18/09/2014 – Kazakhstan to export mutton to Bahrain
ASTANA (TCA) — This year Kazakhstan will start exporting its mutton to Bahrain, said Kazakhstan’s national agricultural holding KazAgro.
“National holding KazAgro has established a new export destination for Kazakh sheep breeders. It is planned that this year the first batch of mutton from the Almaty and Zhambyl provinces will be shipped to Bahrain. Work is going on to start meat exports to Iran and China,” KazAgro said.
According to the holding, a delegation from Bahrain recently visited Kazakhstan with the purpose to study the animal health situation in Kazakhstan and to see whether the country’s sheep farms and meat processing enterprises meet the halal standards. During the visit specialists from Bahrain visited several sheep farms and meat processing factories in the Almaty and Zhambyl provinces in southern Kazakhstan, where they saw the conditions of sheep farming, the animal health situation, infrastructure, and the practice of sheep slaughter and meat storage. They also visited local pastures.
“Experts from Bahrain emphasized the ecologically perfect conditions for keeping and feeding the cattle. They also gave the highest estimation of the taste of Kazakh mutton,” KazAgro said in a statement.
At the initial stage Kazakhstan would ship live sheep to Bahrain, and later on it will export frozen meat.
KazAgro said that new sales markets it has opened for Kazakh agricultural producers should encourage them to increase production.
In the meantime, Dariga Nazarbayeva, deputy speaker of the Mazhilis (the lower house of Kazakhstan’s parliament), believes that Kazakhstan should export meat only after the saturation of the local market.
“We are talking about meat export while our import exceeds exports 16-fold. Why should we export meat? Does our country lack foreign exchange? What is the purpose [of meat export] if we have not saturated the market with domestic meat and have not solved the problem of the country’s food security,” Novosti-Kazakhstan quoted Nazarbayeva as saying in parliament on September 16.