Poor quality of milk in Nepal

FAO Nepal

Although the all the actors related to dairy development in Nepal including the government, DDC, dairy cooperatives and private dairies principally agree on the production of good quality milk and milk products, they have not been able to play their role in improving the quality of raw milk as well as finished products. Milk produced from a healthy animal would contain very little bacterial population. It gets contaminated during subsequent handling processes. The contamination is very high in the Nepalese context. One reason for the high bacterial load in raw milk is unhygienic practices in milk handling and lack of knowledge on clean milk. The other reason is that the milk travels fairly long hours, especially in the hills, before it reaches for processing; either chilling or pasteurizing that checks bacterial growth. In the Terai areas, when the contamination in milk is high, the higher ambient temperature triggers the multiplication of bacterial population.

In addition, raw milk quality also deteriorates due to some malpractice, which include addition of water for increasing volume, sodium bicarbonate for reducing acidity, starch, sugar and urea for increasing solid content and preservatives for longer shelf life. The law prohibits using these chemicals in milk. Accepting milk of any standard due to competition among buyers has led milk quality to deteriorate. In some areas such as Ilam and Chitwan districts, the collectors' experience have shown that milk delivered in these areas is comparatively better quality than in other districts.

Since the quality of raw milk is not up to the mark, the resulting processed products are also of not high quality. The problem of poor quality is intensified when the products are not processed using optimum parameters and post-processing handling is bad. The result is that not only the shelf life of finished products is short (for instance less than 2 days under refrigeration for pasteurized milk), but also the products are harmful for consumption. The pasteurized milk, which should be safe to drink directly from the packet, in reality, may not be safe. In 2001, NDDB [Nepal Dairy Development Board ] and Danida Support Project conducted a Benchmark Survey of Quality of Milk and Milk Products in Nepal. The survey has shown that many of the products did not meet the minimum compositional standards laid out by the Food Act and the major problem was in the microbiological quality. In this new millennium, quality philosophy is considered as password to the market. Quality, as in other products, is considered as an indispensable attributes of the milk and milk products too.