Goodman Fielder International (GFI), after establishing its new feed mill in Lae city, now calls on the government to establish a corn industry in the country because of the potential it will have with regards to manufacturing feeds locally for commercially farmed animals. The GFI Managing Director, Mr. Sun Xing Tao made this call during the visit of the Minister for International Trade and Investment, Richard Maru and the National Agriculture Research Institute (NARI) team to GFI’s new feed mill at 11mile in Lae city on Tuesday 05th March. “With our new USD200 million worth world-class feed mills, we can produce chicken and pig feed as good as anywhere in the world depending on what the farmers want,” said the GFI Managing Director. “Right now, we are importing wheat as our basic ingredient for feed; however, our big challenge is that we wait for over a month for our order to arrive and it is very expensive because of the declining value of the Kina.” He said GFI is willing to substitute to a corn-based diet and buy all the corn that local farmers can produce so to reduce imports of wheat for feed, but this can be achieved only with the input of the National Government. “The Government must support us by establishing a commercial corn industry, so we can fully utilize our feed mill whose current under-utilized capacity is around 6, 000 metric tons per month (72, 000 metric tons per year), which is more than enough to replace all importation of poultry feed,” said Mr. Sun.” Meanwhile, much to the delight of GFI, Minister Maru encouraged GFI to negotiate a Memorendum of Understanding (MoU) with NARI to go into large-scale commercial corn faming to supply feed to GFI feed mill. “PNG imported over 49, 000 metric tons of feed last year,” the minister revealed. “We have to stop importing by going into large-scale commercial corn farming so we can stop spending over K70 million annually to import feed alone- this money should be going into our people’s pockets.” “The market and the capacity are already here but we are not producing. Once we start using local feed, we will ban all the imports of feed so we can support the local industry,” added Minister Maru.