GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer of Na­tion­al Flour Mills Ian Mitchell says the com­pa­ny has been look­ing at us­ing sweet pota­to and cas­sa­va as al­ter­na­tive sources to wheat flour but it may not be eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able to pro­duce at this time.

Speak­ing dur­ing a re­cent tele­vi­sion pro­gramme Mitchell said, “Cas­sa­va flour is twice as ex­pen­sive when processed as wheat flour. While it is an op­tion and it is some­thing we want to look at be­cause it gives us that se­cu­ri­ty of grow­ing that com­po­nent of what we al­ready eat at home, the cost to grow cas­sa­va, to ex­tract the starch and process it in­to a flour is just sig­nif­i­cant­ly ex­pen­sive at this time,” Mitchell ex­plained.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, NFM’s chair­man Nigel Ro­mano said if cas­sa­va has to be used as a source it must be “re­li­able and that qual­i­ty is as­sured.”

More­so, get­ting the nec­es­sary quan­ti­ties are al­so crit­i­cal to en­sure that the mar­ket is prop­er­ly served, Ro­mano added.

Fur­ther, Mitchell said oth­er types of flour sim­ply do not per­form as wheat flour, which is an­oth­er de­ter­min­ing fac­tor in us­ing sub­sti­tutes to wheat.

On Tues­day, the NFM an­nounced a 33 per cent in­crease in the whole­sale price of flour, with a sug­gest­ed in­crease av­er­ag­ing 28 per cent on the re­tail price of flour.

The com­pa­ny ex­plained that while it has been able to se­cure suf­fi­cient wheat stocks to guar­an­tee that Trinidad and To­ba­go has an ad­e­quate sup­ply of flour for the re­main­der of 2022, the cost of wheat to NFM has in­creased by a fur­ther 49 per cent 2022, due to the on­go­ing war be­tween Rus­sia and the Ukraine.

The com­pa­ny added that to re­duce loss­es in its flour di­vi­sion, it had no choice but to in­crease its flour prices.

Ac­cord­ing to Mitchell dur­ing the com­pa­ny’s ex­plo­ration to use cas­sa­va as an­oth­er source for flour, it has had dis­cus­sions with Cos­ta Ri­ca and as far as Ghana, apart from T&T.