Wheat Grain Imports Replace Wheat Flour in Angola
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Angola’s Wheat milling capacity has been expanding since 2017, with the opening of the first Wheat mill by Grandes Moagens de Angola (GMA). The facility has a processing capacity of approximately 280,000 metric tons (MT) annually. The Carrinho Group, based in Benguela province, also opened a mill with a similar capacity. Kikolo Wheat mill, on the outskirts of Luanda, can process 140,000 MT per year. AP Foods is a pasta factory, but in 2019 the company built a Wheat mill with a capacity of approximately 100,000 MT per year. These Wheat mills collectively offer about 800,000 MT of milling capacity in Angola annually. They are also all associated with the Association of Wheat Flour Producers of Angola.
Angola, which derives about 90% of its GDP from petroleum exports, took measures to diversify the country’s economy, including support for developing the agricultural processing sector. One such effort is the Production Support, Export Diversification, and Import Replacement Program, known by the Portuguese acronym PRODESI, which the Presidential Decree approved in July 2018.
PRODESI aims to facilitate the economic diversification of targeted non-oil sectors. To that end, the government of Angola (GRA) created the Credit Support Project (PAC) that the Council approved of Ministers on March 22, 2019. PAC is an instrument to facilitate the financing of private investment projects in PRODESI’s targeted goods and services sectors. Through PAC, the GRA can allocate $434 million of public resources through commercial banks to reduce interest charges and improve credit guarantees.
In 2020, PAC provided financing worth $20 million to Induve, an Angolan processing company, to build a new Wheat mill that can process 700 MT per day and an annual average of 255,000 MT of Wheat. Angola has very limited Wheat production, so the new mill is expected to drive demand for increased Wheat imports, supported by the GRA’s increase of tariffs on Wheat flour imports from 0 to 20 percent, thus encouraging more Wheat grain imports to be milled domestically. Induve Mill is not a member of the Association of Wheat Flour Producers, but including the capacity of the new mill, Angola can now mill over 1 million MT of Wheat each year.
According to the latest data released by the Angola Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 2020, Angola annually consumes about 650,000 MT of Wheat flour (equivalent to approximately 890,000 MT of Wheat grain, using a milling conversion factor of 1.368). However, since the country produces very little Wheat domestically, virtually all consumption is fueled by imports of Wheat flour or Wheat grain milled domestically.
Wheat and Wheat Flour Import in Angola
As milling capacity has increased, Wheat grain imports have replaced Wheat flour imports. According to AgFlow data, France shipped 44,000 tons of Wheat to Angola in Jan-Apr 2023, followed by Russia (25,000 tons) and Lithuania (6,000 tons). The primary import sources of Wheat flour imported by Angola in 2020 were Turkey, with 164,000 MT, followed by the EU, with 42,000 MT. At the same time, the EU led the way in Wheat grain exports to Angola with 380,000 MT in 2020, followed by Russia with 199,000 MT.
The Association of Wheat Flour Producers of Angola stated that the Russia-Ukraine war could cause the consumer price of Wheat flour to rise by 40 percent or more. The industry is working with the GRA to identify ways to mitigate this potential price increase. In 2021, the GRA announced the new management of a strategic food reserve (REA) for staple commodities, and in early April 2022, the GRA reduced the official prices for food products in the “basic basket”.
Other sources: USDA
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