The Hindu Business Line : Declining consumption unnerves poultry sector

MOST domestic poultry functionaries are on a `consumer confidence building' campaign as the declining consumption of poultry products in the local markets has unnerved them.

Though they claim that their products have getting more export enquiries of late, defending the domestic market seems to be their main worry and forms the campaign plank for many of the representatives of the regional poultry farm bodies, who have launched a `damage control' exercise to retrieve the lost market.

"Domestic sale of poultry products took a hit by the recent reports of the bird flu to the extent of 20 per cent, the worst hit being the broiler sector," admitted Dr Selvaraj, Zonal Chairman of the National Egg Coordination Committee.

But information from poultry market sources say that the loss of business to broiler would be much higher as the consumption of chicken has fallen by 40 per cent or so in the past two weeks, in the face of the heavy media hype on the diseases outbreak.

At a press briefing on `What the poultry industry has to say about the avian flu episode' organised under the banner of the Palladam-based State broiler coordination committee (BCC), Dr Selvaraj maintained that the domestic poultry sector had to face the adverse market scenario despite the fact that Indian poultry continued to remain free from any incident of the viral disease.

"The whole media blare on the avian flu appears to be political rather than technical to destabilise the Asian poultry exports," Dr Selvaraj said.

The BCC President, Mr Lakshmanan, and other members of the committee said though reports of the avian flu did create panic among the Indian consumers it also had given scope for increasing layer eggs and broiler meat export.

"There has been increased enquiries for table egg exports and against the current per day export of 10 lakh eggs, the volume of export from the Namakkal zone (in Tamil Nadu) would go up shortly to 14 lakh eggs a day," said Dr Sevlaraj.

In the case of the broiler meat export, the biggest problem is the processing capacity in Tamil Nadu.

As against the weekly broiler bird production of 35 lakh from the Coimbatore region, the present processing available with one full-fledged chicken processing house operating in the State is just two lakh birds.

This is a bottleneck as creating new capacity for processed chicken to take advantage of the export potential would not be possible immediately and would be investment intensive and time consuming, the BCC President added.

Seeking to alleviate the consumers' fear on chicken/egg eating, the poultry scientist from the Tamil Nadu University for Veterinary and Animal Sciences (Tanuvas), Dr A.M. Ramaswamy and Dr Sivaramakrishnan, Assistant Director of the State Animal Husbandry Department, said the directorate of the State veterinary services and the animal husbandry department have been keeping vigil on the poultry farms in the State, and are adhering to the bio security measures to check the possibility of the disease spread.

The veterinary services has already formed vigilance teams in each poultry zones, which would visit the layer/broiler farms.

As for humans contracting any viral infection in the event of the spread of the diseases, Dr Tamilselvi, an infectious diseases expert from the Coimbatore-based Kovai Medical Centre and Hospital, said the particular strain of viral infection would not spread through eating the egg or chicken meat as this virus would not survive in a temperature beyond 70 degree.

The BCC members felt that the recent ban on import of any domestic bird or vaccine of poultry origin into India would be a good move.

Though the ban would apply to import of grand parent birds into the country, this would not affect the domestic poultry sector as sufficient grand parent stocks available locally and the same way, according to the BCC members, all vaccines to contain poultry diseases are available.

Notwithstanding the BCC's counter campaign against the avian influenza incident, the State's poultry sector is faced with sliding prices for their produce in the market throughout the last two weeks.

While the live broiler (wholesale) price this week fell to Rs 26 a kg, the fall in the layer egg price remained unrelenting and it closed this week at Rs 1.10 per egg from Rs 1.35 that prevailed 10 days ago.