Milk producers, who have the potential of meeting the demand of milk and dairy products in Nepal, have been marred by milk-holidays. After a large number of peasants across the country realised that milk was a major source of income besides other agricultural products, the total milk output in rural areas has shot up in recent years. However, the development of dairies and chilling centres have not kept pace with the white revolution. As a result, the farmers are forced to resort to milk-holidays to allow space for the chilling centres and processing plants at the expense of disusing over 35,000 litres of milk daily. The nation’s daily milk demand is around 500,000 litres, only half of which is met through state-run units and private dairy operators. Allowing such a large volume of milk to stand by daily underlines the need for the State to rev up dairy infrastructure, including matching up the processing speed of dairy plants with milk production. Until now, only 52 milk cooperatives across the country have full or semi-modern facilities and a majority of the 1,362 unions still resort to conventional milk collecting and processing methods. Despite all indications that Nepal has the ability to meet internal demand for dairy products, the inefficient technology in this industry sees it importing dairy products to a large scale.

While so much of milk remains unused due to inadequate infrastructure on one hand, the milk cooperatives see the government as too lenient on the state-run Dairy Development Corporation (DDC) in fixing price for milk and milk products on the other. It has also been accusing the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) of allowing the DDC in adopting unscientific and unreasonable pricing methods. To further encourage the domestic milk-producers, the government’s soft stand on allowing easy purchase of powder milk needs to be given a hard look. The milk-producers, on their part, will have to strive to meet the demand, else restricting access to imported powder milk despite a deficit on milk products at home will create another artificial scarcity of dairy products. Instead of exporting 200,000 litres of milk a month to India for three months during the peak production season, introducing better technology to convert milk into products like cheese, butter, yoghurt that can be stored for a longer duration will help normalise the demand-supply gradient at home to some extent. The DDC has also been diversifying its products lately to include sweets, which are quite popular. Yet the need for strengthening the milk cooperatives, introducing cost-sharing mechanism and training farmers to make them self-reliant cannot be overemphasised.