THE Tanzania Trade Development Authority (TANTRADE) has vowed to support local meat processing firms win more foreign markets, with the Mwanza based Chobo Investments Ltd taking the lead to secure potential business deals in the Middle East.
The revelation was made by TANTRADE Acting Director General, Mr Edwin Rutageruka, while visiting the company’s plant in Misungwi District, saying there was a big demand of the Tanzanian meat in Vietnam, Egypt, and Comoro among others where already they have signed a deal.
Mr Rutageruka said the opportunities for Tanzania to export meat have increased, and called for massive investment in the industry as shown by the Mwanza based local company, which has installed state of the art slaughtering and meat processing machines in the area that meet international standards.
“For many years we have been undertaking slaughtering and meat processing with local standards that could not attract potential foreign markets. But with the investment I have seen here, we are now capable of winning potential markets abroad and benefit economically ,” he said.
According to Mr Rutageruka, the availability of the meat market in Vietnam was declared recently by the Minister of Trade, Marketing and Investments, Mr Charles Mwijage after a visit he made into the country.
He said the country was proud of having local investors like Chobo Company whose plant is installed with modern equipment, and called upon the company management to make sure the plant passes all standardisation tests and obtain International Standards Organisation (ISO) certification to be able to trade more efficiently.
On that crucial requirement, Mr Rutageruka asked for the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) and the Tanzania Food and Drugs Regulatory Authority (TFDA) to make regular visits to the plant and provide consultations on how best it can pass and obtain ISO accreditation.
In another development, the TANTRADE boss challenged local tourist hotels operating in the country to enter into business agreement with Chobo Investment, instead of importing meat from outside the country, which has almost the same standards or at times below what is produced by the local firm.
On his side, Chobo Investment Operations Manager, Mr Charles Hotay said his company with the capacity to slaughter 600 Cattle, 900 Sheep and goats of the same number a day, was now eying international markets come early next year.
Without going into details, he said the company has already secured a preliminary deal to supply 250 tons of meat to one of the countries in the Middle East, besides the new markets of Dubai, Egypt and Kuwait.
According to Mr Hotay, he cited some mining companies reducing their demand of meat from 8 tones that they used to order, to slightly a ton per month, something that was forcing them to look for alternative to survive in business.
Of late Tanzania has 25 meat processing plants with further records indicating that in 2015/2016 they produced 648,810 tons that included 319,112 Cattle meat, 129,292 Sheep and Goat meat, and 91,451 pork meat as well as 104,292 as poultry meat.
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