Development and Expansion of Hilly Chicken
The Chittagong Hill Tracks (CHT) comprises of three districts: Rangamati, Khagrachari and Bandorban with twelve ethnicities. It has a typical agro ecology, landscape, plant diversity and anthropology from that of the plain land of the country.
Chittagong Hill track have some considerable economic importance with the genetic diversity of livestock population (Cattle, Sheep, goat, gayal, buffalo, and poultry). For example Hilly Chicken, a potential meat producing poultry genotype available in hill districts may be a source of organic white flavor meat. So far very little concentration has been given to know the actual status of these native germplasm of livestock to improve their production potentialities. However there is no indebt report available on the production potentials of hilly cattle, sheep, goat, poultry and other livestock to increase the livelihood of hilly peoples in Bangladesh.
A number of hilly people rear cattle, sheep, goats, pig, gayal and chickens for their livelihood. Across the three CHT district about 62% households in the region irrespective of ethnicities are living bellow absolute poverty line (bellow 2,122 kcal), while 36% are hardcore poor (bellow 1,805 kcal). On an average irrespective of ethnicities the rural household income is TK 66,000.00 per year while the same in rural Bangladesh is 1.28 times higher. If the productivity of the available livestock and poultry in the hills could be increased through introduction of balanced feeding by fodder cultivation, proper management, veterinary health services , enhancing livestock production system through validation and upscaling of improved technologies, development of marketing facilities , introduction of community workers, providing training and motivation on livestock rearing and creation of job opportunities etc that would help increasing the livelihood of hilly peoples.
In this state, IDF has been coordinated a research project “Increasing livestock production in the Hills through better husbandry, health service and improving market access through value and supply chain management” along with other three institutes -Chittagong Veterinary and Animal Science university, CVASU; Poultry Research Training Centre, PRTC; and Bangladesh Research Institute; BLRI to increase the productivity of the available livestock and poultry in the hills. The research activities will be will be conducted at the different laboratories like Animal Nutrition/PRTC Laboratory at CVASU and different upazillas of Chittagong Hill Tract (CHT) district, Bandarban (Sadar and Naikhonchari upazilla) and Khagrachari (Sadar and Panchari upazilla) from April 2017 to March 2022.
