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Till two years ago, the rearing of the birds was being peddled as a get-richquick scheme. Now that the bubble has burst — there never was much demand for emu products — the birds are being abandoned in the thousands around the countryside.
These are the lucky ones that survived. Many have gone the way of the 50 emus that died crammed into a truck on a road in Tonk. The drivers said they had been paid Rs 22,000 to simply dump the birds somewhere because their owner could no longer afford to keep them. A few dumped near the Thalavu hills in Erode last month were mauled by dogs.
Emu farming was till two years ago being peddled as an easy, get-rich-quick agri venture. All one had to apparently do was buy the chicks, feed them twice a day and wait for massive profits to roll in from the sales of wildly expensive emu meat, skin, even oil. What they conveniently forgot to mention — and the investors forgot to check on — was that the market for emu products in India is negligible. never having really caught on despite several efforts made to push it in the past.
With excess supply, the bubble soon burst and now the birds are being dumped in forests or sold for cheap meat by desperate farmers. Meat from the abandoned birds is being sold at Rs 50 a kg at government auctions held in Erode, till recently a big emu farming hub.
He estimates 50% of emu businesses have shut down. In Gujarat, entrepreneurs say the farms gone bust amount to 80% of the total business. Given that at the height of the b o o m , b e - tween 2007 and 2011, there were about 13-14 lakh emus being farmed, the number awaiting “disposal” must run into the thousands.
According to Nabard officials, all emu businesses in and around Pune district, Satara, Sangli, Kolhapur, Ratnagiri, and Amravati have shut down. About 6,000 emus are on the verge of being abandoned. Tukaram Chikane from Satara says he bought 10 pairs, at Rs 32,000 a pair. The bait was every egg would fetch Rs 1,600. “I am now stuck with not only the bank loan I raised to purchase the emus but also the burden of their daily upkeep,” he says.
Most emu farmers in Punjab too are looking to either sell the birds to other farmers or to sell their meat among friends. Indervir Kaushik, a farm consultant, says he struck a deal recently to sell some birds to a Ganganagar farmer. Sometimes, he says, he throws a party and serves emu meat. “I am spending more than Rs 30,000 per month on the farm with almost nil income.”
In the early years of the boom, farmers learnt on the job to manage, feed and breed the birds. “Initially, the chicks were being sold at good prices so little thought was given to processing units or end product marketing,” says Maini. This turned out, in the long run, to be the undoing of the boom. And once the speculators and agri ponzi schemes moved in, there was no other way the story could have ended.
PC Palanisamy, a powerloom owner who invested in an emu farm at Nammakkal, now uses his emu pen as a temporary kennel for his labrador. But he is among the lucky few to not be cheated – his investor paid up and took the emus back. Several others have said goodbye to lakhs. Maini — and other big emu farmers — believe the business can be salvaged with some patience and generous investment in planning for its future, especially the marketing of emu products. But farmers are in no mood to listen.
The government’s response has been myopic too, they say. “The government was quick in providing subsidies for emu farming in the early stages but it didn’t explain how to go about the business,” points out Bharuch-based emu farmer Jitendra Parmar. Last year, he gave away his birds to another farmer and quietly exited the business.
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