Sri Lanka promotes ‘safe milk’ through massive campaign
Sri Lanka is to promote drinking safe milk amidst the milk powder contamination controversy which has aggravated to boiling point, a top official said.
One of the main challenges for the country today was to popularise drinking fresh milk which was now the worldwide trend and what was also seen as important from the Sri Lankan perspective, to first reduce and then stop milk imports costing over US$300 million per annum, said Chairman of state-run Milco (Pvt) Ltd, Sunil Wickramasinghe.
He said milk powder was introduced to this country through a USAID free milk campaign in countrywide schools in late 1950s and 1960s.
With the campaign of popularising milk powder among children in schools, the people embraced milk powder as it was easy to prepare instantly.
The present day task is to change this habit to safe milk drinking and eating of milk based products such as yogurt and curd, cheese and butter which are nutritious for human beings, Mr. Wickremasinghe said.
“The culture of drinking milk powder should be changed. We need to promote more consumption of milk-based products that liquid milk,” he added.
While stating that his company accounted for 220,000 litres of the 550,000 litres processed on a daily basis, the MILCO Chief also asserted that reaching self-sufficiency in three to four years would mean that a total sum of over Rs. 35 billion would be injected to the local farmer community which will also uplift their lives, he said.
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