Despite its installed capacity of 240,000 birds per day, Cross River State governor, Ben Ayade, disclosed that the State-owned chicken processing factory, Calachika, has been hit by soaring demands ahead of the Christmas celebration.
Governor Ayade made this known while conducting the Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture Production and Services, Muntari Dandutse Mohammad, and Special Adviser to the Central Bank Governor on Development Finance, Anthony Ifechukwu round the factory.
Ayade said with a few days to Christmas, “we are doing 24 hours production because we are struggling to meet the demand and as you can see behind me, the production process is ongoing. We started producing from live birds brought on to the production line from our poultry to slaughter, which goes through the entire process until you have it fully bagged and sent to the blast freezer for storage.”
According to him, “we have massive orders from everywhere. We are currently processing for a particular state, most of which are for Christmas gifts.”
Recalling the stages leading up to the birth of the factory, the governor said: “I went round the world to do a compilation of the technology that reflects exactly what we need as a country and I discovered, sadly that we spend over N150bn every year importing frozen chickens.
“Under the Buhari administration, the focus is to crash the import of frozen chickens and Cross River State Government that owns this factory 100% has now invested massively in this sector.”
Speaking on the full poultry value chain and the attendant trickle-down effects, Ayade hinted: “What will happen is that the entire value chain of the poultry line will be fully done here. It will create jobs for those who are supplying us maize and soya beans to produce the feeds that will take us to the feed mill. It will take us also close to all the people who are supplying us the additives including the poultry farmers themselves who will be growing poultry for supplies to Calachika. So Calachika will become the main off-taker and will create a prosperity agenda across the state.”
Read also: Chicken shortage looms as poultry farmers shut down over high cost of feeds
The governor disclosed that “right now we have about 40000 people on the CBN/NIRSAL scheme. NIRSAL is coming together with Central Bank to support the farmers in an out-growers scheme where the farmers will have to take day-old chicks from us, feed them, using our own feeds and our formulations, bring back them to Calachika when ready for consumption. The factory will process and have them refrigerated in our 40ft containers for export.”
On the general outlook for both state and national economy, Ayade expressed optimism that “by the close of the second quarter of next year, Nigeria will be a net exporter of frozen chicken. And that is our ambition.
“Once we can achieve that, we would have helped in strengthening the naira and that is how we will gradually begin to stabilize this country. There is no way you can stabilize this country by depending on FDI alone because we have a complex macro and microeconomic climate.”
The Governor insisted that “it is only Agro-Industrialization that can actually bring true value. No matter how many jobs the oil industry creates, it cannot create beyond 5000 to 6000 because it is technology-driven. But poultry is manual and everywhere you turn, there is a huge human application in agro-industrialization because only through agro-Industrialization that you can combine technology with human beings.”
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