Image: Hindustan Times

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has ordered a nationwide stay on the Central government’s new cattle slaughter notification. The SC said that “livelihoods cannot be subjected to uncertainties”. The SC further said that the stay directed by the Madras HC will apply to the entire country. The Madras HC had stayed the controversial ban on May 30.

The Central government responded by saying that it will change the rules and re-notify the changes.

On May 29, the A gazette notification, titled Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2017 by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change states that no one can bring cattle to an animal market unless he or she has furnished a written declaration that the cattle will not be sold for the purpose of slaughter. Further, upon sale of cattle, the animal market committee will take an “undertaking” that the animals are for agricultural purposes and not for slaughter.
 
On June 15, the SC had issued notice to the Centre on the ban.. The Meghalaya Assembly had passed a unanimous resolution opposing the ban on June 12.  West Bengal and Kerala too had vehemently opposed the ban.
 
 

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This was a Facebook post last month by Maharudra Mangnale, farmer, author and journalist from Shirur-Tajband village in Latur district in south-central Maharashtra. The irony was directed at the tightening of restrictions on cattle markets and what this would do to the farmer.
 
There is a ban on the sale of cattle for slaughter in Maharashtra, extended on March 4, 2015, to bulls, bullocks and calves. On May 23, 2017, the Centre notified new rules banning the sale and purchase of cattle from animal markets for slaughter under Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.
 
Why is this increasing squeeze on the cattle market for slaughter making Marathwada’s farmers anxious? In this two-part series, IndiaSpend travels through the rural hinterland looking for answers. It looks at  why small landholders and landless farmers who own a major share of the state’s livestock need the freedom to sell unproductive animals to make cattle-rearing viable.
 
The next part will take a close look at the work cycle of two farmers in Marathwada to understand the place cattle occupy in it.
 
Marathwada is a marker of India’s current agricultural distress: 77% of farmers have no more than five acres of land, the region has experienced three years of drought over the last decade, its rural per capita income is Rs 90,460, or Rs 12,547 less than the national average.
 
Cattle rearing and trade form an integral source of farm livelihood in this region. Cattle are essential for agricultural work but there are also 1,614 village-level dairy cooperatives in Marathwada, third highest among the state’s six divisions. Annual milk procurement from these societies was around 20 million litres in 2016.
 
However, there is one important fact about the economic life cycle of cattle whether they are used for milk or agricultural work: It only lasts for about 15 years of their 25 to 30-year life span.
 

Source: Food and Agriculture Organisation; Sheep and goat breeds of India & Guidelines for slaughtering, meat cutting and further processing, United Nations, India Council of Agricultural Research & Tamil Nadu Agricultural University Agritech Portal
 
Farmers, thus, need to be able to sell unproductive cattle. This is especially the case with poor farmers who need to raise money to buy productive cattle and sustain milk procurement or farming. In times of distress, droughts for example, cattle sale helps small farmers raise money for sustenance.
 
To tend to old and unproductive bovines and arrange fodder and water for them is impractical for small and marginal farmers of dry Marathwada. Small landholders and landless farmers account for major share in ownership of livestock, according to the 2015-16 report of the union department of animal husbandry, dairying and fisheries.
 
So the new restrictions are making cattle rearing increasingly unviable. Slaughter traders are having to shut down businesses and farmers are giving up on dairy farming in Marathwada, IndiaSpend investigations found.
 
The new rules mandate a tangle of official procedures that threaten to cripple the thriving livestock markets which are intrinsic to rural Maharashtra’s agrarian culture.

 
New rules complicate cattle sale process
 
Maharashtra government’s Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees (APMCs) run 196 livestock sub-yards within the 300-odd markets that operate in the state. While some animal markets function within the premises on designated days where other agricultural produce is traded, others are located in more interior areas regulated by gram panchayat (village council) bodies.
 
The APMC grants licences to animal traders to purchase and transport animals–cow, buffalo, bull, bullock, calf, goat, sheep etc–that are brought to the market. At present, any person can bring an animal to the market for display and sale. A minimal market licence fee of Rs 10 is charged from the purchaser only if a transaction is made.
 
