Parent stock farmers have voiced their concerns over extremely low prices of the day-old chick for the past two years. The concerns from the Pakistan Poultry Association (PPA) surfaced on Wednesday when it said in a statement, "The current day-old chick prices have gone down to between Rs 2 and Rs 4 while the cost of production is well above Rs 35 per day-old chick as evaluated by the Commissioner Animal Husbandry for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa High Court in Peshawar back in 2012. The current cost is even higher."
The association also claimed that the serious loss to farmers had already started by way of premature selling of their breeding flocks for meat while cancelling some of their orders for placement of parents stocks, which would lead to reduction in production of parents by parent stock producers.
"Grandparent farmers have no option but to reduce their imports of grandparents a decision which will be further accentuated by the prevalent import duties of 21 percent. Once the grandparent placement is reduced, it could take up between two and a half and three years for it to return to the position it has dropped during which the broiler chick production will be substantially reduced, thus supply of table birds and meat will be reduced, too, since the prices will dramatically shoot up," it claimed.
"In the face of the 21-percent import duty, the curtailment of imports will begin at a much earlier stage than it will have with duty free imports. All seeds for food production such as those for vegetables, cash crops, and so forth, are subject to a maximum of three-to-five-percent import duty.
The poultry seed is the only one which has been subject to a 21-percent import duty. The 21-percent one on grandparents amounts to Rs 690 on one day-old female baby chick, which when grown up produces female parents. There are other levies and taxes amounting to Rs 270 per female grandparent chick; the major being landing charges of one percent and half a percent by the Civil Aviation." The association also suggested that the entire import duty, including the regulatory duty, be withdrawn immediately.
It went on to argue its case. "There is no cogent reason to levy the regulatory import duty on grandparents. They are neither produced in the country nor are they a luxury item. The grandparents are produced by only three genetic research companies in the world - all of which are American companies. The grandparents are being imported by only four or five companies in Pakistan and the total quantity of imports is less than 400,000 female grandparents per annum, which is known as the 'D-Line'.
The total revenue for the exchequer will be an insignificant amount but the total burden of the cost of the import duty has to be borne by the day-old baby GP Chick which, we are certain, cannot be borne by them. It will have to be borne by consumers in the face of increased prices because of the ultimate lower production of parent stocks."
The association finally talked up the poultry industry by contributing substantially to filling up the protein gap and the food demand and recommended that the import duty be kept at the three-percent import duty.
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