Poultry farmers are losing 4 taka on every egg, they say, with the production cost at the farm level standing at 10 taka against a sale price of just 6 – even though eggs sell for more than 10 taka at the consumer level. The Bangladesh Poultry Industries Association (BPIA) has demanded a profitable farm-gate price for eggs, a digital database of all poultry farmers in the country, and special measures to protect marginal farmers.
BPIA president Mosharraf Hossain Chowdhury raised the demands at a news conference at the Dhaka Press Club on Saturday. The association’s secretary general, Md. Safir Rahman, and joint secretary general Anjan Majumder also spoke, following a human chain earlier by farmers from around the country.
Mosharraf Hossain Chowdhury said that although production costs had risen, farmers had long been forced to sell eggs below cost, running daily losses and falling into debt, and that many were shutting their farms. At a loss of 4 taka per egg, the sector was losing about 500 crore taka a month, he said. He added that the corporate tax in the sector was 27.50 percent, higher than in competing countries. Prices of almost all inputs – fish, chicks, medicine, vaccines, electricity, gas and transport – had risen, he said, but farm-gate egg prices had not been adjusted accordingly, leaving marginal farmers, the main drivers of the industry, in the deepest crisis. Some 64,000 farmers had dropped out of the sector over the past five years, he said, and the association called for a “fair price” system for eggs, like those for paddy and sugarcane.
Secretary general Md. Safir Rahman said feed accounted for 70 to 80 percent of farmers’ costs, and that a 4 percent advance income tax on imported feed ingredients should be withdrawn – a tax he said neighboring countries did not impose on raw materials. The association also called for a farmer ID for every registered farmer, upazila-level cold storage, cooperative production and marketing, low-interest loans, vaccines and food support, and effective monitoring to reduce the influence of middlemen in the market.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report