Lamki, April 19 : Dairy shop owners here in the Kailali district have suffered the loss of million rupees since the imposition of the national lockdown on March 24 to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. With the dairy shops shut down and cooperatives not collecting milk from the farmers following the lockdown, the milk supply chain has been hit hard, incurring huge losses to the dairy shops owners, farmers and cooperatives here.
Badamalika Dairy Shop at Bhajani earlier used to sell around 700 litres of milk. Following the lockdown, sales of milk has declined sharply to 50 litres a day. The dairy shop which had prepared 300 kg of cottage cheese for the Nepali New Year falling on April 13 was left unsold, according to Yuwa Singh Thakuri, the proprietor of the shop.
As a result, the dairy shop suffered Rs 150,000 of losses. The shop, informed Thakuri, provided milk for children and sick people lately. He bemoaned that the farmers could not bring milk to the diary shops due to the stay-at-home order.
Another dairy shop proprietor Sher Bahadur Buda also lamented that cottage cheese worth Rs 60,000 went to waste after the extended lockdown. Madan Bohara of Bhajani-5 who used to collect around 170 litre of milk from various houses and sell it to the dairy shop wailed that he has been kind of out of job since the lockdown.
“The farmers rearing cows and buffaloes are hit hard by the lockdown as their products have not been able to get to the market. Nor the consumers here have been able to buy it.” From farmers to the dairy shop owners, all are worried about how they would be able to pay the bank loan.
Farmer Shiva Bahadur Thapa of Tikapur demanded that the local government should facilitate to take the agro-products to the market, including milk. “The products of the farmers have gone to waste while the consumers are not getting the agro-products,” asserted Thapa, saying that government should either introduce mobile shops or find out some solutions to it. “Otherwise a huge economy will perish,” he warned. RSS
