USSEC recently conducted a soy supply workshop in Myanmar.  Deputy Southeast Asia Regional Director Timothy Loh; USSEC Myanmar Local Aquaculture Coordinator May Myat Noe Lwin; and Philippines Country Manager Ted Cortes organized and hosted the workshop in Yangon for a group of sixteen participants representing eight key companies in the Burmese livestock and aquaculture feed industry.  Accompanying the USSEC team was Peter Chen, Vice President of the Bounty Group of Companies in the Philippines and leader of the country’s largest commodity feed ingredients purchasing organization, the Import Group.  Bounty is the second largest poultry producer in the Philippines, producing 500,000 broilers per day.  They are also a major importer of U.S. soybean meal.  Mr. Chen’s role on the team was to explain how a consortium that purchases feed ingredients is formed and the advantages it offers to its members.  The Import Group started with an initial import volume of 500 metric tons of U.S. soybean meal.  The group now consists of over twenty members and imports several hundred thousand metric tons annually of corn, feed wheat and soybean meal and has built its own dedicated PANAMAX bulk grain handling facility at Subic Bay.
As Myanmar emerges as a new and developing economy, there are many lessons that it can learn from the experience of the feed and livestock industry in neighboring countries.  At the current level of production, a major challenge has been the ability to take advantage of the economies of scale that purchasing in bulk has to offer.  Myanmar currently imports soybean meal in small quantities from nearby countries, primarily India.  The U.S. soy supply workshop gave the participants a better understanding, of not only the benefits of U. S soybean meal quality, but the advantages of buying U.S soybean meal as a coordinated group.
Myanmar imported its first 6,000 metric tons of soybean meal in 2013 as a result of a buyer mission USSEC organized to the U.S. last September.  The goal is to grow Myanmar’s aquaculture industry and its relationship with the U.S. over time as the country’s industry develops and grows from its small, yet emerging, base.