INDIA : In Land of Sacred Cow, Plan to Import Manure Seen as Waste

In India, where cows are sacred, one commodity should exist in abundance--besides milk, that is.

A Dutch company, Seaswan, begs to disagree and has devised an ambitious scheme to ship some of that other product, generated by the Netherlands’ cows, to India for fertilizer.

“Oil tankers go to Europe and then come back empty,” explains Albert van der Struik, agricultural counselor at the Royal Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi. “Couldn’t that excess capacity be used to carry manure?”

Small and densely populated, the Netherlands has serious soil and water pollution problems caused by its large dairy and animal-husbandry sector. Strict environmental laws limit the amount of manure that farmers can produce per acre.

When they increase their milk or meat output by breeding more animals, Dutch farmers must get rid of the excess dung, Van der Struik said--hence Seaswan’s idea.

A feasibility study, financed in part by the European Union, is considering whether the plan makes business sense. One idea is that bio-gas be extracted from the manure in the Netherlands first, and perhaps used to generate electricity.

Then the dung, which could be mixed with water into a slurry to make it easier to transport, would be loaded onto tankers in Rotterdam.

In India, the reception given Seaswan’s scheme ranges from the commercially curious to the downright hostile. A small but vocal group of Indians views the plan as just another way for a rich country to dump its trash in the Third World.

“The proposal is seen as part of the reckless opening up of the economy to all kinds of imports ranging from Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Kellogg’s breakfast cereals to McDonald’s hamburgers (which are to be free of beef), Hollywood soap operas through satellite television and obsolete American automobile technology,” fulminated the Telegraph newspaper of Calcutta, which is largely hostile to the free-market reforms being carried out by India’s ruling Congress Party.

Shekhar Singh of the New Delhi environmental group Kalpavriksh said he couldn’t understand the logic of Seaswan’s scheme, because India already has more manure than any other country in the world. Because of Hinduism’s ban on cow slaughter, India has the world’s largest cattle population, with 192 million cows.

It is equally true, however, that a lot of manure in India is now dried and used for fuel.

“This is a country with an enormous need for organic matter in the soil,” Van der Struik contends. Supporters of Seaswan’s proposal note that manure is a lot more ecologically sound than chemical fertilizers.

According to the Telegraph, an Indian company, EID Parry, has already joined hands with Seaswan and is seeking more local partners.

The reported plan is for the Dutch manure to be shipped to Gujarat, a western Indian state, in quantities averaging 6 million tons annually to start.

“It sounds very absurd to me,” Singh said. “Who is going to buy it at this end? And you can’t just come and dump it at the port in Gujarat. A lot of people will object, because it will seem like waste dumping.”

Somebody in the Netherlands must have anticipated problems with the project. Initially, the proposed export item was given the snazzy name “eco-dung”; it has since been changed to “organic fertilizer.”

“It’s in a very early stage,” Van der Struik said. “Nothing may come of it.”

In fact, religious taboos--but not the religion that believes cows are holy--could torpedo the whole project.

Seaswan had originally eyed Saudi Arabia as its most promising market, Van der Struik said, but had to back off that idea because “eco-dung” will also contain manure from pigs, an animal that Muslims hold to be particularly unclean.

“I can’t imagine that being used for fertilizer here,” Singh said. “India has far more Muslims than Saudi Arabia.”