The only documentation required in a sale is an entry by an APMC or gram panchayat official in a register after the sale. A basic receipt stating the names and addresses of the buyer and seller, the sale price and the animal’s details is issued.
 
Under the latest rules, cattle sale will become a far more complicated process. It will involve the formation of two committees–one at the district level and another at the local body-level–to carry out a more stringent regulation of market activities.
 
Members of these committees, unlike the elected members of APMCs, will be appointed by the state government. They will hold discretionary powers to inspect every animal entering the market. They can stop the entry and sale of “unfit” animals as well as seize animals from their owners in cases of “cruel treatment”, according to sections 11, 12 and 13 of the recent Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2017.
 
“We oppose every law that destroys this current free access to market, limited regulation and freedom of trade,” said Seema Narode, western Maharashtra president of the women’s front of the Shetkari Sanghatana, a farmers’ organisation.
 
The rules are not only arbitrary and detrimental to farmers, but are also removed from ground realities of current trade practices, Narode said.
 
“In western Maharashtra where milk production is a flourishing occupation for farmers, many own jersey (cross-bred) cows which produce greater quantities of milk. But, male calves of these cows cannot be used for agricultural purposes,” she added. “There is no option for us but to sell them.”
 
Leather industry and butchers comprise a huge number of buyers of male calves of cross-bred dairy cows.
 
The story of a cattle market that had to shut shop
 
APMC’s weekly animal market in Udgir town of Latur district recorded a slight sag in sales in the year 2016-17 and first quarter of 2017-18. Sales had steadily soared in the period between 2010-11 and 2015-16 owing to the successive droughts. Farmers in distress often sell cattle to tide over a crunch.
 
Source: Data collected from APMC, Udgir
NOTE: *Figures available up to December 2013; **Up to June 15, 2017
 
Cattle rearing in the region has declined because of two reasons, according to officials: An increase in the use of machines for farming and a fall in the number of traders who purchase animals after the 2015 ban.
 
“Around 10-12 cattle traders who operated out of the market here don’t work here any longer because of the growing hassles they face in transporting cattle,” said BM Patil, APMC secretary, Udgir market.
 
The situation appears to be equally worrying for farmers in Vidarbha.
 
An animal market that gathered at Sawal Mendha village in Bhainsdehi taluka of Baitul district in Madhya Pradesh stopped operating nine months ago. Sawal Mendha borders Amravati district in Maharashtra and served as a market for cattle-rearers within a 30-km radius in Akola, Amravati and Buldhana districts of the state.
 
Those who went to the Sawal Mendha market to trade their animals are now forced to travel 50-90 km to a livestock market in Paratwada village in Amravati district, said Satish Deshmukh, a farmer from Panaj village in Akot taluka of Akola district.
 
“Around four months ago, a few Muslim traders were also threatened and beaten up when they were transporting cattle. No FIR (first information report) was lodged,” said Deshmukh, who is also a member of Shetkari Sanghatana. “The situation is becoming increasingly tense and difficult.”
 
On May 26, 2017, two men were thrashed for possessing beef by seven gau rakshaks (cow vigilantes) in Malegaon taluka of Washim district.
 
The country witnessed 63 crimes of attacks by cow vigilantes, including 28 deaths, across the country in the past seven years, as IndiaSpend reported on June 28, 2017. And 97% of these attacks occurred after the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government came to power in May 2014.
 
“People fear that they will be booked under false cases. I have decided to not nurture cattle until this law is in place,” said Mangnale.
 
In times of distress, as we said, small farmers usually sell their cattle to deal with the crunch. “When farmers are themselves in debt and committing suicides, they don’t have the financial capacity to tend to old cattle and bury them after they die. It is expensive to hire a JCB and dig a pit,” said Mangnale.
 
Govt assistance doesn’t reach enough farmers
 
In 2016-17, Aurangabad district–one of the three districts in Marathwada with the highest bovine population–insured 15,891 cattle. The cattle population of the district stands at 676,180, according to the 2012 livestock census.
 
