Luanda – Angolan head of State João Lourenço Thursday encouraged Angolan and foreign businessmen to maintain their focus on food production in the country, with a view to offsetting the high costs of import.
The President of Republic stressed the importance of food production at the end of the inauguration of a Meat Products Factory, called “Quinta de Jugais”.
He underlined that businessmen who invest in the country must also invest in agricultural production and thus boost industrial production.
According to João Lourenço, there must be a correspondence between what is produced in the countryside and what is transformed in the industry.
He warned that units such as the recently opened one can only survive if they have the product locally to transform, otherwise they will continue to import or go bankrupt.
Cattle from Chad
Joao Lourenço stated that the process of receiving cattle from Chad will continue, but under different conditions.
“As soon as the agriculture sector justifies that the time has come to resume, the process will continue,” he clarified.
Angola received from Chad, as of December 2020 to June 2021, around 1,900 head of cattle.
Despite the fact that most of the animals died, in the Planalto de Camabatela, Cuanza Norte province, the Head of State denied that the causes were linked to the lack of adaptation to the climate and terrain.
He said that “African cattle” are much more likely to survive in Angola and what happened, perhaps, was that the beneficiaries were not, at the time, sufficiently prepared to receive the animals.
He said that Angola needs to repopulate livestock, specifically cattle and make the country self-sufficient in meat production.
Tannery Industry
Finally, he appealed to private investors, national and foreign, to start thinking about the tannery industry, because in cattle everything must be taken advantage of.
“We are wasting the skins of these animals, which is bad for the environment and an important resource is lost,” he concluded.
Located in the Luanda-Bengo Special Economic Zone (ZEE), in Viana, on the outskirts of the Angolan capital, the unit aims to produce cold cuts, based on the processing of pork and poultry.
In a first phase, the factory, under Angolan law, will produce to fill the availability of consumption of this category of products by consumers in the Angolan market, currently largely supplied by imports.
With an installed meat processing capacity of 800 tonnes per month, the unit will invest, at a later stage, in exporting its products to neighbouring countries.
Source: Angola Press News Agency