Centre mulls poultry venture capital fund

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New Delhi: In a bid to boost the poultry sector, particularly small farmers who have been reeling under the impact of repeated occurrences of bird flu disease and falling exports, the government is considering a proposal to launch a special venture capital fund for the sector.

The fund will help small farmers in the sector through promotion of value addition in poultry products. The proposed fund will also have a capital subsidy. "We think that capital subsidy is better than soft or interest-free loans to farmers," an agriculture ministry official told FF.

The proposed fund, which is under active consideration of the government, is expected to be launched shortly with a subsidy component of Rs 200 crore.

Despite a relatively large size, the poultry industry, which directly or indirectly employs more than 20 lakh people and is worth around Rs 20,000 crore, comprises mainly small players, thus limiting their scope of value addition and expansion.

Thus the government is considering several proposals for ensuring growth of the processing of poultry and ensure that incidents like bird flu does not adversely impact the sector.

Recently, the government approved implementation of the poultry development scheme during the 11th Five Year Plan for supporting the industry.

Last month, the Cabinet committee on economic affairs approved the implementation of a Centrally sponsored scheme on poultry development with a total outlay of Rs 150 crore. The scheme will be implemented from the current fiscal till the end of of the 11th Five Year Plan period (2007-12).

The scheme will focus on assistance to state poultry farms and rural backyard poultry development and poultry estates. The backward poultry development will cover 3.85 lakh BPL families to mainly enable them to gain supplementary income and nutritional support.

Another project cleared by the CCEA is 'Assistance to State Poultry Farms', which aims at strengthening existing state poultry farms so as to enable them to provide inputs, mainly in terms of providing improved stocks suitable for rural backyard rearing.

The poultry industry has stressed the need for checking the volatility in feed ingredients prices that are hitting them hard. The industry consumes close to 15 million tonne of feed annually with an estimated value of Rs 15,000 crore.

Poultry in India is growing at 7-8% per annum, contributing 8% of the value of livestock and 2.5% of total agriculture products.