'Mint money from processed honey'

Jan 29, 2009

HONEY producers have been urged to embrace value addition to benefit from the ready global market. President Yoweri Museveni made the call in a December 2008 ApiExpo Africa report released by the Ssemwanga Centre for Agriculture and Food, recently.

By Alice Kiingi

HONEY producers have been urged to embrace value addition to benefit from the ready global market. President Yoweri Museveni made the call in a December 2008 ApiExpo Africa report released by the Ssemwanga Centre for Agriculture and Food, recently.

Museveni noted that bee farmers export honey to Europe poorly packaged fetching low prices, but in a supermarket like TESCO in the UK, a kilogramme of honey costs 10 pounds (about sh30,000) or more.

“With value addition the extracted bee venom would be $100 per kilogramme, brood at $74, pollen at $15 and royal jelly at $100.

“A total of $289 increases the prospects of a household’s earnings to a record levels,” Museveni said.

Recently, bee farmers and honey exporters from Africa formed a marketing group, ApiTrade Africa, a honey trade network to promote Africa’s honey and other beehive products on the regional and international markets to generate wealth in Africa.

They said though Africa produces the unique and quility honey, they get less than 1% (about $3b) of over 300,000 tonnes of the annual total world trade that is dominated by Asia.

Museveni said an average bee hive produces 20 Kilogrammes of comb honey per season.

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