First DRC opened

by Gayan KANCHANA in Meevanapalana

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) in collaboration with the Ministry of Livestock Development (MLD) opened its first dairy resource centre (DRC) at Meevanapalana, Horana in the Kalutara district last week. Ten other DRCs will also be opened within the next two months at different locations in the country, said a CBSL official.

The DRC, Meevanapalana. pic by Chinthaka Kumarasinghe

Under the project 50 DRCs are to be set up islandwide to facilitate dairy farmers to sell their excess animals and purchase high quality milch cows. DRCs will act as intermediary markets for exchange of milch cows among dairy farmers. The motive of this program is to support the government's initiative of increasing milk production in the country and to make it self-sufficient in milk by 2020.

Assistant Governor, CBSL, W.M. Karunaratne said, "We must strive to improve the dairy production in the country. The Agro Livestock Development Loan Scheme introduced by CBSL will assist farmers to adopt modern animal husbandry practices to increase productivity. Farmers have been educated to deviate from traditional practices and to adopt modern scientific animal husbandry practices under the scheme.

According to reports the number of milch cows in the country has not increased since many are sold for meat.

The country will lose around 80,000 fresh milk litres by the slaughter of one milch cow. We can not increase dairy production without increasing numbers of milch cows. Under this program farmers can sell milch cows through the DRCs and get information of potential buyers."

Addl. Secretary, Ministry of Livestock Development Dr. A.O Kodituwakku said that the domestic milk production only constitutes about 35 percent of the requirement and the rest is imported. The import bill on dairy commodities is over one billion rupees.

The government policy on dairy development is aimed at producing 50% of country's milk requirement by 2015.

The ministry has implemented many programs to develop the industry including increasing the liquid milk consumption, set up a proper marketing system, increase the purchasing rate of a fresh litre of milk by 10%, he said.