PHOTO | DIANA NGILA MEA Limited executive director Titus Gitau (left)
with MD Eustace Muriuki and Fertiplant Engineering Company Limited
director Sanjeev Doshi at the signing ceremony in Nairobi.
NATION MEDIA GROUP
A local fertiliser company has entered
into two separate deals that could bring down the cost of the farm
input by 20 per cent and boost farming.
MEA Limited has, in the first arrangement, signed an agreement with an Indian engineering firm, Fertiplant, to construct a fertiliser factory in Nakuru by mid next year.
The Sh1.4 billion deal is expected to be East Africa’s first NPK fertiliser steam granulation plant that will quadruple MEA’s capacity.
NPK is a highly complex mineral fertiliser used by farmers as either the main input or extra-nutrition for vegetables, legumes, wheat, barley, and maize.
Speaking during the signing of the deal, MEA Ltd executive director Titus Gitau termed the deal a game changer in the fertiliser industry.
“The new plant will enable us to produce up to 100,000 tonnes of NPK fertiliser annually,” said Mr Gitau.
The
factory, expected to begin operations in 2015, is scalable to between
150,000 tonnes and 200,000 tonnes, depending on demand.
It will enable MEA to blend, heat, and rapidly cool the mix and output it as a single granule different from the current facilities where the various inputs remain distinct. It plans to produce 20 blends.
Currently, there only blending plants in the country are that of MEA and Athi River Mining.
In the second deal, Mr Gitau said the firm would sign a memorandum of understanding with the China National Chemical Engineering Company (CNCEC) in late September to design and construct the first nitrogenous fertiliser factory in Kenya.
The second plant will deal exclusively in producing the calcium ammonium nitrate CAN type of fertiliser mainly used for top dressing.
Mr Gitau admitted MEA’s inability to venture into production of diammonium phosphate (DAP) due to lack of good quality rock phosphate in Kenya.
Farmers stand to be the biggest gainers as locally produced fertilisers are bound to be cheaper and more easily accessible.
The government has in the past funded the now struggling National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) to import the farm input in bulk to cushion maize farmers against the high cost of the commodity.
The initiative has, however, been affected this year following the attachment of NCPB bank accounts over a Sh500 million court award to a supplier. The outcome of the case has a bearing on farming.
The Kenya Tea Development Authority also imports fertiliser on behalf of its approximately 560,000 tea farmers, which enables them to enjoy cost benefits due to the quantity purchases.
The country has been hunting for a partner to invest in a fertiliser plant, with the recent visit to Russia by President Uhuru Kenyatta focusing on the venture. An attempt to set up a government plant collapsed in the 1980s when the KenRen project failed to take off.
REDUCING FERTILIZER COST
There
have been plans to set up a fertiliser plant in Mombasa and a
bio-fertiliser factory in western Kenya as part of the government’s
objective of reducing its cost.
Earlier in the year, Kisumu-based Spectre International announced that it had started pilot production of artificial fertilisers as it sought to diversify from ethanol due to reduced availability of molasses, a key raw material.
The industrial spirit and alcohol maker said it had the capacity to produce 40 tonnes of fertiliser daily at optimal level from the solid residue that remain after fermentation.
Kenya’s annual fertiliser consumption stands at 500,000 tonnes, with imports contributing a larger share, making the farm input unaffordable to many farmers.
Last year, the government spent Sh20.2 billion on importing chemical fertiliser but MEA hopes to reverse this trend by the end of 2014, when all the two plants are expected to be up and running.
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