PAKISTAN is the fifth largest milk and seventh largest goat meat producing country in the world. In the year 2009-10, the total red meat production comprised 1.65 million tons of beef and 0.60 million tons of mutton. Of the total red meat produced, buffaloes contributed 35 per cent, cattle 39 per cent, goats 18 per cent and sheep eight per cent. The per capita meat consumption trend indicates a growing domestic demand for meat with the increasing population, urbanisation and income growth.

The challenge ahead for policymakers is to achieve the growing target of per capita meat consumption to a level of 47kg for the year 2020. Moreover, there is an increasing demand for red meat in the Middle East, Iran, Malaysia and Afghanistan. During 2009-10 export value of Pakistani red meat was $120 million. There has been 390 per cent increase in one year in export, but this is a negligible share in global red meat business of $600 billion.

The Punjab government has focused on the red meat sector and established the Lahore Meat Company, which is setting up a modern facility for livestock slaughtering, meat processing, value-addition and processing of by-products with foreign collaboration.

Production system: The red meat production systems are traditional and inefficient. Most of beef comes from emergency slaughtered animals. With a few exceptions, no commercial fattening activity is being carried out. A lot of buffalo calves 1-2 week-old are slaughtered. Some calves are raised to 60-80kg on extremely poor and unbalanced diets and only a few are raised to heavier weights with very low average daily gain.

Mostly small ruminants (sheep and goats) are owned by landless people, who rear them on crop residues, roadside and communal grazing. These animals which are raised for sacrificial purpose for Eidul Azha are offered concentrates along with grazing since these animals fetch premium prices. The other major constraint is the slaughtering techniques, transportation of animals and marketing structures which are traditional and unhygienic. There is very little value-addition of meat products and also wastage of valuable by-products. The concept of quality meat production is almost missing.

The livestock resources hold considerable potential for increasing meat production. It has been estimated that if the 6-7 million male buffalo and cattle calves available for rearing are raised on balanced fattening diets to live weights of 250-300kg, the beef production can be doubled.

The absence of calf weaning programme heavily penalises the development of sound beef industry. Without introducing adequate weaning techniques, all efforts to develop a viable beef industry will fail. Too many young male calves are slaughtered at an early age due to high cost of milk required for feeding these calves. The leftover calves are generally underfed to achieve normal growth in subsequent phases of their life.

The Lahore Meat Company introduced a project named “Save the Calf” and offered subsidy of Rs2,500 per calf to those farmers who will raise these calves for meat purposes. There is a need to set up model calf-raising centres at public sector research organisations for training farmers.

A good weaning programme could provide a very large number of animals of 70-100kg which could efficiently be raised to the desired market weight. The quality of diet is going to be the key to the success of the early weaning system.

To change the prevailing weaning system is going to be a long and difficult process unless economically viable incentives are given to small livestock farmers. Other option for the beef producer is to buy feeder calves from cattle markets which are healthy.

The process may require technical assistance from livestock professionals. It is advisable to purchase fattening rations initially from public or private sector feed mills and install feed processing equipment, such as grinder-mixers as per capacity of the farm.

Sheep and goat production is mainly a small-scale rural activity that is integral part of an age-old system of mixed farming, the main production systems are nomadic , agro-pastoral and sedentary. Mutton production in is a secondary farm enterprise and its potential has not yet been fully exploited. The present methods used in sheep and goat farming, marketing, slaughter, processing and sale of meat, result in low carcass yield, large losses of by-products and supply of poor quality unhygienic meat to consumers.

The lambs and kids are slaughtered at low body weights and in lean conditions. Fattening of these animals for 90-100 days could add 9-10kg weight per carcass and also improve the meat quality.

Socio-economic conditions: Though livestock production is very fragmented and most farm units are small and only 10 per cent of them in Punjab hold from 10 to 20 buffalo cows and five per cent over 20 heads each. Such units are often run by capable and business-oriented farmers who seem to be open to change and eager to adopt improved production practices if these prove profitable. Thus if sufficient incentives and workable production programmes are introduced, their response would be quick and positive.

In recent years, the Livestock and Dairy Development Board introduced commercial meat production techniques to farmers and a number of farmers participated in the programme. They produced many ‘lots’ of fattened animals and were happy with their performance, but felt difficulty in selling the animals at proper price. It is in fact very clear that by giving the producers a price which covers the production costs with a reasonable profit margin, there is no other way to develop a modern sustainable meat production industry.