AFFORDABLE food security and increased foreign currency income can be had by strengthening the links between paddy and cooking oil crops on the one hand, and the livestock and fisheries sectors on the other, food supply experts say.

About 80 percent of the investment in livestock and fisheries comes from the profits from rice and cooking oil crops.

Simply, if there are more plantations, greater quantities of paddy and cooking oil will be produced. This in turn will cause prices to fall, while allowing more of the crop to be exported, thus bringing in more foreign exchange.

This is the message from a number of senior figures within the relevant and interconnected industries.

One of these is U Win Kyaing, secretary of the Myanmar Fisheries Federation, who warned that when feed prices are high, farmers struggle to make ends meet. However, this is not the case now, which is helping to rehabilitate an industry still reeling from Cyclone Nargis.

He called for increased cooperation between the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation and the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, especially in conducting joint needs assessments to guarantee that both sides benefit.

Dairy Cattle Farmers and Milk and Milk Products Sellers Association secretary Dr Khin Hlaing disagreed and said it’s not that simple: “Animals don’t like to have their diets changed overnight.”

The senior agricultural planning official agreed that there should be more cooperation and dialogue between the two ministries but said all the information about crops and yields are available.

“I admit that we do not do any cooperative assessments as yet but we do ensure that information about what crops our members are growing and how much has been planted is available to the other ministries.

“For oil crops it’s safe to assume that the amount of land used to grow these crops is always increasing. For instance, peanut and sesame plantations increased by about 300,000 acres from the 2006-07 to 2007-08.

U Khin Soe, president of the Livestock Feed Association, highlighted the importance of increasing oil crop yields.

“Myanmar consumes 600,000 tonnes of cooking oil a year. But we also import 300,000 tonnes of palm oil, which is a waste of foreign currency,” he said, adding that there are additional benefits for farmers from increasing yields.

“If bean and sesame cultivation were increased, we would get one and half tonnes of by-product for every tonne of cooking oil we produced.

“That would be healthier for the general population because they wouldn’t be consuming so much unhealthy palm oil and would keep the prices of cooking oils, fisheries and livestock products lower; it would also save foreign currency.”

This is because the by-products – broken rice and rice bran from grinding paddy, and peanut or sesame oil cake from grinding oil crops – are used to make feed for fish and livestock. Other sources of animal feed are bean powder, soya beans, mustard cake and so on.

“The industry is spending about K100 billion for feedstuff a year,” said U Khin Soe. But if more were produced, once enough had been set aside to meet domestic demand, the rest could be exported.

“Rice by-products are selling cheaply now. The less farmers have to pay for feed for fish and animals, the more they can produce their goods at a reasonable price and keep a decent slice of the profits. So our population can have low-cost rice, cooking oil, chicken, pork, fish and eggs.”