China aids Tonga in sourcing animal feed
The Governor of the Shaanxi Province in central China, Yuan Chunqing is currently in Tonga at the invitation of Tonga’s Prime Minister Dr Feleti Sevele to explore the possibility of producing animal feed for Tongan livestock, including pigs, chicken and ducks.
Governor Chunqing told the Tongan Press that one important objective of their
trip was to see how they could assist Tonga in processing their own animal feed
by making it from local resources such as taro, sweet potato and
tapioca.
“I personally believe your locally produced potato and taro can
become very good animal feed that can be processed for local farms. And I feel
confident in this cooperation and sincerely hope it will be successful in the
future,” he said.
The Governor said Shaanxi is a province strong in its
livestock industry with a yearly yield of 10 million pigs. “We also have very
good technology in the pig breeding farm and China’s one and only agriculture
high tech demonstration zone is located in the province.
“We had a very
good discussion with the Prime Minister and when I go back to China I would send
a small group of technicians to explore the way of how we can conduct the
assistance in this field,” he said.
Imported feed
Prime
Minister Sevele told the visitors, “One of our problems is that we cannot
produce our own animal feed so we tend to rely mainly on feed from overseas,
this is evident in our poultry industry and their feed is mainly bought from New
Zealand.”
“Tonga spends over $20 million on the importation of meat
products every year, if we can save half of that in terms of our foreign
exchange we can put money back to the producers who are producing local meat so
assistance in this area is a huge potential for Tonga,” he added.
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