Corn duty hike: leads to increase cost of poultry feed

Recently notified hike in the import-duty on corn (better known as maize in India) could increase poultry feed costs by as much as 50 paise to a rupee a kg unless animal feed millers switched to other ingredients of less efficiency and lower nutritive value, as release by the Poultry Federation of India (PFI). The federation has pointed out that farmers those make a livelihood out of poultry cannot afford such a hike in their input costs.

On June 12, ’00, the Union ministry of finance had notified a duty rate of 15% on imports of corn, one of the major ingredients of feed. This had been combined with a TRQ (tariff-rate quota) where, after the first 350,000 tonnes imported during this financial year, the duty would be escalated to 50%. The duty hike is in consonance with the WTO Article 28 Negotiations, initialled between India and the US on December 28, last year, whereby duty rates had been lowered for some items and hiked for others with a TRQ thrown in.

Last year govt. had fixed a minimum support price of Rs. 4,150 a tonne, open-market prices for maize had, spurted to Rs.7, 500 a tonne before arrivals of imported corn had helped stabilise prices. The federation has projected this year’s consumption of corn at 12.7m tonnes (over five million tonnes as poultry feed), as against a domestic production of 10.6m tonnes. While the shortfall was 2.1m tonnes, the usage of other grains could reduce the deficit to one million tonnes, sources said.


Market Update
(Eggs)