Philippine animal feed production to decline by 10%

Animal feed production in the Philippines could go down to around 4.9 million tonnes due to lower demand for livestock and poultry products.

Business is so slow that an industry analyst disclosed that feed distributors are already resorting to a number of marketing promotions just to keep their businesses afloat.

Because of the lacklustre performance of the livestock and poultry subsector, the main customers of feed millers, the analyst said that they may no longer increase their importation of feed wheat, an alternative material to yellow corn.

For 2010, corn farmers from Philippine Maize Federation (Philmaize) projected that their sector would produce only 6.8 million tonnes of corn, half a million tonnes lower than the 2010 government target of 7.3 million tonnes.

Last year, feed millers shipped around 1.1 million tonnes of feed wheat into the country. To date, industry figures show that more than 500,000 million tonnes of feed wheat have already arrived in the Philippines. A total of 844,000 million tonnes of feed wheat is expected to arrive in the country until October.

The feed wheat was imported mainly from the Ukraine, Brazil and Romania.

A report earlier revealed that animal feed production in the Philippines declined by 26% to 5.5 million in 2009 owing to the sharp decline in hog and poultry production. ''Hog raisers were telling us that demand [for pork products] dropped by about 40% this year,'' the analyst said.

Figures released by the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) showed that hog production increased minimally at 0.35% on-year. ''This slowdown was manifested in the lower stocks of fatteners and tight supply of piglets as observed in Cagayan Valley, Central Luzon and Calabarzon,'' said BAS in its report.