09 Dec 2021

Botswana Meat Commission (BMC) has potential to make big profit from its cannery products should it automize its cannery to improve efficiency and rebranding associated products.

Giving an update on the state of BMC during Lobatse town full council virtual meeting on Tuesday, the assistant minister of Agriculture and Food Security Ms Beauty Manake said other companies in the region have surpassed BMC as it continued to operate a manual cannery which hindered it from reaping full value from the associated products.

“The opportunity that we have identified is the cannery.

What we are currently making out of the European market with the hind quarters, which are the best cuts, is almost the same as what we are capable of doing with the cannery (products) which are made with the so called low quality meat.

But the cannery that we have at BMC right now is mostly manual, which means that there is a lot of work that you actually have to do to have a product actually go to the market,” Ms Manake said.

She further said statistics showed that if exported to European countries, products from the BMC cannery could fetch almost the same amount of money as high quality meat exports.

Ms Manake noted that government believed a lot could still be derived from BMC because of the beef market that it commands in Europe.

“Profitability of BMC can shoot up overnight if it can invest in automizing of the cannery and unbundle some of the activities so that the private sector could partner with government and be able to utilize some of the activities that are there (cannery),” she said.

The minister said if improvements were to be made in that regard, BMC could be in a position to re-package and export its Ecco pet food products to the United Kingdom where the industry was worth billions of Pula annually. She said those were priorities the ministry would look at in their quest to revitalize BMC.

She said an efficient and fully functional BMC was important to achieving Priority Number Four of the government Reset Agenda, which talks about value chain development of the food sector.

“When we talk about the value chain development we focus on what we have capacity and potential on.

Currently what we have potential on is the beef industry and we have to actually strengthen the value chain, the upstream activities, and ensure that they consistently support the downstream activities which are on the processing,” she said

The minister further told councillors that the ministry was working on appointing a substantive chief executive officer for the BMC very soon.

The organization has not had a substantive CEO for over two years now.    

Lobatse deputy mayor and Maokaneng ward councillor Ms Tiny Dinoko, expressed concern that the export of live cattle had affected supply of cattle to BMC.

Ms Dinoko said BMC now slaughters about 100 cattle per week compared to the 600 cattle per day as it was in the past.

She said that had also resulted in BMC products dwindling from retail shop shelves.

In response, Ms Manake said the ministry was looking at ways to make BMC more efficient so that farmers could have confidence to sell their cattle to the abattoir.

She said BMC was not getting enough cattle supply from farmers even before the export of live cattle and had to actually rely on government bailouts to survive. ENDS