The National Egg Coordination Committee (NECC) had been expressing concernabout lifting of quantitative restriction on import of poultry products asper the WTO commitments. Free import of poultry products especially chickenmeat had the potential to kill domestic poultry industry as had happened inRussia and Sri Lanka it was feared. US recently exported chicken legs toRussia at 22 cents per pound (Rs 35/kg) inclusive of freight and dutieswhereas the domestic price in the local market is Rs 90 per kg.

Anuradha Desai, chairperson of the Venkateshwara Hatcheries Group, whospearheaded the campaign as chairperson of the NECC, says this step is inthe right direction and is a major fillip and morale booster for thepoultry industry which is currently going through an unprecedented crisisdue to high input costs and unremunerative prices.

With Nationalist Congress Party president, Sharad Pawar and Andhra PradeshChief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu working behind seeking protection for thepoultry sector, the finance minister has duly obliged.

"We were worried about the dumping of `poultry waste' by US companies," shesays. In the US, there is clear preference for white meat or just breastfillets and the entire cost of bird is recovered from these parts. Chickenlegs are a waste and have to be got rid of at any price and take for examplejust one company in US was holding unsold stock of over one lakh chickenlegs, says Desai. This could find its way to India and destroy the Indianpoultry industry. Though India is the cheapest producer of eggs in the worldand enjoys economies of scale it is no match to the US, where the industryis more than ten times the size of the Indian industry. While the Indianpoultry industry may have got a reprieve Desai say there is a need for along term vision for the sector and is working on it. A road map for theindustry should be out later this year, Desai says.