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Necessary steps should be taken to ensure food safety and address challenges in the country’s poultry sector, which is a major source of nutrition for the general people, according to experts at a roundtable on Tuesday.
They called for access to bank loans as well as incentives in times of crisis to marginal farmers, and for influential middlemen to be removed from the supply chain.
They were speaking at the “Dutch-Bangladesh Knowledge Sharing Roundtable”, held at a city hotel on Tuesday.
The event was organised by PoultryTechBangladesh, a public-private partnership co-funded by the Netherlands embassy in Dhaka, in collaboration with the Breeders Association Bangladesh (BAB) and the Feed Industries Association of Bangladesh.
Addressing the programme, Abu Luthfe Fazle Rahim Khan, managing director of Aftab Bahumukhi Farms Ltd, said it has been observed that protein consumption in Bangladesh is exceptionally volatile due to different cultural festivities and events.
Mahbubur Rahman, general secretary of the BAB, said regulatory steps need to be taken to stop selling live chicken in wet markets.
“This single step would ensure better food safety, a streamlined value chain without excessive intermediaries, better farm-gate prices for producers, and a lower price of poultry products in the retail market,” he added.
Md Ahsanuzzaman, director and chief executive officer of Spectra Hexa Feeds Ltd, said access to finance is another key challenge for small-and-medium scale farmers in Bangladesh.
“So, it is important to provide them easier access to loans, ensure insurance coverage and improve their technical capacity.”
Gordon Butler, president of G&S Agri Consultant Co Ltd, said the local poultry sector is unique compared to global poultry industries.
“Hence, we cannot aim to replicate the practices of the West, but instead, we need to collaboratively come up with unique solutions that are relevant to the domestic poultry industry,” he added.
According to Md Nazrul Islam, associate vice-president of ACI Godrej Agrovet Private Ltd, the poultry industry will grow by 300 per cent and per capita consumption will reach 320 eggs per annum by 2025.
“So, we should focus on food safety and develop a traceable and integrated backward linkage to ensure profitability for farmers and quality products for consumers at an affordable price.”
About Tk 35,000 crore has been invested in the poultry sector in Bangladesh. And about 60 lakh workers are directly and indirectly involved in the sector, which consists of 90,000 to 100,000 poultry farms.
The poultry business has different segments — egg and meat production and hatching. Large farms operate in all segments, while small and medium farmers focus on one or two segments.
(TDS)
