Win Resources, a Portuguese-owned company, plans to diversify its
investments in Mozambique by focusing on grain production in the Chokwé
district of Gaza province, said the company’s chairman.
According to Davide Freitas, the company plans initially to invest 1
million euros to explore an area of 100 hectares in the first year and
increasing to 1,000 hectares by 2018.
Feeding candy to cows has become a more popular practice
in tandem with the rising price of corn, which has doubled since 2009. While corn goes for about $315 a ton, ice-cream sprinkles
can be had for as little as $160 a ton.
“As the price of corn has climbed, farmers either sold off their pigs
and cattle, or they found alternative feeds,” said Mike Yoder, a dairy
farmer in Middlebury, Indiana, USA. He feeds his 400 cows bits of candy, hot
chocolate mix, crumbled cookies, breakfast cereal, trail mix, dried
cranberries, orange peelings and ice cream sprinkles, which are blended
into more traditional forms of feed, like hay.
It’s a long way from southern Brazil to Western Canada.
But it was a lot easier for farmer representative Hamilton Guterres
Jardim and a group of Brazilian government officials to travel to
Winnipeg than it would have been for them to ship their own wheat to
northern parts of their own country.
“The roads are not fit and the railways are practically
non-existent,” Jardim said in an interview during a course at the
Canadian International Grains Institute.
“For us to place our wheat in the north, north-east, with Brazilian
flagged ships (that are) old, obsolete, with a high transportation cost,
it is more viable to bring wheat from the U.S. with modern vessels.”
Flag-map of Mozambique (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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