“Demand for insurance policy is huge. The target given to us was 5,000 cattle. We exceeded it,” said BD Chaudhari, assistant commissioner, animal husbandry department, Aurangabad division.
 
Insurance is given to the cattle owner if the cow, buffalo or bull dies within one to three years of registration for the policy. The amount is estimated by the veterinary doctor depending on the animal’s prevailing market rate and health at the time of registration.
 
Chaudhari admitted that availability of fodder remained a bigger challenge in the region. A state policy that allows distribution of fodder seeds to farmers had up to 2,000 beneficiaries in the year 2015-16 in Aurangabad district. But, this is clearly inadequate–of the 529,861 landholding farmers in the district, 83% have less than 2.5 acres of land and it is not enough to raise fodder.
 
“Because the seeds are provided on 100% subsidy , a limited number of beneficiaries are selected every year based on budget availability,” said a livestock development official from the Aurangabad zilla parishad (district council).
 
‘Cattle markets are a tradition that need to continue’
 
Livestock exhibitions and markets are a part of Maharashtra’s agrarian tradition. Hundreds of cattle of indigenous varieties are displayed and traded every month at these events.
 
A case in point is the 50-year-old bull market, one of the largest in Marathwada, in Hali-Handarguli village, 22 km from Udgir town in Latur district. It functions for eight months between the Dussehra festival (October) and the kharif sowing season (June) every year. The market is known for its Deoni and Lal Kandhari breeds of bulls which are known and prized for their strength and capacity to work in peak summer temperatures.
 
“Are these exhibits and markets also not a part of our tradition?” asked Shankar Anna Dhondge, former Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) legislator from Nanded, countering the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh’s (RSS) narrative of protecting “gauvansh” (cow dynasty) for its “sacredness”.
 
But, cattle commerce in the Hali-Handarguli market, which operates Saturday to Monday, has now fallen considerably. On May 29, 2017, just before the market closed for the sowing season, only three buffaloes were available for sale against at least 100 earlier, according to locals.
 
“The legal perspective (on cattle slaughter) itself is flawed. Farmers do not anyway trade productive cattle for slaughter,” said Mangnale.
 
Traders say that animal markets in Nalegaon, Deoni and Udgir in Latur district’s Udgir taluka bordering Karnataka might have to shut down completely if the Centre’s new notification is implemented.
 
Section 8 of the proposed law states that no animal market can be organised within 25 km of a state border.
 
“The law is made by those in cities, who know nothing about raising cattle,” added Dhondge. “What will those who cannot take care of their own elderly parents and leave them in old age homes tell us about taking care of our old cattle?”
 
Moreover, Section 14 of the new rules also prohibits traditional practices such as painting of horns and decking animals with ornaments for being “cruel and harmful”.
 
“The law is made with a sense of how animals are kept in a factory. What does the government know how much we care for our animals?” Mangnale added.
 
(Kulkarni is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist, who has worked with Haqdarshak–a social enterprise, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan–a non-party people’s political organisation and Hindustan Times–a newspaper.)
 
This is the first of a two-part series.

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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Be careful! In Uttar Pradesh, the cow trade is now almost wholly criminalised. Jitendra Prakash/Reuters

“Even the third generation of Muslim brothers, whom I have seen since my young days, are continuing with their cycle-repairing job,” he said, referring to one of the many menial jobs to which Indian Muslims are often relegated. “Why does such misfortune continue?”

But instead of “bring[ing] about change in their lives,” as Modi promised, his government has made life harder for India’s Muslims by cracking down on the leather and beef industries.
 

Impact on Muslim and Dalit livelihoods

Muslims and Dalits (the marginalised group once known as “untouchables” in the Hindu caste system) are among the poorest in India, and they have very little access to property. By tradition and due to a lack of other opportunities, many work in the leather sector, which employs 2.5 million people nationwide.

