The country’s poultry industry has massive potentials, however, the gradual increase in production cost is posing a challenge to this sector.
One of the major underlying reasons is the rise of the cost of the raw materials that goes into poultry production, poultry feed being one of them.
Over the past few years, in addition to the increase in price of corn and soy, two major ingredients of poultry feed, increase in fuel prices has also catered to the increase of poultry feed production cost.
Speakers highlighted this while addressing a discussion titled ‘PoultryTechBangladesh hosts Feed Milling Workshop’ at a hotel at Gulshan in the capital on Wednesday night. Under the public-private partnership, PoultryTechBangladesh, Netherlands-based consultant firm Larive International, along with their co-implementor, LightCastle Partners jointly organized the event.
Van Aarsen, one of the consortium members of the PoultryTechBangladesh project and developer, manufacturer and supplier of state of the art machines and complete feed mill and premix plant solutions, mainly conducted the session.
On behalf of Van Aarsen International B.V, Roger Ubags, area sales manager for South East Asia, presented a keynote paper titled ‘Energy Capacity at Feed Mill’ at the discussion.
In the keynote, it was told that Van Aarsen has been working since 1949 for making a modern animal feed processing and manufacturing feed mill for providing quality and safe foods for poultry birds. There are 40 such feed mills in the world at the moment.
Dr. Rashed Mahmud, Research Manager of One Health Poultry Hub-Bangladesh, presented another paper.
The discussants mentioned several challenges in the poultry industry. These are: rise in price of poultry feeds recently, instability in prices of chicken and eggs, trouble in getting bank loans for marginal farmers, absence of incentive during crisis, and imposing more customs duty on import of raw materials.
Haruni Osman, Senior Policy Advisor, Food & Nutrition Security at Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh, Sara van Hoeve, First Secretary at Netherlands Embassy in Bangladesh, Matthias Brienen, Director of Larive International, Zahedul Amin, Director of LightCastle Partners, were present during the session.
