March 12, 2020

Indian poultry loses INR1,100 crore due to dropping sales

According to Suresh Chitturi, vice chairman of the All India Poultry Breeders Association and vice chairman and managing director of Srinivasa Farms, India's poultry sector is losing around INR1100 crore every week or about INR160 crore everyday.

The COVID-19 outbreak in India has severely impacted sales of poultry products with many consumers giving chicken and eggs a miss on their grocery list.

Headquartered in Hyderabad, Srinivasa Farms has branches across 16 states in India supplying 5 crore chicks to farmers every year.

Chitturi says, the industry has made a representation to Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman and is seeking an appointment to apprise her of the challenges faced by the industry. As an industry, the weekly loss today is around INR200 crore from fall in egg prices and INR900 crore on account of lower prices of birds and reduced sales.

Bahadur Ali, chairman, All India Poultry Breeders Association, has said: "Unfortunately, due to the recent outbreak of coronavirus in China and related developments which is beyond the poultry farmers, has created massive crisis and forced poultry sector to bankruptcy."

Attributing it to what he calls, "the fake novel coronavirus threat spread by social media among the consumers" that has "created massive problem and devastated the poultry sector." The farm gate realisation prices of eggs has now plunged to INR2.50 per egg against the cost of production of close to INR4.00 per egg, the note says.

In February alone, the egg poultry farmers lost INR600 crore. This is on top of the challenges of rising cost of production that they were already coping with. Today, the situation is worse than the last two bird flu hits in 2006 and 2010.

Chitturi stated, "We are requesting the government for an interest subvention, conversion of existing working capital loans to term loans with two years moratorium for payback and issuing fresh working capital. This will help the industry tide over the current crisis."

The Indian poultry sector, he says, currently contributes INR1.2 lakh crore to India's GDP and is a major provider of livelihood and therefore crucial for the country, which produces 25 crore eggs and 1.3 crore birds per day.