THE Goodman Fielder International (GFI) is calling on the Government to establish a commercial corn industry in Papua New Guinea.
GFI Managing Director, Mr. Sun Xing Tao made this call during the visit of the Minister for International Trade and Investment, Hon. Richard Maru and NARI team to GFI’s new feed mill at 11mile in Lae on Tuesday.
“With our new USD200 million worth world-class feed mills, we can produce chicken and pig feed as good as anywhere in the world, depending on what the farmers want.
“Right now, we are safe importing wheat as our basic ingredient for feed, however, our big challenge is that we wait for over a month for our order to arrive and it is very expensive because of the declining value of the Kina.
“We are willing to substitute to a corn-based diet and buy all the corn that local farmers can produce, so that we can reduce imports of wheat for feed.
“The Government must support us by establishing a commercial corn industry so that we can fully utilize our feed mill whose current under-utilized capacity is around 6, 000 metric tons per month (72, 000 metric tons per year) which is more than enough to replace all importation of poultry feed,” Mr. Sun said.
Meanwhile, Minister Maru encouraged GFI to negotiate an MoU with NARI to go into large-scale commercial corn faming to supply feed to GFI feed mill.
“PNG imported over 49, 000 metric tons of feed last year.
“We have to stop importing by going into large-scale commercial corn farming so that we can stop spending over K70 million annually to import feed alone.
“This money should be going into our people’s pockets,” the Minister said.
“The market and the capacity are already here but we are not producing.
“Once we start using local feed, we will ban all the imports of feed so we can support the local industry.”
