Lalitpur, March 2:

Dairy farmers who have been hit hard by frequent bandhs and milk holidays are facing hardship to pay back their loans due to an uneven milk market.

Oversupply of milk has forced the commercial dairies to declare milk holidays in advance. Dairy farmers are forced to throw away the milk during this situation and face hard times to pay back their loans borrowed from the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) to buy buffaloes or cows.

Upendra Prasad Ghimire of Chandanpur, who had bought a bufallo with a Rs 45,000 loan from ADB is worried about how to pay back the loan. He said in December which is a flush time (Oct to Jan) for milk production had four milk holidays in a week.

Over 5,000 farmer families in 14 VDCs of Lalitpur end up at the Dairy Development Corporation, Nepal Dairy, Kathmandu Dairy and many other private dairies to sell the milk.

"Most farmers here were attracted to dairy farming as it pays a few thousands rupees monthly during normal days," said a farmer Santa Prasad Humagain of Chaughare. However the profession lacks modern techniques due to lack of investment.

According to Uddab Ghimire, manager of the Lalitpur District Milk Production Cooperatives Association, 45 corporatives in VDCs of the district collected 40,000 litres of milk everyday during the flush time in 2005 but the collection went down to 27,000 litres in a day recently. "Lack of proper infrastructure to ferry milk, milk from six remote VDCs does not even get to the market."

He added the dairy farmers are not trained to turn surplus milk into other products, besides ghee and khuwa. Two local chilling plants in Lele and one under construction in Gotikhel have been providing a little bit of relief to the farmers of adjoining VDCs.

While the farmers are not getting buyers for the milk, the government imports powder milk to meet the demand. The government should focus on collecting this oversupply of milk rather than importing powder milk, Ghimire said.

The Dairy Development Corporation (DDC) has a powder milk plant in Biratnagar that produces 650 tonnes of powder milk yearly which meets 60 per cent of the demand, said Siyaram Singh, technical division manager at DDC.

"Since, the production cost of powder milk is high and huge investment is required to run a plant, it is not viable to run powder milk plants without ensuring a regular supply of 0.1 million litres of milk a day," he said. However, the DDC is planning to set up a powder plant in Chitwan.