Pakistan Poultry Association (PPA) is highly appreciative of the government’s support that has been provided in the budget 2017-18 through the judicious understanding of respected Minister for Finance, Senator Ishaq Dar and Advisor to PM on Revenue Haroon Akhter, to the poultry farming sector for the purpose of modernisation.
Our request for reducing the import duty on grandparent stocks and parent stocks, being the basic multiplication seed for poultry, will be helpful in expanding the farming sector.
Our request for bringing the poultry farming machinery sales tax at par with agriculture greenhouse tunnel farming especially because of having a commonality has not been fully accepted but the reduction has been provided in the levy of sales tax, which will indeed help to some extent in bringing modernization to the poultry sector.
Our request in support of value addition to the poultry sector by making the processing sector fighting fit against duty and sales tax-free imports of poultry products under FTA and MFN with various countries has not been accepted.
It would be extremely unfair if we are made to compete against imports of processed chicken meat and its products importable under FTA and MFN at 0pc, 5pc and 10pc customs duty from Malaysia, India and China respectively, whereas our inputs to produce those products have an incidence of 36.90pc to 58.40pc which includes 20pc customs duty, 15pc regulatory duty and 17pc sales tax on duty paid value.
There is a lot of talk about value addition at various levels but little is being done to harness the potential of value addition in the field of agriculture and livestock. Establishing slaughterhouses, value addition and freezing units is the only way to stabilise the prices of agriculture produce and all those perishable products, which have a fluctuating demand and supply and fluctuating production patterns.
The perishable products have to be converted into stable, non-perishable branded products, which would ensure continued availability in the face of fluctuating demands. Poultry demand and prices fluctuate with the Islamic calendar and production fluctuates on account of roller coaster prices, adverse climatic conditions, diseases, etc. In order to equalise demand and supply, freezing and storage is the only way to stabilise demand and supply, which would be a great benefit to the consumers and the farmers. Today, the farmer can neither forecast the demand nor his prices. He remains in the dark; either produces too much and ruins himself or produces too little which hurts the consumers.
Value addition and branding bring tremendous benefits in terms of quality, revenue to the government and, of course, continuous availability as per demand without a sudden increase in prices because of a sudden increase in demand. The Association maintains that processing and value addition of as little as 12pc of the total 1.4 billion broilers that are produced, would yield a revenue of over Rs 3.8 billion through income tax, sales tax on packing materials, advertising, electricity and sales tax on other miscellaneous inputs and in addition, workers’ social security, workers’ profit participation fund, workers’ education cess, etc. to the Exchequer.