Over the past three years, this trade has increasingly made Muslims and Dalits the targets of so-called cow vigilantism – attacks perpetrated by Hindus on cow traders in the name of religion. And legislation adopted in May, which amends the 1960 Prevention of Cruelty on Animals Act, is set to victimise these populations economically.

Among other changes, the new rules mandate that cows, camels and buffalo may be sold to farmers only for agricultural purposes, not for slaughter.

In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, one out of every 1000 work in cow-related industries, including slaughterhouses and the leather industry. The town of Kanpur recently saw several slaughterhouses close down, putting out of work over “400,000 employees linked to leather industries”, according to a Reuters report.
 

The supply of local hides has declined precipitously, leading to a decrease in Indian sales of leather and leather products. From April 2016 to March 2017, total leather exports dropped 3.23% from the previous year, to US$5.67 billion from US$5.9 billion.
India also does enormous trade in meat. In 2015, the main market for its buffalo meat was Vietnam, which buys up US$1.97 million worth of it, followed by Malaysia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Last financial year, annual production was estimated at 6.3 million tonnes and exports totalled US$3.32 billion, according to a report in the Economic Times. That’s down from US$4.15 billion the year before. In Uttar Pradesh alone, attacks on cow related-businesses have already triggered losses of US$601 million on the state’s export business.
 

Coercive measures

States have also introduced several coercive measures aimed at people in the cow businesses. Uttar Pradesh, whose chief minister is a right-wing Hindu fundamentalist, leads the measures.

Illegal slaughterhouses have been at the core of the debate in recent months following a government crackdown in March 2017, as non-compliant facilities struggle to adapt to complex regulations, including locating shops at specific distances from religious places, getting appropriate documents from several administrations or particular freezers.

On June 6 2017, the state issued a new directive to punish cow slaughter and illegal transport of dairy animals under the National Security Act and Gangsters Act, effectively criminalising traders.

This has encouraged harassment of Muslims and Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. Even in the Muslim-majority village of Madora, residents are encouraged to denounce those who engage in slaughtering cows by the promise of a INR50,000 (US$1000) reward.
On the west coast state of Gujarat, cow slaughter is now a non-bailable offence, punishable with life imprisonment, meaning that people who kill a cow will serve the same time as a murderer.

Central Jharkhand and other states ruled by Modi’s BJP party have begun applying similar laws. The national government is also currently considering a petition to give cows an Indian identity card similar to those issued to its citizens.
 

In the name of the cow

These new rules have reinforced the impunity of criminal groups that burn down Muslim and Dalit businesses, terrorise cow traders and brutally beat or kill people. Rebranding themselves as animal activists, cow vigilantes exploit the sanctity of this animal in Hinduism to commit violence, with the tacit endorsement of state and national governments.

The violence has impacted both legal and illegal traders (bulls and buffalo are not included in new regulations), generating panic among flayers, contractors, truck drivers, traders, daily wage earners, who are now abandoning their posts out of fear. The majority are Dalit or Muslim.
 

Hindu slaughterhouse owners, on the other hand, have been largely spared by the wrath of cow vigilantes and onerous regulations. Of the country’s 11 largest meat-exporting companies, eight are Hindu-run.

Flourishing and paradoxical beef trade

None of this will help already-tense Hindu-Muslim relations in India, nor does it seem to bode well for Modi’s “Make in India” initiative to boost the country’s economic production.

According to the campaign website, the government hopes to increase leather exports to US$9 billion by 2020, from its present level of US$5.85 billion, and bring the domestic market to US$18 billion, doubling its current value.
 

To do so, the government says it will focus on maintaining India’s comparative advantages in production and labour costs and ensure the availability of skilled manpower for new or existing production units. But that may be hard when Muslim and Dalit workers are being systematically singled out and harassed.

Can Modi’s government really afford a crackdown on cow economics?
 

Afroz Alam, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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A vacation bench comprising Justices R K Agrawal and S K Kaul issued notice to the Centre and asked it to file response within two weeks on two separate petitions challenging the notification.

