East Africa: EAC, Comesa Move to Harmonise Dairy Standards

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East African Business Week (Kampala)

23 August 2008
Posted to the web 25 August 2008

Phillip Nabyama
Kampala

The East African Community (EAC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) are fast tracking procedure to allow for harmonisation of dairy standards across the two trade blocs.

This implies that players in the lucrative dairy sector by year's end will have seamless access to the big markets if they pass the stipulated minimum standards.

For example, a certificate from the Uganda Bureau of Standards (UBOS) on any of the accepted dairy products will be honoured in any of the respective COMESA- EAC countries.

Sources involved in the process told East African Business Week that when the EAC council of ministers meets next month, top on the agenda will be the adoption of harmonised dairy standards that have gone through a tiring consultative process.

These harmonised standards will then be processed for final adoption through the respective procedures of the EAC and COMESA up to national adoption and incorporation into national standards regulations.

Back in early October 2007, a regional consultative meeting on harmonisation of dairy standards was held at the COMESA Secretariat in Lusaka, Zambia under the auspices of COMESA with the participation of the EAC Secretariat.

The meeting involved stakeholders from the dairy industry in the region, notably, national bureaus of standards, dairy regulators and dairy industry players.Milk production in the EAC and the COMESA region is currently estimated at only 12 million metric tonnes per annum while demand is at least 14 million tonnes and growing at about 4% every year.

There was an earlier decision of the COMESA SQA (Standardization and Quality Assurance) committee made at a December 2006 meeting in Nairobi, Kenya that COMESA and the EAC should come up with common regionally harmonised dairy standards that would facilitate open regional trade in dairy products based on East African Standards (EAS).

The Eastern and Southern African Dairy Association (ESADA), a private sector organisation founded in October 2004 to promote member interests at both local and international levels and is geared towards facilitating more import trade of dairy products from member countries has been heavily involved in the harmonisation.

Among its members is Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, Burundi, Ethiopia and South Africa Negotiations are ongoing to admit DR Congo, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

With a global shortage of about 2 trillion litres of milk, available statistics show that processors in ESADA operate at an average of 40% of installed capacity. These further paint a grim picture that about 90% of the dairy products available in the local stores around the region are imported from the European Union and North America.

Statistics aside, dairy players in Uganda through the Uganda Dairy Processors Association (UDPA) are elated at the initiative to harmonise standards.

Mr. Tom Oming, the UDPA chair and also president of ESADA told a press conference in Kampala last week to update the media about the 4th African Dairy Conference and Exhibition held in Kenya between 6 and 8 August that the major dairy products like butter, fresh and cultured milk were okayed for harmonisation while ghee, ice cream, yoghurt and cheese are still in consideration owing to the complexity created by their numerous varieties.

Although Uganda processes 10% of its milk (annual production of about 1billion litres), according to Oming, the country stood a better chance at dairy production because of its good weather. Kenya processes about 80% of its 3billion litres of milk.

However the challenge for Uganda (1 million litres of milk at farm level goes to waste each day) to better rip from this harmonisation is to develop a more efficient infrastructure that can give the country a competitive edge.

"We need efficient infrastructure to pick milk from farms to the factories and then to the airport for delivery to various destinations. The supply capacity must be constant," Mr. Gideon Badagawa, the Uganda Manufacturers Association (UMA) executive director told East African Business Week.

"In case we work on our infrastructure and supply capacity side, we could be able to even double capacity to 20% of processed milk," Badagawa said.

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