Call to establish corn industry as feed option

THE Government should establish a commercial corn industry, as a substitute for wheat to meet the demand for chicken and pig stock feed, according to the Goodman Fielder International (GFI).
Managing director Sun Xing Tao said: “With our new US$200 million (K761.8 million) worth 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 we can reduce imports of wheat for feed.
“The Government must support us by establishing a commercial corn industry so we can fully use our feed mill whose current under-used 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.”
Tao relayed the message to International Trade and Investment Minister Richard Maru and National Agriculture Research Institute officials when they visited Goodman’s new feed mill at 11-Mile in Lae this week.
Maru advised the company to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with Nari to go into large-scale commercial corn faming.
“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 we can stop spending over K70 million annually to import feed alone- this money should be going into our people’s pockets,” he 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,” Maru said.