The apex court fixed the matter for hearing on July 11. Additional Solicitor General P S Narasimha, appearing for the Centre, told the bench that intention behind bringing the notification was to have a regulatory regime on cattle trade across the country.

He also told the apex court that the Madras High Court has recently granted interim stay on the notification.

One of the petitioners, who has approached the apex court challenging the notification, has claimed in his plea that the provisions in the notification were unconstitutional as they violated the fundamental rights including freedom of conscience and religion and right to livelihood.

The Centre had on May 26 banned the sale and purchase of cattle from animal markets for slaughter through an Environment Ministry notification — ‘Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2017’ under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.
 

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In a unique effort at inter-faith collaboration and dialogue, Goa's influential Muslims and the Roman Catholic Church have come together in the state backing a civil society collective called Goa for Beef — Beef for Goa.

Also, the Qureshi Meat Traders Association filed a writ petition Monday before the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court, seeking a stay on the May 26 central notification banning the sale and purchase of cattle from animal markets for slaughter. The Qureshi Meat Traders Association, part of the collective, made the Union and state governments respondents in the petition — the Manohar Parrikar government has been silent on the central notification that has hit Goa’s meat industry and tourism. The collective expects to hear the “justification behind the ban on trading at cattle markets”.
 
Anwar Bepari, representing the Qureshi Meat Traders Association, said one of the important points raised in the petition is the ban on purchase of animals for religious sacrifice. “This is important for us because in two months we have Bakr Eid which will open other issues if this notification goes through.”
 
The collective, which has held meetings at the Clergy Home in Margao, was formed after the June 1 incident when trucks travelling to transport bullocks were stopped at the Goa-Karnataka border following the central notification.
 
Abdul Matin, representing the Muslim community, said the collective was formed because they found no representation from the new government on the beef issue. “We were tired of their silence when other state governments and chief ministers were sending letters against the notification,” Matin said.
 
Calling the collective a product of “inter-faith dialogue”, Father Savio Fernandes, its co-convener, said “it was the need of our times”. He is also executive secretary of Council for Social Justice and Peace, “a body of the Church” formed in 2005 to look into cases of rights violations.
 
“We were quiet but now the issue affects livelihood and is an act of infringement,” Father Fernandes said of the central notification.
 
“In this collective, there are three formal members — the Church’s body, that is this office; the Muslim community; and, representatives of the meat traders in Goa. We have come together specifically for this issue as this is is a direct attack on the secular nature of our country. We now feel that the time has come where we will have to meet more often than before. Inter-faith dialogues will have to increase,” he said.
 
In meetings in Margao and at the office of the Council for Social Justice and Peace, convenors and meat traders highlighted loss of livelihood because of the notification — the state relies on cattle markets in Karnataka and the slaughter house in Ponda for beef.
 
“Beef was always the cheapest food in Goa and forms an important weekend dish in most households. Even our traditional cuisine is styled around beef,” Father Fernandes said. “Priests have been sending us feedback from the people. In fact, we are seeing it ourselves.
 
Many restaurants in Goa have started putting ‘beef not served here’ signs… they do not want trouble,” he said.
 
Bepari said: “Without the market, there is no space to look. With incidents of lynching, one cannot travel anywhere and pick up cattle from any farmer. We are telling our problems to the court through this writ petition since no one seems to be representing us. We are looking to see if there are legal remedies available. Livelihood is not just restricted to us, there are many sectors that will be affectednds

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The Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who was in Aizwal on June 12, was compelled to assert a Constitutional truism: he said that people are free to choose what they want to eat, reported PTI. When asked about protests against the government’s ban on sale of cattle for slaughter, Singh clarified that the Centre will not impose any restrictions on one’s choice of food.

However, even as Singh spoke, scores of people in the Mizoram capital participated in a “beef ban bashing banquet” organised by a local organisation, according to PTI. Thousands braced heavy rainfall to gather at Vanapa Hall where the festival was held by the Zolife Group and other activists.

