October 4, 2005

 

Pakistan's railways to help resolve poultry farmers' problems

 

 

Mian Shamim Haider, Federal Railways Minister, has announced that Pakistan Railways would facilitate the poultry feed and soybean meal importers for in-time delivery from Karachi and India to solve the country's poultry sector problems.

 

Inaugurating the National Poultry Conference on Saturday, he urged poultry farmers, exporters and researchers to give up obsolete methods and move towards mechanisation to raise quality and productivity of poultry meat and eggs.

 

The conference was arranged by the Pakistan Poultry Association Faisalabad with the cooperation of multinational medicine companies.

 

The minister said: "Rapid economic development is resulting in considerable pressure on the poultry sector to increase its output, as demand for meat and eggs are increasing rapidly along with the population." Therefore, he said, "The production by the poultry sector needs to be increased substantially."

 

He said that poultry production has emerged as a good substitute for beef and mutton.

 

"Its importance can be judged from the fact that according to farm statistics, almost every family in rural areas and every fifth family in urban areas are associated with poultry production activities in one way or the other," he said. "The government is providing all possible incentives to develop it at an accelerated pace," he added.

 

To further promote poultry production, the government has provided various incentives for promotion of eggs and poultry meat exports in international markets and to compete with China and other countries. He said the Middle East had a vast potential for Pakistani Halal meat.

 

The minister said that the government was already spending huge funds on improving quality poultry production and exports, through updating poultry development and research wings at all levels.

 

He further underlined the imperative need of joint ventures and more investments from the private sector in research and development, to meet the growing needs of white meat in the country.

 

Addressing the association leaders, Haji Altaf Haider, Dr Hussain Sarosh Akram and Raza Mehmood Khurshid said that poultry farmers as well as breeders were facing many problems regarding multiple local taxes. They demanded that the number of taxes should be reduced and electricity should be provided to poultry farmers according to the industrial tariff instead of the expensive commercial tariff.

 

"Multiple local taxes and commercial tariff of electricity are yielding a negative impact over poultry production, and investors are shy due to gradually increasing costs of production," they said.

 

After the inaugural session, the Federal Minister for Railways also inaugurated a poultry industry exhibition and visited various stalls.