Hindu-dominated India has started hitting its own multi-billion dollar beef and buffalo meat trade, with exports falling in the last six months as traders run short of supplies paving way for Pakistan to act fast to boost its beef and buffalo meat exports.
According to Pakistani meat exporters, India is one of the world's biggest buffalo meat exporters and April-September shipments fell 13.2 percent from a year ago to 598,901 tones.
In recent weeks, suppliers of buffalo meat have been roughed up by Hindu mobs and it may be permanent setbacks to trade as some Indian politicians even call for a complete ban on the meat export industry, which generated about $5 billion in sales last year. Despite having the eighth largest herd of cattle and the third largest herd of goats in the world, Pakistan's animal population is very scattered, which makes procurement of the animals for the abattoir expensive.
According to report, India exported 2.4 million tonnes of beef and veal in FY2015, compared to 2 million tonnes by Brazil and 1.5 million by Australia. These three countries account for 58.7 percent of all the beef exports in the world. India itself accounts for 23.5 percent of global beef exports. This is up from a 20.8 per cent share last year. They said that most of India's buffalo meat exports go to Asian countries - Asia receives more than 80 percent, while Africa takes around 15 percent. Within Asia, Vietnam is the largest recipient, at 45 percent.
Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FPCCI) Standing Committee on Agriculture Produce & Food Exports, Chairman Ahmad Jawad said that after the ban on slaughtering cows in India would provide a good chance to Pakistan to capture $4.5 billion left over market. He said India's exports of beef are on the rise even as several states expand their bans on the slaughter of cows and bullocks, opportunity for us to capture their rest of the share internationally.
Though India has been the largest exporter of beef in the world since last year, and has further widened its lead over second-ranked Brazil with a projected total of 2.4 million tons exported in 2015 against Brazil's 2 million. But now India's role in the global meat trade sticks out in the largely Hindu country where vegetarianism is widespread.
Although the slaughter of cows, sacred for the Hindus that make up India's majority population, has long been banned in several parts of the country, states like Maharashtra of India. The USDA report predicts that global beef exports overall will rise to a record 10.2 million tons, 3 percent higher than the October 2014 forecast. Similarly, Pakistan ranked 18th in the production of Halal Meat Market and its volume is only 2.9 percent of the global Halal meat production which is a very low.
Pakistan's share in this is not as much as it should be, necessitating extra efforts on the part of the government to give much-needed boost to this sector. As there is no Muslim country included in the list of first ten Halal meat exporters. "Jawad said Pakistan can play a major role in the global Halal meat industry and has the potential to become a market leader since it has all the required ingredients.
Regardless Halal meat exports in Pakistan grew by 9.5 percent in fiscal year 2014, reaching a record high of $230 million and still experts say that the market has even more room to grow. Since 2003, Pakistan's Halal meat exports have grown at a compound annualised growth rate (CAGR) of 29.1 percent, growing from $14 million in 2003 to $230 million in fiscal 2014, according to data from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.
Jawad also viewed Pakistan has a 100 percent Halal production base and has direct access to 470 million consumers in Central Asia, Middle East and Europe. Now Pakistan has a great opportunity to gain a big share in the global Halal market by enhancing production and improving quality which could also give certain boost to our exports which went down day-by-day.
Comments
Comments are closed.