Mr. Neeraj Kumar Srivastava, Managing Director – Novus International (South & Southeast Asia), Former Chairman – CLFMA of India shares his views with Poultry TRENDS magazine, on the Indian Poultry Industry Outlook: Challenges, Opportunities, way forward and outlook.

Current Challenges:
The poultry industry which contributes about 17-20% to the country’s gross economic value added, faced a deep contraction in profit margins in the last 2-3 years due to various unprecedented reasons like drastic increases in the feed raw materials, cost of production for meat, eggs, and other poultry products. On top of this disease, challenges have been a common phenomenon throughout this period.

The lack of infrastructure in terms of better logistics, marketing, and processing of poultry products is another big challenge in the country. As a result of that, there is a huge fluctuation in prices of poultry, broiler, and eggs sometimes leading to big continuous losses to the poultry industry.

Opportunities:
Growing per capita income and consumption, combined with education on protein intake will be the key drivers of growth.

• Growth in per capita income is shifting consumer preferences from cereals to fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat.
• As per McKinsey report, the per capita chicken consumption is set to grow from 3.2 to 9.1 Kg by 2030.
• Share of Poultry & other meat in household food consumption is expected to grow from 12 % to 24% by 2030.

To feed the 1.4 billion people of India, animal protein is the only option. India has a deficiency of more digestible animal proteins as compared to the rest of the world. Also, a gap in per capita consumption of both egg and chicken compared to the global average opens a big opportunity.

With better scientific know-how and safe food production, India can scale up poultry production in the country and compete in the world market in the coming years.

Despite these challenges and with the increase in demand for animal protein, the Indian poultry industry is bound to grow both in eggs and meat. To compete and overcome the challenge of escalating prices of feed ingredients and commodities industry needs to deploy various resources to curb and win over the current situation. The role of big industry players and support from policymakers and the government of India is going to play a vital role in mitigating these challenges.

We have seen a positive momentum from last quarter in the prices of broilers, and eggs throughout the country. Broiler prices are yet to improve in the north and east, to come up to break even or above the cost of production. However, the south, and west are doing well. Egg prices are good throughout the country.

Recently, the animal husbandry department of Maharashtra has told that Maharashtra has the capacity to produce 1 to 1.25 crore eggs per day and the department has been working on a plan to meet the need “more than 2.25 crore eggs are consumed than in Maharashtra per day”. Maharashtra is facing a shortage of eggs. Now, as it is facing an egg crunch, the animal husbandry department has come up with a scheme to increase its production in the state. This opens a huge opportunity for growth in layer birds in Maharashtra.

Similarly, the biggest state of India UP with a close to 23.3 crores human population has declared to develop poultry production in the state leading to a massive development and growth opportunity for the poultry industry in the state.

He added a very positive move from the government of India for allowing the production of the LPAI vaccine within the country is going to support Indian poultry producers by eliminating huge losses. In addition to this, the government has come up with an animal husbandry infrastructure development fund of 15000 crores to develop and support various industry-associated sectors.

The big news in India has exported 2 million eggs to Malaysia. There is a good demand for eggs in the country.

The way forward and outlook:
Livestock and Poultry contribute close to 5% of the total GVA of the country and provide employment to about 8.8% of the population, it has undoubtedly been the largest provider of animal protein for both non-vegetarian and vegetarian in the country, with a population of approximately 540 million of livestock and 900 million of poultry.

It’s estimated that, over the next 40 years, we will need to produce as much food as we have produced in the last 8000 years of agriculture with the rising human population. It means, the demand for protein-rich food – broiler meat, egg & milk – will rise progressively. Considering these steady demands, the Indian poultry industry would witness strong growths – 8 to 10% in broiler meat & 4-6 % in eggs. Down the line, with the increase in consumer awareness & preferences, it is required to give more emphasis on safety & clean production with the adoption of new technologies across the value chain to gain consumer confidence. Further, adopting innovative technologies & digitalization at various levels of operations would not just improve the efficiencies but also helps in producing safe food for humans.

I am of the opinion, with a focus on producing safe foods, there would be strong growth in the processing industry and the exports as well.