A national workshop was organised by the Agricultural & Processed Food Products Export Development Authority on "Achieving Exponential Growth in Agro Exports." BM Vyas, managing director, Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd, spoke at length on the occasion.
He said, "Today, world population has crossed 6 billion mark and India is the 2nd largest populated country with more than 1 billion population. Thus, every 6th person in the world today is Indian. In addition to this, the world economy is growing continuously, and especially service sector is growing more and more. The services like IT, travel and health are spreading all over the world much faster and fortunately, India is capable to provide manpower for these specialised sectors in much efficient manner. Thus, all these will help to spread Indian diaspora across the globe at much faster speed. Given the typical Indian taste, culture and tradition the demand for traditional Indian dairy products is likely to go up at much faster pace."
Vyas continued, "As regards to dairy products, we need to look at the exports of branded dairy products to cater to the growing Indian diaspora in world market. This is more important rather than exporting dairy products as bulk commodity, where the exporter has to fight with exports of developed nations who are providing heavy subsidies for their exports. Government of India will not be able to support dairy products export by way of subsidy as it results into high vulnerability in domestic market.
Government should avoid steps like banning of exports of dairy products (esp. in consumer packing) due to fear of shortages as this creates negative image in the minds of world consumers.
India is exporting "NUTRITION" in large quantity in the form of de-oiled cake which is rich in crude protein. Oilmeals are extractions of sunflower, cottonseed, soyabean, groundnut, rice bran and rapeseed which are important ingredients in manufacturing of cattlefeed and even poultryfeed. They have high levels of total digestible nutrients (about 60-70%) and the milch cattle can convert the crude protein roughage into high value nutritious food like milk. It is unfortunate that India chooses to export such valuable ingredient and import other forms of edible protein like pulses. Further, the escalation in prices of domestic cattlefeed leads to increase in production cost of milk and contributes to inflation in the consumer prices of milk. India should discourage export of de-oiled cake which will help in increasing availability of crude protein especially for cattle and will help reducing input cost to the milk farmers which will make milk production more competitive. This will also boost availability of nutrition in the country and will help exports of dairy products at more competitive prices.
It is interesting to note that during 1965 to 1989 - the period when dairy development was at its peak, government has consciously kept export duty of Rs 125 per MT on export of de-oiled cake / oilmeals and animal feed (year wise duty is shown in Annexure 1 vis-à-vis price of Amul cattlefeed during that period). In terms of % the export duty was in the range of 30 % to 10 % during this period of cattlefeed price. This export duty was removed in 1989. Thus, government was clear in its objective of discouraging export of input products for milk to ensure that the feed cost does not go up. We have recommended government to impose 25% export duty on oilmeals which will help to improve input cost to the milk farmer.
Government also needs to protect the dairy industry from imports of subsidised dairy products from developed nations into India as this would discourage domestic production and would completely imbalance the Indian milk market for local as well as exports purpose. While, dairy products are kept in sensitive list of imports and imports are being monitored by government regularly, there is no action being taken to stop dumping of cheap products (since last 6 months New Zealand is dumping butteroil at half the price into India). Government also should restore the import duty back to its normal level for milk powder (from current 5 % to 15%) and butteroil (from current 30% to 40%) immediately to ensure that they are not dumped into India.
Government needs to take following steps to promote exports of dairy products:
● Promote export of branded dairy products.
● Ensure that export of dairy products in consumer packing is not hindered by government intervention.
● Help reduction in costs by proper management of inputs / nutrition.
● Ensure that developed nations do not hamper Indian domestic industry."
On GCMMF and Amul Vyas said, "Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (GCMMF) is India's largest food products marketing organisation with annual sales turnover over Rs 67 billion (over $ 1.3 billion). We manufacture and market a wide range of dairy products in India and abroad under the brand names of "Amul" & "Sagar". GCMMF has 25 affiliated dairy plants with a total milk handling capacity of 11 million litres per day. The total milk drying capacity is 700 MT per day. We are a co-operative organisation with membership of 2.7 million farmers of Gujarat.
GCMMF is also the largest exporter of dairy products from India. Our all plants are ISO as well as HACCP certified. They are also certified by Export Inspection Agency of India under Export of Milk Products (Quality Control, Inspection & Monitoring) Rules, 2000.
Amul was established in 1946 to prevent exploitation of milk farmers by middleman. The 1st day milk collection in Amul was only 250 lit from 2 villages in 1946 which has today crossed a mark of 11 million litre per day procuring from more than 13,000 villages.
The National Dairy Development Board was formed under the leadership of Dr V Kurien and they successfully replicated "Anand Pattern" of dairy co-operatives across India in 22 states and established 176 dairy plants involving more than 15 million milk farmers. The successful implementation of Operation Flood program in 3 phases helped India becoming the world's No. 1 milk producer country from the state of a milk deficit nation. Currently, India produces more than 100 MMT of milk per annum."
Source : fnbnews.com