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World agricultural prices shot up in 2008 and stayed high for several years. So farm production and exports boomed globally, and India too benefited. That global cycle is now reversing, and global surpluses are piling up. In this milieu, India must focus on efficiency, and on items in which it has the greatest comparative advantage. Animal husbandry has been booming. India has a major comparative advantage here. It is one of the biggest exporters of buffalo meat, and a significant exporter of sheep and goats. But export economics have been being disrupted by Hindutva. For decades, surplus bulls and oxen were sold for slaughter, along with aged cows that no longer gave milk. This ensured the farmers some thousands of rupees per surplus animal. The Hindutva drive against cow slaughter, including mob lynchings, has eroded or ended sales, impoverishing farmers. Farmers often turn such animals loose, leaving them to eat the crops of neighbours, or crowd out productive goats and sheep from shrinking pastures.
Worse, the distinction between bulls and buffaloes is getting erased. The cow may be sacred but the buffalo is not. Yet in BJP-ruled states, thugs now extort, on threat of lynching, money from buffalo transporters, shrinking supplies to slaughterhouses. Many states have closed down dozens of slaughterhouses saying these are illegal. But the deeper problem is that municipalities are not implementing their legal obligation to licence enough slaughterhouses, and the resulting scarcity induces illegal slaughter. Exporters have slaughterhouses of proven top quality to cater to global markets. So exporters should be harnessed in a crash programme to build slaughterhouses in every municipality. This will also increase the supply of hides to leather exporters. Alas, this does not figure in the new export policy.