For ensuring that the country has enough productive livestock to meet the rising demand of milk and meat products over the next few years, the government must focus its policy towards breeding of quality livestock along with ensuring supply of adequate seed, a Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) official on Wednesday said.
“Traditional means of selection of productive livestock is time consuming process, we need to identify better milk producing animals from indigenous cattle population,” KM Bujarbaruah, deputy director general (animal science), ICAR told FE. According to ICAR, out of around 100 million livestocks, 47 millions are buffaloes, 11 million are cross breed and 45 million belong to indigenous cattle varieties. “For meeting rising demand of milk over the next seven years, we can select high yielding 20 million cattles from the indigenous varieties,” Bujarbaruah said.
Similarly on the acute shortage of feed, ICAR data indicates that in case of dry fodder against demand of 509 million tonne there is availability of 459 million tonne, a shortfall of 10%. However, in case of green fodder and concentrates, demands are 648 million tonne and 88 million against the availability of only 491 million tonne and 62 million tonne, respectively. “We have a significant shortage of 32% and 25% green fodder and concentrates,” a senior official with ICAR said.
Even in the case of semen doses, the country faces shortage as against demand of 45 million doses ‘we have 12 million doses available,’ Bujarbaruah said. He said that health of livestock is crucial to increase the production of milk and eggs.
According to World Health Organisaton norm, the country needs to produce 160 billion eggs by 2015 against the current production of around 50 billion eggs. “Even if we achieve the half of WHO target, it requires enormous effort,” he said. Similarly the meat demand in the country is going to rise from 6 million tonne at present to 10.5 million tonne by 2015.
India has about 16% of cattle, 56% of buffalo and 16.2% of goat population of the world. According to ministry of agriculture, contribution of livestock to total GDP has increased from 4.8% during 1980-81 to about 6.5% during 2002-03 and is currently 5.3%. The contribution of livestock to agriculture GDP has gone up from 13.8% in 1981 to 23.8% during 2002- 2003.
For deliberate on the key issues concerning the livestock development, around 300 scientists are to participate in a World conference on animal nutrition during February 14-17 being held here in collaboration with ICAR, International Livestock Research Institute, Ethiopia and Indian Veterinary Research Institute.