Thursday, August 07, 2008
DHAKA: Bangladesh has hiked the export, price of maize to $600 per tonne to price the grain out of international markets and ensure its availability for domestic poultry feed, a senior government official said on Wednesday.
Bangladesh’s poultry farms are trying to revive after bird flu crippled the industry over the past year. No fresh outbreak of the deadly H5N1 strain has been detected since April this year.
The export price move came after poultry feed producers, the main consumers, had demanded the ban in the wake of rising prices in local market.
Traders had started exporting maize, the main ingredient for poultry feed, to Malaysia and Indonesia, at around $128.40 a tonne.
“We have taken the decision to restrict exports and keep a stable local market,” C S Karim, an adviser to the interim government, told Reuters.
Bangladesh produced nearly 2.3 million tonnes of maize in the 2007-08 fiscal year (July-June) compared to 1.2 million tonnes in the previous year, the officials said.
Bangladesh’s $750 million poultry industry comprising 150,000 farms, had been severely hit after bird flu spread for months across the impoverished south Asian country.
The H5N1 virus was first detected in Bangladesh in March last year and since then the avian influenza spread through 47 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, forcing authorities to cull around 2 million chickens and destroy more than 2 million eggs.
It caused a loss of about 45 billion taka ($650 million) for the growing poultry sector, which accounts for 1.6 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. The News
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