India on way to becoming world’s largest beef exporter

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The eating of beef has always been a contentious issue in India. This is why latest statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture, which say that the country is on its way to becoming the world’s leading beef exporter come as a shock.

The report says that beef exports are likely to touch 1.8 million tonnes in 2013. This figure is second to Brazil’s however. In 2010/2011, India’s beef export was worth $1.9 billion while in 2012/2013 the figure was $3.2 billion. Though most of the exported meat constitutes buffalo meat, the statistics are still alarming.

Gujarat’s Chief Minister and BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, in a blog post he wrote in 2012, had opposed the Central Government’s emphasis on meat production and said that this “pink revolution” needs to end.

A Reuters report says that global demasnd for buffalo meat is growing at approximately 30 per cent per year. This may be because beef from India does not have growth hormones which are used into cows and buffalo in the West to fatten them. The Reuters report quotes Hind Agro’s M Kalim Khan as saying that health conscious consumers find beef exported from India more to their liking for this reason.

Beef consumption, directly related to the politically fraught issue of cow slaughter, which is banned in places (even though males are still slaughtered routinely all over). Domestically, the country consumes 2.1 million tonnes of beef. The US, with a quarter of India’s population, consumes 11.5 million tonnes of beef every year.

Source : Niti Central