With a combined capacity of 720,000 tonnes of poultry feed annually, Olam said its facilities directly address a significant supply gap for poultry meat in Nigeria, giving farmers and distributors access to high-quality feed and DOC at competitive prices. In addition, Olam’s team of field veterinarians will train up to 10,000 farmers a year in best poultry farming practices.
Given around 75% of poultry farming is managed by smallholders, Olam’s poultry initiatives have the potential to indirectly create 150,000 to 200,000 rural jobs for Nigerians as the entire sector is stimulated.
Olam estimates that poultry meat consumption among Nigerians could increase up to 10-fold by 2040, provided domestic supply can meet increased demand and based on prices becoming more affordable for Nigerians. This would require the poultry feed and DOC supply in Nigeria to grow at over 10% CAGR per year.
“Today we inaugurate the largest direct investment in Kaduna State in 10 years,” said Mallam Nasir Ahmad El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna State and chief host. “When I first met with Olam representatives in 2015 I knew it was a meeting of minds. The company made a commitment to invest further in Nigeria and the fact that we stand here today shows it is a reality. This facility will help us on the road to economic diversification and food security as well as producing thousands of direct and indirect jobs. Olam’s investment will create an industrial agri-hub to incentivize our farmers to produce more by providing good products and support, quality control and access to domestic and global markets.”
In Kwara State, Olam’s new fish feed manufacturing facility will boost feed supply to help meet rising demand in Nigeria for fish – currently 2 million tonnes per year.
Olam said the future fish consumption faces supply challenges of overfishing, water pollution and global warming. Production from natural habitats is expected to stagnate or even come down.
Fish-farming is therefore essential to meet the supply gap and reduce the need for imports – currently almost 700,000 tonnes to 800,000 tonnes of fish and marine products are imported annually, resulting in a foreign exchange outflow in excess of $1 billion.
One of the barriers to increasing production is readily available, affordable and good quality floating fish feed – it currently accounts for over 70% of the local farmers’ production costs. The Kwara mill has an initial capacity of 75,000 tonnes of fish feed per year that can be further scaled up.
Olam estimates that its local sourcing of raw materials such as soybeans, corn and cassava for its animal feed operations will positively impact more than 300,000 smallholder crop farmers. The company is specifically focusing on boosting the productivity of soybeans in Nigeria, currently at below 1 tonne per hectare, versus 3 tonnes to 3.5 tonnes per hectare in Brazil and the United States. To this end, Olam is collaborating with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan to supply farmers with high-yielding soy seeds.
In another effort, Olam has created internships for around 100 veterinary, aquaculture and agronomy graduates who will receive hands-on learning opportunities at the company’s facilities over a two-year period.
“We thank the governors of Kaduna and Kwara States for supporting our projects,” said KC Suresh, Olam’s managing director and chief executive officer for Grains. “Our world-class facilities will provide high-quality, cost-effective products that will help farmers and rural Nigerians to prosper. In the same way that Olam Grains has built a highly successful wheat milling footprint across Africa, we will be looking to scale our animal feed operations, both in and beyond Nigeria.”
