Tsehay Farmers’ Cooperative Union has invested 70 million Br to set up an edible oil processing plant in central Gonder, Amhara Regional State.

With a production capacity of refining 10,000lt of oil a day, the plant is expected to be inaugurated at the beginning of this week. The plant, which took two years to complete, rests on 8,734Sqm of land and is expected to create jobs for 75 employees.

The processing plant, which will use sesame seeds, niger seed, sunflower and peanuts to produce the oil, started trial production on February 12, 2019, processing 7,000lt of oil a day.

The steel structure of the new plant was constructed by a Saudi Arabian company, Zamil Steel Industries, a company founded in 1998 and headquartered in Dammam. Zamil employs over 10,000 people in 55 countries.

The machinery was installed by an Indian company, Kumar Metal Industries, a company established eight decades ago supplying machinery for oil mills, solvent extraction and edible oil refining plants. The company has a presence in 25 countries and serves over 500 customers.

The two-decade-old Tsehay Farmers’ Cooperative Union has been engaged in trading cereals, processing animal feed, distributing consumer products and exporting sesame.

Oil made of sesame will be exported, while the rest will be retailed in the local market, according to Endalkachew Abi, CEO of the Union, which is one of the 388 cooperative unions in Ethiopia.

The plant will play a significant role in import substitution, according to Sintayehu Demissie, a lecturer at Addis Abeba University.

"A large portion of Ethiopia’s edible oil is still imported," said Sintayehu.

The latest data from the Food, Beverage & Pharmaceutical Industry Development Institute shows that 96pc of the nation’s demand for edible oil was being fulfilled by imports from Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.