The National Egg Coordination Committee (NECC) has called upon the All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC) to exempt eggs, poultry feed and feed ingredients from the purview of the ongoing nation-wide transport strike.
In a statement released here today, its chairperson Anuradha Desai said that like milk, eggs were an essential item of food and perishable in nature.
Desai pointed out that lakhs of poultry farmers across the country were already incurring huge losses due to the widespread drought and lack of remunerative prices for eggs. They were now saddled with mounting stocks of eggs and were faced with their perishing, Desai voiced the concern of NECC.
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Unless tranported immediately, the eggs, whose production is at 12 crore per day in the country, would be spoiled, thereby causing huge losses for farmers. This would also lead to spiralling of egg prices in the retail market.
Elaborating the impact of strike, she said that shortage of poultry feed and feed ingredients would result in large-scale mortality of birds due to starvation.
At any given time, the country would have about 120 million broilers and an equal number of layer birds spread over thousands of farms.
Due to financial constraints, farmers do not normally maintain stocks for more than four days, and the current strike had paralysed the replenishments.
NECC also appealed to the government to include eggs, poultry feed and feed ingredients in the list of essential commodities to facilitate their free movement as in the case of milk and other essential food items.