 Chicken is the largest source of protein for people in southern Africa and is also the cheapest source of protein. It's very, very important for people in their consumption of food, particularly for low-income consumers. It's also very, very important in terms of industry. It's one of the largest agro-processing industries. This research looked at the competitiveness from the perspective of the firms, the large producers. There's only three to four major firms who account for the majority of poultry production in South Africa as well as in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia. These firms, to different extents, vertically integrated backwards into the feed manufacturing. To understand the competitiveness of the industry, it's about understanding the competitiveness of those firms. While the firms have expanded across the region, the regional value chain, the linkages between production in one country and the processing happening in another country are relatively weak. The best example of this is that Zambia has the conditions to produce maize and soya very competitively, but to be able to translate that into competitive production of poultry in South Africa for the Johannesburg market, for example, it means linking up the production of the soya and the maize in Zambia through the processing levels and critically with the transport to be able to bring the feed components to the production of the poultry, the slaughtering and the processing. The regional integration in practical terms on the ground has not been very effective. The transport costs are quite high as well as the coordination of the investments that are acquired at different levels. There are two main proposals that come out of the study. The first one is the need to reduce the transport costs by around about 50%. So it costs around about $100 a ton to bring animal feed from Zambia to South Africa, but if one looks just at the distance that it is, it should be around about $40 to $50. The second recommendation is around the investments that are required to usually grow the production from the feed level and link that to investments at the poultry level, which is growing the poultry businesses. That means more breeding stock, means larger facilities, both for growing the poultry itself but also in terms of the avatars, the slaughtering and the processing. And it means bringing technical capabilities to make that happen at a competitive level.