ABSTRACT
Poultry is one of the important segments of the livestock sector in Pakistan. Currently, the country holds the 11th position in the world's broiler meat production while the layer sector is producing around 16 billion eggs annually. The current growth of poultry sector is 8–10% annually and the demand for meat and eggs is on the rise not only in this region but also globally. However, with the present system of production and due to poor planning for the forthcoming future challenges, that is, out breaks of contagious diseases, market competition, intellectual property rights/patents/copy of genetic resource, quality control, cost effective production, and issue of increased competition between human, poultry and other livestock for available resources of land, water, and raw feed ingredients, it does not appear that the poultry sector in Pakistan will sustain this pace and will be able to coop with the production demands. To survive well, the industry in support with government and professionals will have to overcome those issues which are jeopardizing the growth of industry, that is, poor production standards, lacking of processing/further processing/value addition facilities with less interest to compete globally for the finished poultry products, poor marketing channels, limited investment/research on continuous supply of feed ingredients, limited research and investment in disease diagnostic and control, disaster management, lacking of high productive heat tolerant and disease resistant commercial/rural chicken breeds, lacking of “other than chicken” poultry species in commercial production chain, and consumer awareness about poultry products. The government's role should be to devise industry friendly policies/rules and regulations, develop suitable price control mechanisms, work towards disaster management, make action plans for careful utilization of natural resources, focus on development of commercial and improvement/conservation of rural poultry breeds, and more importantly strengthen educational, research and development institutions. Therefore, it is the need of the time that a policy framework should be devised for sustainable growth of the poultry sector in Pakistan. This chapter is an effort to provide necessary guidelines for that purpose.
