Contain the abnormally high poultry feed prices

Regarding the complaint against the prevailing high price of chicken and eggs, Bangladesh’s poultry farmers and businessmen invariably cite that this is due to high poultry feed prices in the market which is rather true to some extent.

But it is quite not understandable why locally produced feed should be costlier when in the international market poultry feed ingredients dropped in the second quarter of this calendar year.

Apart from the high feed prices, there are two other reasons, farmers say, for which, chicken and eggs have gone beyond the capacity of most people in Bangladesh in these days of high food inflation.

Fall in egg production and market manipulation by a section of unscrupulous middlemen are also blamed for the price hike.

In Bangladesh poultry feed is produced out of maize, soybean meal and rice polish.

Reportedly almost 70 per cent of these ingredients have to be imported.

Therefore, it is now absolutely necessary to contain the poultry feed producers who are, like businessmen in every sector, making hefty money manipulating the feed market apparently through forming syndicate.

We can here point out the sudden price hike of broiler chicken as the month of Ramzan approached this year.

Poultry farmers as well as businessmen did not have any moral compunction to raise the price of the broiler chicken per kilo to 280-290.

At that time also feed price was blamed for the hike in price which was a lie.

Broiler chicken is now selling at Tk 180 per kilo which is still not reasonable.

Reportedly, soybean meal sold at $519 per tonne in the April-June period of the current year, down 4.94 per cent year-on-year, according to World Bank data.

Maize sold at $275 per tonne, registering a 19.59 per cent drop year-on-year.

According to the Feed Industries Association of Bangladesh (FIAB) that represents the country’s feed millers who cater to an annual demand for roughly 75 lakh tonnes to 80 lakh tonnes of feed, only maize prices had gone down 15 per cent.

But soybean meal soared 20 per cent. Obviously, there is a price manipulation here.

If the poultry feed prices could be lowered according to the price of the ingredients in the international market and market manipulators are brought to book, there is no reason why the price of chicken would not come down even more.