Falling livestock GDP

Last week BR Research flagged how livestock sector, which has 60 percent share in agriculture GDP has been growing at a seemingly flat pace for year, and yet no one questions those numbers. (See Facts, fiction & poor press engagement, June 11, 2019)

The reason why livestock GDP, where cow and buffalo combined have the biggest share, grows at a flat pace every year is because the statistics department simply assumes that livestock growth rate between the last two livestock census (1996 and 2006) holds true today as well. That assumption is wrong and would have been proven such, had the statistics wing been conducting livestock census at least every ten years, and intermediate surveys at every three years.

In 2016, Punjab livestock department did their own livestock census and their numbers challenged the federal government’s estimates used for livestock GDP. Punjab’s 2016 livestock census revealed that total livestock in the province was about 25 percent lower than the provincial number for 2016 estimated by federal government for that year, which as mentioned earlier is simply based on inter-census growth.

In some Punjab districts it was 30 percent lower, in others, it was 40 percent. Only in two districts, one being Dera Ghazi Khan, the number from provincial census was higher than the federal government estimate for that district. In all other districts it was lower than the federal estimate. These results are very alarming, and sources in Sindh livestock department say that the size of Sindh’s livestock has also dwindled noticeably, albeit, they haven’t done their own survey as yet.

There are a host of reasons behind weak or negative growth in livestock across various districts in Sindh and Punjab. At the one end, livestock industry does not get sufficient credit from the banking sector, and at the other, public sector investment in the sector had fallen between 2010 and 2015 – the years after devolution.

Prior to devolution, federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (Minfal) used to spend some money on livestock. After devolution, developmental spending on this sector fell sharply, though in Punjab it did pick up after 2016 but by then, the damage had been done.

Meanwhile private sector investment remained poor as regulation of milk prices by DMG officials doesn’t create enough incentives across the milk and meat value chain. The rise of corporate sector – packaged milk - triggered some investments in the sector ten years ago, but not enough to move the needle since packaged milk industry is still no more than 10 percent of the total milk market. The rest of the milk is mostly supplied by farmers who have no more than 3-5 animals.

Moreover, there is a problem of pre-mature culling of the animals before they complete their calving cycle. This is somewhat limited to Karachi and some urban areas of Punjab and KP, but still a major problem nevertheless that is hurting local livestock growth.

Pakistan’s indigenous breeds have a useful life of about 10-years during which they are supposed to yield about 7 calves or crops during their lifetime. But when local pregnant animals from rural areas are brought to milking parlours in urban or peri-urban areas, their offspring is slaughtered soon after it reaches the slaughtering age, (sometimes even earlier which is done illegally). This is because the calf whether male or female has a cost; it drinks the milk of its mother cow, which the owners of milking parlours in urban-peri-urban areas would rather sell. Remember these are milking parlours and not cattle or dairy farms per se.

By the end of the milking period of the cow, these milking parlours sell those cows to the slaughtering houses instead of sending them back to the rural areas where they could graze, become healthy and become pregnant again and come back to urban areas for milking. This means that a cow does not complete its crop cycle of seven cows.

In other words, the herd size catering to Karachi and some urban centres in Punjab and KP, that should have grown at the multiple of 7 and would give milk 7 times has not been happening for the last 18 years. And that’s not all. Many farmers give toxin laden food to their animals – such as cottonseed cake – to increase the milk yield of the animals. But because of the toxins, the animal’s calving frequency goes down, leading to lesser births per cow/buffalo. Both these factors in turn are also reducing the gene pool of good high-quality cows and buffalos, whatever little is left of them.

Add to these factors the underlying trend of urbanisation; young people from rural areas are either migrating to the cities or migrating to semi-manufacturing or service sector jobs closer to rural areas. As a result, if the grandfather had 15-20 animals; the grandson now has 3-4 animals.

The system of modern governance is such you can’t fix what you don’t measure. By extension if the measurement is flawed and makes everything look hunky dory, as is the case with Pakistan’s livestock GDP, then there is no reason to fix anything, is there? (See also Livestock lives matter! March 18, 2019)