A writer and a member of the group, Lalrinfela Hauhnar, said a feast in Mizoram was incomplete without beef on the menu. “Beef has strong cultural importance for the Mizos,” He told The Sangai Express. Another member, Lalremruata Varte, clarified that the festival was a symbolic protest and not meant to hurt the sentiment of Hindus.

Other Northeastern states have also protested against the Centre’s new rule. In Meghalaya, two senior BJP leaders and 5,000 workers had quit the Bharatiya Janata Party as a mark of their protest against the ban. On Monday, the Meghalaya Assembly had
passed a resolution against a central government notification.

In March, the BJP had indicated that its call for a ban on beef is not applicable to states in the country’s North East. Party leaders in Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland had said that the crackdown on meat shops and slaughterhouses in Uttar Pradesh would not be replicated in the three north-eastern states that will have their Assembly polls next year.
 

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This is the second state after Kerala to do so. Even Karnataka has opposed the Centre's move.

Cutting across political lines, the members of the Assembly supported the resolution tabled by Chief Minister Mukul Sangma.
 
“This House takes a strong note of the shortcomings and infirmities in these Rules (Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Regulation of Livestock Markets Rules, 2017), as notified and resolves that the same may be withdrawn by Government of India with an immediate effect, so as to maintain the federal and secular character of our Constitution or be faced with a situation where the law prohibits some activity , while the everyday-life practices it on a large-scale due to harsh economic realities, a situation surely to be avoided at all costs,“ the resolution read.
 
The notification, it said, “travels way beyond the scope and object as set out in the Preamble of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960“, thus infringing the rights of states to regulate the items enlisted in State List (List-II of VII Schedule to Constitution of India).
 
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change had issued the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2017 on May 23.
 
Sangma alleged that the notification was “designed to affect“ the people of the north-east in general and Meghalaya in particular.

This move comes as a huge challenge to the hegemonic policies of the Modi regime.
 

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“I cannot compromise on the sentiments of the Garos,” Bachu said. “As a Garo, it is my responsibility to protect the interests of my community. Beef eating is part of our culture and tradition. The imposition of BJP’s non-secular ideology on us is not acceptable,” he said after resigning from the party. He has submitted his resignation to state party president Shibun Lyngdoh.

Bachu had proposed a bitchi (rice beer) and beef party in the Garo Hills on his Facebook page recently to mark the Narendra Modi government’s three years in office and had attracted party leadership’s criticism. BJP national spokesperson Nalin Kohli had warned of stringent action against Bachu. Former BJP leader Bernard, who had resigned from the party, is organising a beef party at the Eden Bari locality of Tura on June 10 and Bachu is also expected to participate in the event.

“I will attend the beef party in Tura to register our voice against such moves of the BJP,” he said.
 

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The Rules of 2017 and the Falling Prices of Cattle
Though cow slaughter bans have been in place in several states, especially since the Modi government came to power, but this is the first time that the central government has taken the plunge to impose a slaughter ban through the backdoor. The notified rules clearly state in section 22 of the notification that all purchasers of cattle will give an undertaking to certify that the sale of animals is for ‘agricultural purposes and not for slaughter’. Further the rules put a moratorium on the resale of the cattle for six months and also on inter-state sale of cattle. This will effectively ensure that there are no suppliers of cattle to even exporters. Once the livestock market rules are applied, farmers will no longer sell in competitive market places but at the farm gate at much lower prices, lowering the bargaining power of the farmer vis-à-vis the trader who supplies cattle to the companies.

Experience from states where the ban has been operational before the formulation of these rules, shows that the prices of unfit cattle have plummeted once the slaughter ban has come into force. As SP Sabherwal, general secretary of The Meat and Livestock Exporters Association explains, “This (the ban) is a major change that will hit farmers more than meat exporters, who will also be hit. Currently, we buy buffaloes that are unable to produce milk and are too old to breed through middlemen who bid for these animals at cattle markets. These sell for about Rs 20,000-25,000 a buffalo. If farmers sell at the farm gate, he will sell at whatever is paid to him, and it will certainly be lower than the rate discovered after bidding at a market”. In keeping with this analysis, the price of unfit cattle has plummeted with the ban in states like Maharashtra. As a study records, the price of milch cows fell from around Rs 65,000 to Rs 50,000 per animal and those of male calves, bulls and old cows from Rs 18,000-19,000 to Rs 15,000-16,000. The cycle of selling old and unusable animals, and replacing these with new animals, has been completely disrupted, creating utter havoc.

