One Chinese company is planning a large investment in Serbia of 250 million euros in corn processing.
As it was stated, negotiations are underway and the only thing that the Minister of Agriculture Branislav Nedimović revealed is that the investors intend to process half a million tons of corn a year and make final products – amino acids, starch, glucose.
Considering that the production of corn in Serbia, depending on the year, ranges between 6.2 million tons, as it was dry in 2021, and seven or more million, this is a quantity that is not negligible.
Serbia annually exports from three million tons to 3.5 million tons of corn.
A year ago, China told its partners in 17 Southeast European countries, including Serbia, that it would increase imports of goods from this area to 170 billion dollars in the next five years, with an emphasis on agriculture and the agro-industrial complex.
Serbia, the seventeenth corn producer in the world, has so far exclusively exported this primary agricultural product as a raw material, without trying to develop processing capacities on its own.
“We could earn much more if we exported products of a higher level of processing – products used in the meat industry, amino acids, starch, dyes, and thus appear as serious competitors in the world market. We can make corn grain much smarter. We earn the least as a state, as an economy, if we export grain, which is a raw material for everything else,” said Goran Bekavac, head of the Corn Department at the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops in Novi Sad, 021 reports.
