Indian state’s beef ban to boost chicken sales

MUMBAI: Poultry firms expect demand to pick up after a ban on beef in India’s western state of Maharashtra, with other states ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party also aiming to toughen laws on livestock slaughter.

India is the world’s second largest beef exporter and fifth biggest consumer, although its majority Hindu community views cows to be sacred, and Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is pushing for legal steps to “protect and promote the cow”.

Such curbs, which critics call the outcome of Modi loyalists pushing a Hindu agenda, will cost jobs and hit India’s exports, but spell good news for many poultry farms. India consumed 2.3 million tons of beef last year until October – higher than the whole of 2013 – while exports were 1.95 million tons in the same period.

Prasanna Pedgaonkar, deputy general manager at a chicken processing company, expects the measure to push up sales 5 percent for his firm, Venky’s, which owns English football club Blackburn Rovers, from a current daily figure of 1 500 tons.

Even without a ban on beef, which is particularly popular in the southern and north-eastern parts of India and tends to be cheaper than mutton and chicken, India’s poultry output has been scaling annual records as higher incomes boost demand for meat.

Owners of Mumbai shops that sell chicken say the effect of the beef ban has yet to show up in prices, although demand is starting to pick up despite the onset of summer, when consumption usually slows. – Reuters