used for government free-food programs. That angered welfare groups. Then he said it might be ground up for feed or fertilizer. That annoyed those industries.

Mazzorin says the government has sold 10,000 tons of the chicken in the domestic market and has reexported a few thousand tons--while about 24,000 tons remain in warehouse freezers, still to be sold. There are reports that 4,000 of the birds cannot be found--but there seems to be no stampede to find them.