Demand and Supply of Livestock Products in India and Nigeria: The Task of Food Security

The paper presents the demand and supply trends of livestock products. It provides the projections for the year 2020, 2025 and 2030 for both India and Nigeria and the future consequences on the future food security. The demand projections were computed using simple growth rate model under the assumptions of 6, 7 and 8 per cent GDP growth rate representing low, moderate and high income growth with 2013 as the base year. Supply projections were computed using Box-Jenkins forecasting Arima model. Findings reveal that the demand-supply gap in India for the year 2020 would be a surplus for milk, poultry, meat and a marginal deficit in eggs respectively. While in the subsequent years of 2025 and 2030 India would become a surplus nation in terms of milk, eggs, poultry and meat across the entire three scenarios; low, moderate and high income growth rates. Nigeria conversely, the demand-supply gap results indicated that across the three income growth rate scenarios there would be a staggering deficit in all the livestock products; milk, eggs, poultry and meat for the years 2020, 2025 and 2030 respectively. The main challenges of Nigeria are; need to improve the productivity of the local livestock breeds through artificial inseminations, improving grazing reserve with quality rich protein fodders, quality drinking water to reduce the menace of farmers/pastoral clashes that leads to the loss of thousands of livestock over the years in Nigeria which in turn reduces the availability of the livestock products. In addition, government needs to provide financial support, training and input to the local and small scale poultry farmers in order to enhance eggs and broiler production. The finding recommends that India should strengthen the local processing industries with financial support in ensuring a proper efficient processing and export of the surplus livestock products to avoid losses of these most perishable products; increasing farmers income, creating employment, export competitiveness and increasing the nation`s balance of payment.