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At the International Exhibition of Agriculture and Animal Resources (SARA) in Cote D’Ivoire, from left, Paul Kasse, NARA representative in Côte d’Ivoire, Leroux Roux, chief of staff of MIRAH, Matthew Meredith, Sidi Touré, Minister of Animal and Fisheries Resources, and Gouromenan Assoumani, cabinet director of MIRAH.
All About Africa Continued from page 9
So far, NARA and its consultants are building trust and
consistently finding positive industry support in North and West Africa for utilizing U.S. rendered products in animal and aquafeed rations.
“Once we start talking with all of these groups about how to use rendered products to enhance a feed ration, you can see the wheels start to turn,” Meredith explains. “It’s something they’ve heard about, and it sounds pretty good, but they don’t really know how to do it. So, the next step for NARA is to offer technical assistance programs — training and research on feed formulation and other industry know-how that we can bring to the table either through seminars or other consultations.”
Furthermore, joint discussions with regulators are also moving closer toward necessary reform to open these markets for rendered products. In fact, a major milestone was announced July 16 with the signing of a landmark MOU between the Ministry of Animal and Fisheries Resources of Côte d’Ivoire (MIRAH) and NARA, which paves the way for deeper collaboration on high quality, sustainable and cost effective feed ingredients to strengthen Côte d’Ivoire’s livestock and aquaculture industries.
Work Still Needed Back Home
With significant progress ongoing in Africa, NARA is also addressing crucial trade issues domestically with the federal agencies responsible for trade negotiations.
“Africa has not been a priority focus area at APHIS for rendered products,” explains Meredith. “Historically, USDA spends most of its time for the feed industry dealing with soy, grain and corn as component feed industry inputs. We’re determined to elevate rendered products so they are part of the trade negotiation agenda. The administration has been
10 August 2025 Render
effective at getting U.S. trading partners to the negotiating table, and the time is right to push for market access. Our aim is to ensure the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and USDA trade-policy experts have our issues front-of-mind when they are hammering out agreements and protocols.
“We need some help from APHIS to elaborate the documentation mechanism because right now, it’s not something that is standardized,” he says. “In Tunisia, we can bring in hides, but we can’t bring in feed inputs. And then for Morocco, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Kenya, there’s really a whole range of different import requirements or feed restrictions.
“Other markets in sub-Saharan Africa show potential with almost $40 million in imports of rendered products, but the U.S. market share is only about 5%, likely due to unknown or murky import requirements,” Meredith adds. “One of the areas we’re working toward is to facilitate more transparency, standardization and simplification for these types of requirements.”
NARA is also developing a trade dashboard for Africa to map rendered product and feed ingredient flows. This dashboard will include country-level insights like import volumes, trends and regulatory shifts for markets with high export potential along with key macroeconomic and logistic indicators. Among other factors, the data will help track U.S. trade performance and policy impacts over time.
“Africa remains a region of high potential, and the dashboard allows users to zoom in on specific countries to assess import volumes, supplier trends and regulatory shifts,” Meredith says. “This will enable NARA to better target in-country efforts, optimize engagement strategies and allocate resources more effectively.”
Obviously, each African country has different needs, opportunities and challenges. Here’s a brief summary of
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