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Albania
Food Processing
Albania's food-processing
industry had at least one processing facility for the cereal,
meat, and dairy branches in each of the country's twenty-six administrative
districts without regard to efficiency or economies of scale.
These facilities, which employed about 25,000 people, relied on
the Ministry of Light Industry to allocate raw materials, arrange
transportation, and market products. Years of depreciation and
inadequate investment had left the 200 largest food-processing
enterprises and about 750 smaller plants with obsolete, broken-down
equipment. As a result, managers had little experience in obtaining
materials or marketing, and the plants functioned inefficiently
and produced low-quality goods. Minimal hygiene and sanitation
standards went unmet. Shortages of raw materials and spare parts,
along with transportation problems, forced many food-processing
enterprises to curtail operations; in 1991 alone, output fell
35 percent from the previous year. When the government loosened
controls on food and vegetable prices in 1991, the official marketing
network collapsed, cutting off the supply of raw materials to
the country's thirty-one canneries. As unofficial prices rose,
supply flows to the twenty-seven state-owned slaughterhouses dried
up. The thirty-two district-level and 550 village dairies survived
only by paying unofficial prices for milk and cooperating with
private traders.
Albania's thirty-eight flour mills normally employed between
thirteen and 257 people and could grind between eight tons and
160 tons of flour per day. The seventy state-owned bakeries in
urban areas produced about 370,000 tons of bread annually. The
government privatized many of the country's village bakeries,
which had a 200,000-ton total annual production capacity. Albania's
lone modern yeast factory could produce about 600 tons annually,
which was inadequate to meet the country's needs. Albania had
ten pasta factories and two starch factories. Freemarket prices
four times higher than official levels left state-owned mills
and bakeries unable to compete with private millers and bakers
for available grain supplies.
State-farm managers and private farmers radically reduced the
amount of hectarage producing oilseed, cotton, and tobacco because
state prices were low and there were no private markets offering
higher prices. Tobacco and sugar-beet production decreased less
drastically because state enterprises, including the Durrės tobacco
factory and the country's only sugar-beet refinery, offered farmers
advance purchase contracts at relatively attractive prices. Albania's
vegetable-oil industry consisted of twenty-seven olive-oil plants
capable of pressing 755 tons of olives daily; eleven sunflower-oil
plants with a daily capacity of 262 tons of seeds; seventeen oil-extraction
plants with a daily capacity of 270 tons of olive, cotton-seed,
corn, and sunflower pulp; and ten obsolete oil-refinery units
with a daily capacity of 110 tons of sunflower oil and soya oil.
Town and district plants bottled edible oils. The country also
had four soap factories and one margarine plant.
Data as of April 1992
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