Stefanus Nashama
The Meat Corporation of Namibia (Meatco) has appealed for policy interventions to rescue the state-owned entity that has been grappling with a massive fall in its market share in recent years due to the underutilisation of its abattoirs.
Meatco’s Chief Executive Officer, Mwilima Mushokobanji revealed this to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Economics and Public Administration on Wednesday, during a consultative meeting with Meatco management.
He said the meeting was aimed at informing the committee on the operations of the company, progress made so far, and challenges the company faced in the gone times.
Mushokobanji observed that although Namibia had enough cattle, Meatco was currently operating at a loss because its abattoirs were not fully utilized owing to an increasing number of live animal exports, more especially to neighbouring South Africa.
He said that apart from the non-availability of low-cost feed, high producer prices as a result of drought and high operational costs and animal disease outbreaks among many other, the company face many other impeding factors.
He also explained that Meatco currently only has a mere 15 percent of the market share, with 58 percent enjoyed by the live export market, and the remaining 27 percent is occupied by private entities such as Beefcor and others.
“To sustain Meatco, we need to slaughter 66 000 cattle to break even. We have the Windhoek abattoir here which can slaughter over 120 000 cattle annually, but for the past two years, we have only slaughtered about 33 000. We export over 200 000 cattle on hoof to South Africa,” Mushokobanji stressed.
According to him, the Okahandja abattoir closed about five years ago due to throughput challenges. Oshakati is currently closed, Rundu will only open now while Katima is operational but there is a need to have over 2.5 million cattle in the country.
“We are not saying we should close the borders but what we are proposing is that policy intervention should be in place to regulate the market process,” he stated.
Meatco has also urged for the review of the cabinet decision of 2010 on the allocation and utilization of the Norwegian beef quota to align with strategic national development priorities, control the exportation of live animals to South Africa to increase the availability of slaughtered cattle, avail of government farms for breeding of weaners, market access for Northern Communal Areas (NCAs) A livestock and budget support towards Meatco’s operations.
Meatco’s pleading for policy intervention and review of the 2010 Cabinet decision follows a petition received by the National Assembly in 2022, which was lodged by a civic organization known as Lisha Empowerment and Development, which called for the urgent revival of the market for livestock in the NCAs.