But, such havoc is not only linked to the lack of buyers of ‘unfit cattle’. It is linked to the specific links between the milk and the meat producing industry. As is explained by many analysts, there are no separate cattle breeding programmes for meat and milk within Indian markets. The suppliers of cattle for the meat industry are the same farmers who initially rear their cattle for milk production. It is only once these cows become unproductive in terms of milk production that they are sold for meat production. Hence, unlike in many other countries of the world such as Australia and the US, there is no specialised breeding for meat production. But in the event that cattle can be only sold for agricultural purposes farmers will be forced to do distress sales of low productive cattle. These instances have come to light in places where the ban is already in force. For example, a report from Maharashtra showed that cows producing 20 litres a day are currently fetching roughly Rs 45,000 at the weekly cattle market, the largest in northern Maharashtra. A year ago, these rates averaged Rs 80,000 per animal. The same goes for bulls: prices of four-year-old animals in good health have fallen from Rs 50,000 to Rs 30,000 in the last one year. Similarly another cattle trader explained that earlier he used to sell ten cows a day but now he is barely able to sell two cows a day. Another farmer reported that he sold his young cows for Rs 20,000 each after the ban, whereas ordinarily they would have fetched Rs 60,000 each. This type of distress sale is likely to increase and impact on the farmer’s income as sale of cattle constitutes an important supplementary income, especially since the notification also includes buffaloes within its ambit. It is well known that India is one of the foremost exporters of buffalo meat, so the cost of buffaloes would also be impacted.

Potential for Reorganising the Meat Supply Chain
In this context, it is interesting that most of the meat exporting industry has only termed the ban as ‘anti-farmer’ and acknowledged that the ban may not impact its own interests much. This is largely because the cattle sale ban is likely to force a change in the supply dynamics of the industry. It would not be surprising if the government comes up with a subsidised breeding programme under the PPP model. The operational guidelines of the National Livestock Mission which were revised in 2015-16 have targeted the salvaging and rearing of young buffalos as one of the main employment generation programmes. Though this scheme is not a new one it got a fresh thrust with increased allocations to the livestock mission in the last budget. The components of the scheme are three fold: setting up individual units (mostly for dalits, adivasis and women); commercial units and industrial units. It is pertinent to note that this scheme is not only open to farmers or youth, but also to companies, partnerships and corporations. Since the entire scheme is based on credit lines from NABARD, beneficiaries will have to ensure that they have a market for their buffalos, and this where they will be forced to tie up with the corporation. Hence the main thrust of the scheme is the preparation of raw materials for the leather and meat exporting industries. The cattle sale ban for slaughter seems to be aimed at squeezing the cattle market so that the farmer is forced to make distress sales to large slaughter houses. Under the current situation, the National Livestock Mission will only aid this process.

Given this scenario, it is also obvious that slaughter houses serving the domestic meat markets will suffer. And it is here that the government has used the backdoor method of introducing a measure that will make access to beef virtually impossible for the local consumer. This aspect has especially been highlighted in the Kerala government’s prompt response to the slaughter ban. Further, even if there is no ‘official ban’ on beef eating, consumers will be forced to buy beef from super markets that will form one end of the domestic supply chain. This is likely to result in closing down of small meat retailers. If they are to survive in the market, they will have to arrive at market arrangements with the corporate meat producers, or even become franchises of business houses who can afford to access cattle at the farm gate.  Hence the cattle sale ban is not just a cultural move, but its economic logic is grounded soundly in support for corporate capitalism. Or rather, it is the best example of Modi government’s corporate Hindutva which attempts to impose its cultural hegemony and at the same time protect the interests of corporate players.

Courtesy: Newsclick
 
 

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