Import-reliant Gabon gets taste for local beef
- Last updated: September 30, 2025 | 12:58
The rib eye steak that Matthieu Msellati was tucking into at a restaurant in Tchibanga in southwestern Gabon unusually came from a cattle ranch less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) away.
Eating locally sourced food is still a rarity in the oil-rich central African country, which imports almost everything it eats but has a growing appetite for that to change.
"We know where it comes from and that's reassuring," the 48-year-old manager of a tourist attraction enthused, between mouthfuls.
On social media, use of the "consogab" hashtag showing support for eating and promoting Gabonese products has grown in recent months.
President Brice Oligui Nguema, who took power in a military coup in 2023 and was elected president last April, has offered small agricultural businesses low-interest loans to help them boost the country's food self-sufficiency and offered low-interest loans to small farming enterprises.
A Gabonese eats just under 41 kilograms (90 pounds) of meat a year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization -- but less than 10 percent is produced in the country.
The only large-scale cattle farming business in Gabon is the Grande Mayumba Development Company, which owns the Nyanga ranch, where Msellati's steak came from.
"We're a forest people. Our ancestors lived by hunting and gathering, not from livestock," Morgan Bignoumba, deputy director of livestock at the agriculture ministry, said.
Forest covers 88 percent of Gabon's 267,000 square kilometers (103,000 square miles), while savannahs -- the large, flat, grassy spaces necessary for cattle to graze -- account for just seven percent.
Stretching more than 100,000 hectares (over 247,000 acres) to the border with the Republic of Congo, the Nyanga farm is Gabon's only one involved in large-scale beef production.
Its 5,000 heads of cattle roam in a natural pasture of vast plains, fed on tall grass and watered by the Nyanga River, which crosses the farm.
"It's meat produced locally in organic conditions," Gui-Lov Dibanganga, 38, Nyanga ranch manager who heads a team of 108 staff, said.
Food self-sufficiency
Besides nearby Chad and Cameroon, Gabon imports beef from far-flung Brazil and France.
"The ranch is part of this vision of wanting to significantly reduce beef imports in order to help the country reach this objective of food self-sufficiency," Dibanganga said.
Production at the ranch is projected to hit 30 tons this year, a modest figure explained by the breed of cattle: the N'Dama.
Native to west and central Africa, its orange color blends in with the reddish-brown earth tracks typical of the region.
The breed is favored for its resistance to trypanosomiasis, a disease transmitted by the tsetse fly equivalent to sleeping sickness in humans.
While compact and small, Dibanganga acknowledged, "its yield isn't very high".
But with the ranch's livestock numbers growing around 10 percent a year, its beef is no longer just being enjoyed at nearby restaurants but in the capital too.
Fresh meat
Butcher Youssouf Ori takes delivery every fortnight at dawn of around 300 kilogram’s of carcasses brought in a refrigerated lorry to his shop in a business district of the capital Libreville.
In front of his store in Charbonnages, a sign in big letters reads: "Fresh Meat".
From slaughter at the ranch to delivery takes less than 72 hours, nearly 12 of which are spent traveling 700 km along tracks and rough roads.
In his white overalls, his butcher's knife at the ready, Ori gets to work chopping up the meat.
"One or two weeks without arrival and people start asking 'Where's the meat that is more tender?'" Ori said.
He supplies mostly Libreville restaurant owners, whose diners already have a taste for home-grown produce.
"We tell them it's meat from Gabon and it comes from Tchibanga and they're happy when they hear it's their product," he added.
At one of the biggest supermarkets in the capital a large banner at the meat counter reads "100 percent Gabonese Meat".
After eight months on the shelves, it already has loyal customers.
Restaurateur Blandine Loogabeng has been keen on locally sourced food for years.
"With local meat, the flavour is maintained," she said, adding: "Customers love it."
Norvin Kouma, 36, a purchaser at the Mbolo supermarket, said the quality and price of products from the Nyanga ranch had won him over.
"It's meat produced here and we have been asked by the authorities to promote Gabonese entrepreneurs," he said.
A kilo of Gabonese rib eye costs around 18,000 CFA francs ($32), about the same price as that from Cameroon.
But there is a way to go before Gabonese ranches are producing enough meat for the whole country. "Five or six companies setting up like this with the same vision would be good," Dibanganga said.
Agence France-Presse