How the slaughter ban threatens India's dairy industry
January 25, 2018 12:53
It's not just slaughterhouses and leather tanneries that are affected by the government's ban on the sale of cattle destined for slaughter at animal markets across the country.
'Deprived of the option of turning their spent milkers into hamburgers, the farmers who make up India's 5.3 trillion rupee dairy industry have little incentive to expand their herds, which threatens government plans to expand the milk supply,' report Anindya Upadhyay, Pratik Parija, Kanika Sood and P R Sanjai in bloomberg.com.
'Yogurt maker Danone SA is closing a factory near Delhi and exiting India's market for fresh and long-life milk products to concentrate on its "best-performing' nutrition and infant-formula brands, the Paris-based company said in a Jan. 12 statement,' they point out.
Then there is the violence. 'Last year, 11 people died in attacks by so-called cow vigilantes'"the deadliest year since IndiaSpend, a data journalism website, began tracking the hate crimes in 2010,' the report points out.
'The crackdown is driving more dairy farmers to swap their cows for water buffaloes. The beasts already produce more than half of India's milk and are preferred by some farmers, in part because they tolerate heat better. Still, their output of 5.2 kilograms of milk a day is about a quarter less than what the country's Holstein-cross cows average, and it's significantly less than the 28 kilograms yielded by American cows,' the reporters point out, here.
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