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Currently, 70% of meat & poultry and fish production is in hands of unorganised sector as a result, their processing levels remain stagnant between 2% and 4%, even though domestic meat and poultry production has already exceeded 1 lakh million tonnes levels annually. Fish production is estimated to have touched over 7.25 million tonnes.
It is estimated that there are 40,000 food processing units in India of which 10,000 units are engaged in meat, poultry and fish processing and remaining 30,000 processing units exclusively process fruits and vegetables which in percentage terms process a mere 2% of their total production, adds the ASSOCHAM.
According to its President, Mr. Sajjan Jindal, while 80% of the total fruit and vegetables production in economies of scale is processed to derive higher valuation, India one of the leading fruit and vegetable producer, process a mere 2% of its fruit and vegetables since R&D facilities are hardly developed in India for doing the job.
As regards to meat and fish processing, extremely cumbersome licensing process and stringent rules and regulations, processing units to suitably process meat poultry and fish production are not coming up at large scale and remain within jurisdiction of unorganised sector.
Due to this, only 50% of India’s meat production is exported to countries in the Middle East, the pre-dominance of which is for buffalo meat. According to latest figure available with the ASSOCHAM, India exports a little over 5 lakh MT of meat to gulf and neighbouring countries including part of Africa continent.
Of total 7.25 million tonnes of fish production, over 50% is exported to ASEAN region which is a good performance because in fishing sector, India has been doing reasonably well on export front even without developing higher fish processing technologies. This is because of coastal benefit that India enjoys, said ASSOCHAM President.
The ASSOCHAM has recommended to the Food Processing Ministry to accord Industry Status on Food Processing Sector as India presents a huge opportunity for food sector because of its rising income levels. Due to this factor, the number of households with annual incomes between US$ 5000 and US$ 25,000 will rise from 76 million currently to 127 million in 2014-15. India will soon have the largest population of young people in the world. These changes will be reflected in increased demand for processed food.
The ASSOCHAM has further highlighted that Indian Inc. losses more than 25% of its produce due to poor post-harvesting equipment, inadequate food processing technology and storage facilities.
Poor infrastructural facilities such as irregular power supply, high inland transportation costs, lack of cold chain facilities and adequate storage facilities are some of the problems faced in the transportation and marketing of processed products. This according to ASSOCHAM continues to impeded the development of large scale processing units and therefore, the issues be tackled at priority levels. Since food processing industry has huge potential in next couple of years, it is going to attract huge investments especially to process fruit, vegetables, meat, poultry and fish products in India provided this industry is completely de-licensed. Currently, the government regulates its through various state agenda including MPEDA. This needs to be deregulated so that India’s food processing goes up to higher levels and does not stagnate in totality at 6%.
http://www.assocham.org/prels/shownews.php?id=2094
