KABUL: The Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) are to build 248 cold storage facilities, with the capacity of storing up to 50,000 tons of agricultural products, across the country.
The project will cost at least $40 million USD and will come from the ministry’s development budget, said Ahmad Shekib Omar, the MAIL’s project manager of cold storage facilities.
He said that eight of the cold storage facilities would have a particularly large capacity of a total 40,000 tons and the project would take two years.
“Eight cold storage facilities will be built in six provinces including Kabul, Kandahar, Kunduz, Balkh, Herat and Nangarhar in order to keep agricultural products of these provinces (fresh),” Omar added.
Meanwhile, members of the agriculture institute of the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan urged the agriculture ministry to build cold storage facilities according to international standards.
“Two years ago, the ministry of agriculture said they had constructed 250 cold storage facilities for Bamiyan province, but according to our information, we can say that they are warehouses not cold storage facilities. Because the moisture, temperature and air-flow regulators have not been controlled in those facilities in Bamiyan,” said Mohammad Yasin Farahmand manager of the institute.
The MAIL officials said $700 million USD is required to build cold storage facilities with a total capacity of storing 260,000 tons of agricultural products in order to address the shortage of such facilities in Afghanistan.
