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USAID
enhance competitiveness of Macedonian Agribusiness
on export markets
 On
July 3rd USAID’s AgBiz Program organzied Grant
Ageement Signing Ceremony for Macedonian
agribusinesses working in the wine, fresh vegetable,
processed vegetable and wild gathered product
sectors. Attendees at the ceremony included
representatives from USAID/Macedonia, the Ministry
of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Economy, the
Ministry of Economy, and the Macedonian consulting
companies that helped assess the grantees’ projects.
The companies that signed grant agreements with
USAID’s AgBiz Program to support their
competitiveness improvement and business expansion
projects are “Badzo”, “Lars”, “Vipro”, Agros 2004”,
“Koko-lanski”, “Bonum Plus”, “Avto Rita”, “Dentina”
and “Popova Kula”. The export-focused projects that
will be implemented by these companies will require
a total investment of over USD 3.2 million and are
pro-jected to result in increased export sales of
over USD 28 million by the end of 2010.
These projects will enhance the export
competitiveness of the agribu-sinesses by supporting
training, marketing activities, technical
assis-tance, physical facilities expansion and
advanced equipment acquisition. Most of the projects
will support the businesses to move into value added
products, develop or expand share in new export
markets, expand processing or packing capacity and
improve productivity.
“With implementing these business expansion projects
we are going to accomplish bigger sale which means
more employments! Imple-menting new standards in
production process which will provide added value of
our products is one of the key objectives of our
projects! Through implementation of marketing
strategies we are expecting better export!” said Mr.
Viktor Petkov, owner of “Vipro” processing com-pany.
The goal of the Program is to enable agribusinesses
to identify, un-derstand and sustainably enter
export markets for value-added prod-ucts; enhance
market linkages between producers, processors and
traders; improve business management, operations and
competive-ness; achieve greater incomes for
agricultural producers and proces-sors; and create
new employment opportunities.
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