LAHORE - The federal budget 2017-18 has supported the poultry industry as it request for reducing the import duty on grandparent stocks and parent stocks has been accepted, which would be helpful in expanding the farming sector.

The industry’s request for bringing the poultry farming machinery sales tax at par with agriculture greenhouse tunnel farming especially because of having commonalty has not been fully accepted but reduction has been provided in the levy of sales tax, which will indeed help to some extent in bringing in modernisation to the poultry sector.

The industry’s request in support of value addition to the poultry sector by making the processing sector fighting fit against duty and sales tax free imports of poultry products under FTA and MFN with various countries has not been accepted.

“It would be extremely unfair if we are made to compete against imports of processed chicken meat and its products importable under FTA and MFN at 0pc, 5pc and 10pc customs duty from Malaysia, India and China respectively, whereas our inputs to produce those products have an incidence of 36.90pc to 58.40pc which includes 20pc customs duty, 15pc regulatory duty and 17pc sales tax on duty paid value.”

There is a lot of talk about value addition at various levels but little is being done to harness the potential of value addition in the field of agriculture and livestock. Establishing slaughterhouses, value addition and freezing units is the only way to stabilise the prices of agriculture produce and all those perishable products, which have fluctuating demand & supply and fluctuating production patterns.

The poultry association maintains that processing and value addition of as little as 12pc of the total 1.4 billion broilers that are produced, would yield a revenue of over Rs3.8 billion through income tax, sales tax on packing materials, advertising, electricity and sales tax on other miscellaneous inputs and in addition, workers social security, Workers Profit Participation Fund, Workers education cess, etc to the exchequer.