MYANMAR - THE Myanmar Aqua Feed Association is urging members to test all bags of raw materials used to make fish feed imported from India after some bags were found to contain waste products with no nutritional value, a spokesperson said last week. Dr That Mhoo, the association’s general secretary, said six companies are importing Indian-made soy meal. “We found that some bags contain up to 10 percent of waste products such as bean shell or other plant stems,” he said. “This means there is less protein and fibre in each bag and the farmers must source more protein,” he added.
Each bag weighs 30 viss (1 viss is 1.6 kilograms or 3.6 pounds), he added. Dr That Mhoo said domestic feed producers are unable to meet demand for the product, so imports are required to fill the gap. However, imported feed is also cheaper by about 15pc at K700 a viss, while the domestically produced product is K800. “A wave of Indian-made fish feed – about 4000 tonnes – was imported between October and November,” he said.
He added that the importers had hired warehouses to store their feed, without making contracts with buyers. And soon as the imported feed arrived they were able to sell it quickly, Dr That Mhoo said. “The samples of the feed they gave us to test were quite pure but the imported bags they have been selling has between 5 and 10pc of waste product,” the manager of a feed factory in Hlaing Tharyar said last week.
“They [the suppliers] promised that this would not happen again,” the factory manager added. The bags of soy meal are mixed with other products such as groundnut cake, wheat, corn gluten meal and sesame cake to create fish feed. He added that the suspect imported soy meal had been distributed before either the association of factory owners had been able to adequately test its quality. Some factories have their own laboratories but many do not. In Yangon, only the Livestock Breeding and Veterinary Department’s laboratory at Thaketa township can provide quality control certificates. But the costs of using the laboratory are too high for most, he said.
“Thousands of tonnes of the raw materials used to make fish feed are imported every month,” he said. “We need to make sure they all are tested and meet our quality standards,” he added. Dr That Mhoo said it cost about K50,000 to test the amount of crude protein in a sample, which was too expensive for many of the smaller feed companies. “The price must be lower than that to encourage all the importers to test what their goods,” he said.
However, the cost of buying and maintaining (about K60 million annually) the testing machines is paid by fisheries exporters, who test for illegal chemicals such as nitrofuren, said an exporter, Daw Toe Nandar Tin. “We will think about reducing test prices [for feed importers],” she said. “Foreign investment in Myanmar is increasing and perhaps an Indian company might build a feed factory here one day. We need to be ready for that,” Dr That Mhoo said.
Source: Myanmar Times
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