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Kathmandu Monday April 02, 2001 Chaitra 20, 2057.
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Unrestricted poultry imports jeopardise local
industry
By Krishna Bhandari
CHITWAN, April 1 - Poultry farmers of this district say that unrestricted
inflow of unhealthy chicks/birds and contaminated eggs from other countries, specifically
from India, has jeopardized the poultry farming.
Marcks, a kind of fowl disease, had plagued the entire poultry industry of
the country about two years ago. An Indian poultry firm had sent unvaccinated
disease-affected fowls to Nepal which spread like wild fire killing an estimated 300
thousand fowls.
Deepak Khanal, Managing Director of Khanal Poultry Pvt. Ltd, Chainpur 1,
Baheri, says besides the inflow of unvaccinated fowls, lack of specified standard of
Marcks Disease (MD) vaccine, disease are affecting fowls considerably.
The government should formulate a policy to introduce the vaccine by the
concerned hatcheries to control the disease, if the government is really serious towards
the poultry farmers, suggests Khanal. The disease had killed 12,000 of his flock that
year.
"We are not afraid of competition, but there should be an environment
that enables us to compete with others. In Andhra Pradesh of India, the state government
provides 75 per cent subsidy in electricity tariff and other incentives, but we get none
of them. How can we compete with them in such a situation?" asks Khanal.
In India, poultry farming is categorized as agriculture, here we have to get
the firms registered with the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Supplies. And we have to
pay Agriculture Service Tax, Local Development Tax on the import of raw materials like
maize, soybean-, sesame-, and sunflower-oil cakes, fish meal and also on parent breeding
flock, he says.
Similarly, the government levies value added tax (VAT) on the import of
poultry equipment, cages, and cage wires and on feed supplements, amino acids, vitamins
etc. Such taxes weaken the competitiveness of the local poultry firms, but the government
is indifferent towards it, says Shiva Pathak of Piple Village Development Committee (VDC),
a poultry farmers who keeps broilers.
Pathak says that high lending rates of the bank has also made it difficult
for the poultry farmers to make their products competitive. He also said that under-weight
and over-stocked eggs mostly from Hyderabad are dumped in the Nepalese market. This has
badly affected the health of consumers and the financial health of the poultry farmers, he
laments.
The state government allows open import of poultry related equipment and
other materials in the Andhra Pradesh. As such, they often dump eggs and chickens in the
local market, which severely hits the domestic poultry farmers, he argues.
They have demanded with the government form a Poultry Development Board with
the inclusion of the private sector and formulate long- and short-term policies to make
the industry sustainable.
There had been some unpleasant cases of breaking truckful of eggs and killing
truckful of chicks imported from India in Narayangarh by the local poultry farmers in the
past.
Khanal’s is one of the biggest poultry firms in the district, which has
35,000 layers, all of which are them are kept in cages. He imports parent breeders from
Germany.
It is estimated that there are over 10 hatcheries, more than 2,000 firms
producing eggs and meat and over 17 feed industries in the district. It is said that the
industry as a whole has given job directly to over 6,000 people and indirectly to about
10,000 people of the district.
Though the investment portfolio of the Agricultural Development Bank,
Bharatpur Branch shows a steady rise in poultry farming, concerned people say that the
rate of growth is in a decreasing trend.
The Bank, which made a modest investment of Rs 3,742,000 in fiscal year
1991/92, has invested a total of Rs 127,474,000, shown by the accounts of the fiscal year
ending 1999/2000.
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