Food Bill could hurt animal feed availability.

On Friday, an article on this page pointed out a peculiar crisis that has beset India. Animal feed, required to sustain our large population of cattle, poultry and fish, is in short supply, and what is available is not cheap. India's 300 million cattle produce more milk than anywhere else in the world. But individual yield, at 2,000 litres per lactation, is way below global levels: in Israel, as the article pointed out, the average yield is 11,000 litres. The reason behind low yields is malnutrition. India, home to the second-largest number of malnourished children in the world, is also home to malnourished livestock. This has to change, if the quality of what we eat is to go up.

Unless feed supplements become better available and cheaper, there is another danger to the system. Once the food security system becomes widely prevalent, people who rear livestock will feed cattle with subsidised rice and wheat at Rs 2 or Rs 3 per kg, rather than buy feed whose cost can go up to Rs 11 per kg. Most Indian cattle normally graze free, unlike the stall-fed variety in developed countries. To augment their diet, they need feed obtained from farm residues like oil cakes, deoiled rice bran (DORB) and so on. Despite a 60% shortage in these feed supplements, India exports around 2,00,000 tonnes of DORB every year.

Depreciation of the currency makes such exports artificially competitive. Edible oil being a large item of import, liberal export of oil cake might seem like an incentive for expansion of indigenous oilseed production and oil crushing. But oilcake export must be seen in conjunction with animal husbandry and feed requirements. Particularly with export of grain and their domestic stocks being completely mismanaged, liberal export of just feed inputs is likely to accentuate the demand for grain, with its repressed prices, as animal feed. This might well result in the overall demand for grain increasing significantly beyond what food Bill enthusiasts have bargained for. It might be prudent for the government to bring back the 10% export duty on DORB scrapped by the finance minister in his February Budget.

Source : economictimes.indiatimes.com