An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Trade and In­vest­ment Paula Gopee-Scoon says 88 non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies in­vest­ed ap­prox­i­mate­ly $2.27 bil­lion in their ex­ist­ing op­er­a­tions and cre­at­ed over 1,800 ad­di­tion­al jobs.

Gopee-Scoon made this com­ment dur­ing the sod-turn­ing cer­e­mo­ny on Tues­day to mark the be­gin­ning of con­struc­tion of the Nu­trim­ix Group's an­i­mal and pet food plant. She de­scribed the plant as a true rep­re­sen­ta­tion of strate­gic and suc­cess­ful di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.

She said Nu­trim­ix’s bold step in back­ward in­te­gra­tion with­in the agri­cul­tur­al val­ue chain is need­ed as T&T seeks to achieve greater food se­cu­ri­ty and the goals es­tab­lished by Cari­com un­der the 25 by 25 ini­tia­tive.

The Min­is­ter not­ed that over the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 2020 - De­cem­ber 2024, T&T im­port­ed an es­ti­mat­ed 302 mil­lion kilo­grams worth of an­i­mal feed at a val­ue of $1.3 bil­lion. In con­trast, the coun­try has ex­port­ed 13 mil­lion kilo­grams of an­i­mal feed at a val­ue of $60 mil­lion.

“This fig­ure ex­cludes dog/cat food and bird seeds. Look­ing at the ex­port po­ten­tial, the glob­al im­port mar­ket for an­i­mal feed ex­pe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant growth from $17.91 bil­lion in 2020 to a peak of $22.79 bil­lion in 2022, be­fore slight­ly de­clin­ing to $20.78 bil­lion in 2023,” she out­lined.

The top im­porters in 2023 Gopee-Scoon were Bel­gium ($997 mil­lion), Ger­many ($953 mil­lion), and the Nether­lands ($911 mil­lion), re­flect­ing strong de­mand in Eu­ro­pean mar­kets, while the Unit­ed States ($894 mil­lion) re­mains a key non-Eu­ro­pean im­porter.

For T&T, she not­ed the mar­kets with the great­est ex­port po­ten­tial for an­i­mal feed are the Unit­ed States, Bar­ba­dos, and Saint Lu­cia.

Gopee-Scoon in­di­cat­ed that this coun­try has al­so tra­di­tion­al­ly been a net im­porter of pet food and no­tably, over the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 2020 - De­cem­ber 2024, a to­tal of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 mil­lion kilo­grams of pet food was im­port­ed at a val­ue of $523 mil­lion. At the same time, 639,000 kilo­grams were ex­port­ed at a val­ue of $8.3 mil­lion.

The min­is­ter point­ed out that the glob­al pet food mar­ket was val­ued at US$126.6 Bil­lion in 2024 pre­sent­ing an op­por­tu­ni­ty for en­ter­ing the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket­place and earn­ing for­eign ex­change.

She said that the Unit­ed States, Pana­ma, and Chile are the top three great­est ex­port po­ten­tial mar­kets. Be­yond the top three, oth­er high-po­ten­tial mar­kets close to us in­clude Guyana, Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, Be­lize, Saint Lu­cia, Cos­ta Ri­ca, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, Colom­bia, Ger­many, France, Chi­na, the UK, and Mex­i­co.

Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of the Nu­trim­ix Group of Com­pa­nies, Ron­nie Mo­hammed, re­vealed that with the in­vest­ment of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $150 mil­lion, the state-of-the-art an­i­mal and pet food plant will in­clude two pel­letised lines for feeds, pro­duc­ing 20 tonnes per hour with ex­tru­sion lines up to 5 tonnes per hour: yield­ing greater ef­fi­cien­cy and high­er qual­i­ty out­put. Such out­put will con­tribute both to im­port sub­sti­tu­tion and greater food se­cu­ri­ty lo­cal­ly and re­gion­al­ly.