The Caribbean Livestock Feed Supply Programme, which is seeking to make the cost of feed cheaper by piloting the growth of raw material within the Caribbean, pitched for financing for research and development at the recent Agriculture Investment Forum.
This programme aims to improve regional food security and livestock product price competitiveness by producing within five years at least 20 per cent of the requirement of Caricom livestock feed mills.
But the programme requires serious feasibility studies to determine whether they would be bankable and viable. Getting funding for research and development is proving difficult, even during the Agriculture Invest-ment Forum, which was designed to match projects with bankers and investors.
Speaking to this newspaper from the Guyana International Conference Centre, Robert Best, Executive Director of the Caribbean Poultry Association and coordinator of the programme said that for now they are looking only at research and development and feasibility studies.
While most of the individual projects are in the R and D stage, the fact that they are being targeted for a captive market valued at over US$200M, supported by technical assistance from international agencies should increase the likelihood of success.
Responding to concerns that the project will displace traditional rice lands, Best said that the rice component of the project will not be done on rice lands.
He said that there are 25 feed mills in the region and they all import their feedstock from the United States. “Corn can be replaced by rice,” he said.
But he added that the rice that the project wants to cultivate needs to be a high yielding variety. “We are trying to grow rice with high yields and of lower costs to be used for feed. We are considering two approaches: growing the ordinary rice and using the broken and degraded portions to make into feed.”
Best explained that though the appearance of the rice grown for feedstock may not be appealing, the nutritional value will be high.
He said that the programme has come up against some differences of opinion with the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) because of the prices of rice. He said that since the price of rice has increased some difficulties have arisen.
Further, Best said that the infrastructure necessary for the implementation of both options for the project is non-existent.
According to Best, the government indicated that the project in Guyana could be given 10,000 acres of land near the MMA–ADA scheme. “We will be looking at three, four and five tonnes an acre,” he said of the yields expected. The average yield per acre of rice land cultivated is two tonnes.
Best said too that the project is looking at cultivating feedstock in the intermediate savannah. The project envisages that by its fifth year, Guyana would have had cultivated 4,000 hectares of rice, 10,000 hectares of sorghum and 2,000 hectares of cassava, all through individual projects.
He said that the project has received very good feedback from Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud who is seeking to find the project technical assistance from Brazil.
Speaking to this newspaper during the forum, Best said that so far the response of the financiers hasn’t been the most receptive and they were still trying to arrange one-on-one meetings with some international financial institutions present. “For these projects to go forward you need money for research and development and the financial institutions need to assist with this,” he said.
According to a document prepared for the Caricom Livestock Feed Supply Programme Inception Workshop, Caricom produces over US$700M in feedstock per annum and 85 per cent of all raw materials required to produce feed is imported largely from the USA. The remainder is produced in Belize (corn and sorghum), Guyana and Suriname (rice by-product, wheat middling, fat and soya bean.
The document said that over the last two years the feed milling industry has experienced steep and volatile increases in non agricultural commodity such as energy, freight, foreign exchange and labour, and raw material prices.
In 2007, the Caribbean Poultry Association established a public private sector working group to explore possibilities to grow more of the raw materials within the region. The working group developed the Caricom Livestock Feed Supply Programme which received endorsement of the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) in October 2007 and May 2008. Several experimental plots have been established in Guyana (corn, soybean and rice) and Trinidad and Tobago (rice and cassava).
