CNI News
21 Jan 2023
As Myanmar is an agricultural country, it is necessary to produce sufficiently at home, according to farmers.
As the country has not been able to produce enough fertilizer at home, it has to import it from other countries, forcing farmers to spend large sums of money for inputs. As a result, if the county can produce enough fertilizer at home, farmers will be able to save cultivation costs, Chairman U Thein Aung of the Development of Farmers Association told the CNI.
He said, "Fertilizer produced at home costs only MMK 40,000 per bag while exported fertilizer costs as much as MMK 100,000 per bag. If sufficient fertilizer can be manufactured at home, input costs of farmers can be reduced. Fertilizer use efficiency is not so different but we can use two and a half bags of domestic fertilizer at the cost of one bag of imported fertilizer. So, cultivation costs will decrease significantly."
Farmers in a paddy field.
Myanmar mainly imported fertilizer from Thailand and China while it is also smuggled into Myanmar from Bangladesh.
Although there are five fertilizer factories under the Myanmar Petrochemical Industry, No (4) Fertilizer Factory (Myaungdagar) and No (5) Fertilizer Factory (Kangyidaunt) are producing fertilizer under MPE brand.
The two factories can produce 700 tons of fertilizer a day but the remaining three factories have to suspend their operations due to shortages of natural gas.
In the past, domestic fertilizer cannot be stored for a long time because of the defects in the packaging system but the packages of fertilizer have improved recently, according to farmers.
However, they have to use imported fertilizer as there is no domestic fertilizer in shops, U Aung Kyaw Mya, a farmer in Kyauktaw in Rakhine State, told the CNI.
He told the CNI, "We can use domestic fertilizer if it contains 46 percent of urea. However, it is not available in the government. I think it is available only for government departments. So, we are forced to use imported ones."
A fertilizer factory.
Myanmar grows 15 million acres of monsoon paddy and three million acres of summer paddy, totaling 18 million acres of paddy and it is necessary to use three bags of urea, T-super and potash or compound fertilizer to harvest 100 baskets of paddy per acre.
Myanmar needs 2.7 million tons of fertilizer per year only for paddy and another 3 million tons of fertilizer for other crops including pulses and beans and oil crops, according to studies of the Agriculture Department.
According to a survey of fertilizer prices in other countries, fertilizer prices in Myanmar are higher than other countries at US$ 445 per ton while fertilizer prices stand at US$ 410 per ton in Cambodia, US$ 400 in Thailand and US$ 380 in Vietnam.
