FrieslandCampina partners 3 other international firms to boost local dairy production

Onome Amuge

Multinational milk manufacturer, FrieslandCampina WAMCO, has announced a strategic partnership with three international firms including; URUS, specialists in cattle breeding and global supplier of cow genetics; Barenbrug, renowned roughage producers; and Agrifirm, specialised in animal feed and organic farming; targeted at bolstering the development of Nigeria’s dairy sector.

The partnership, according to Ben Langat, managing director, FrieslandCampina WAMCO Nigeria PLC, will plan and act on the long-term requirements for a self-sufficient dairy chain in the country, formulate home grown methods and solutions to challenges which previously needed external intervention and help to bolster a sustainable and integrated dairy sector model.

“In FrieslandCampina WAMCO, our ambition is to jointly invest in local business models to enable the dairy sector to become self-sufficient and profitable throughout the entire chain and this will include building joint infrastructure, collaborative training of local farmers, investing in local production and leveraging each other’s knowledge and competencies,’’ he noted.

Langat added that the partners would on April 20 fully discuss their vision on how to accelerate dairy development in the country, and endorse this ambitious plan by signing the cooperation agreement.

Corroborating Langat’s statement, Jeroen Elfers, global director, Dairy Development and Milkstreams, FrieslandCampina, affirmed that only a sector with a return on investment in every part of the chain is capable of resolving the country’s dairy production challenges to actualise self-sufficiency in the long term.

The objective of the collaboration, he stressed, is an expansion of the companies’ willingness to key into the Central Bank of Nigeria’s backward integration directive to foreign milk manufacturers and help actualise  increased local production, boost capacity and improve local milk production  while also reducing Nigeria’s milk import expenditure which was estimated between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion annually.