Poultry farmers in Sreepur, Gazipur, blocked the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway, forming a human chain and holding a protest march and rally against rising chicken feed prices.

More than a hundred poultry farmers from the upazila joined the human chain at Joinabazar at midday on Tuesday, 25 August, under the banner of the Shimultala Poultry Farmers' Association. They blocked the highway and held a rally, halting traffic on the Dhaka-Mymensingh highway for about half an hour.

Farmers at the rally said multinational feed makers had recently raised prices by Tk 100 a bag without any reason, and small farmers were now making losses. Meanwhile egg prices keep falling even as feed costs rise, leaving marginal farmers facing heavy financial losses and a struggle to survive.

Russell Prodhan, general secretary of the Bangladesh Marginal Poultry Farmers' Council, said companies had formed a syndicate and raised feed prices by about Tk 2 a kg, or Tk 100 to Tk 112 a bag. Farmers' egg production costs had gone up while egg prices had fallen.

Veterinarian Dr Emranul Haque Swapan said feed accounts for about 70 to 75 per cent of a farm's total cost of producing eggs. With a bag of feed now up by Tk 100 to Tk 112, marginal farmers are suffering serious losses.

The protesters said the government had promised to withdraw tax at source but this had not been implemented. Their demands included:

• lower feed prices;
• withdrawal or adjustment of the taxes imposed at several stages on maize and other feed ingredients;
• government subsidy on feed raw materials including soybean and maize, as in crop agriculture;
• an end to discrimination between agriculture and livestock;
• concessional electricity rates for poultry farms, the same as for agriculture;
• an end to what they called harassment of feed mills through BSTI drives.

Asaduzzaman Mamun, president of the Bangladesh Marginal Farmers' Council, demanded lower feed prices for the sector. If the demands are not met, he warned, farmers will take to the streets again on 1 September wearing burial shrouds and launch a tougher movement.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.