Lower demand for livestock and poultry products could cause animal feed production to decline by 10 per cent to around 4.9 million tonnes (MT), according to Business Mirror of the Philippines.

Business is so slow that an industry source disclosed that feed distributors are already resorting to a number of marketing gimmicks and promos just to keep their businesses afloat.

"Sales have been really slow. There was a big drop in the demand for poultry and livestock products, and this discouraged hog and poultry raisers from increasing their production," one source disclosed.

Because of the lacklustre performance of the livestock and poultry sectors – the main customers of feed millers – the industry source disclosed that they may no longer increase their imports of feed wheat, an alternative material to yellow corn.

This, despite the expected drop in corn production for the rest of 2010 because of the impact of the El Niño weather phenomenon.

For 2010, corn farmers from Philippine Maize Federation (Philmaize) projected that their sector would produce only 6.8MT of maize, half-a-million tons lower than the 7.3MT targeted by the government for 2010.

Last year, feed millers shipped around 1.1MT of feed wheat into the country. To date, industry figures show that more than 500,000 tonnes of feed wheat have already arrived in the Philippines. A total of 844,000 tonnes of feed wheat is expected to arrive in the country until October.

The feed wheat were imported mainly from the Ukraine, Romania, Brazil and Romania.

A report earlier revealed that animal feed production in the Philippines declined by 26 per cent to 5.5 million in 2009 owing to the sharp decline in pig and poultry production.

The source told Business Mirror: "Hog raisers were telling us that demand [for pork products] dropped by about 40 per cent this year."

Figures released by the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) showed that hog production increased minimally at 0.35 percent year-on-year.

According to the BAS report, 'This slowdown was manifested in the lower stocks of fatteners and tight supply of piglets as observed in Cagayan Valley, Central Luzon and Calabarzon.'