‘Will you give employment to 100 million farmers?’ Amul destroys PETA for hit-job against dairy industry

PETA has caught itself in a fight way above its league. This time around, it has messed with the wrong entity. Amul – which is a household name in India and whose products are consumed in every Indian home is an indispensable and fundamental part of India’s dairy industry. The American far-left NGO, which goes by the name ‘People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ sought to tell Amul how it should rework its business model, abandon its dairy farmers, stop organic dairy production and instead shift to plant-based/derived “vegan dairy products”.

PETA wrote a letter to Amul managing director RS Sodhi urging Amul “to benefit from the booming vegan food and milk market”. Where PETA found such a “booming market” in India is something which gives us a miss. “We would again like to encourage Amul to benefit from the booming vegan food and milk market, instead of wasting resources trying to fight the demand for plant-based products that is only growing. Other companies are responding to market changes, and Amul can, too,” PETA said.

Amul is an Indian dairy cooperative society managed by the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd.

PETA’s rant against organic dairy products did not go down well with Amul. The dairy giant’s Managing Director, RS Sodhi took to Twitter to lambast PETA and asked if switching over to vegan milk, as suggested by PETA, will provide 100 million dairy farmers, 70 per cent of whom are landless, with a livelihood and pay their children’s school fees, and how many people in India will actually be able to afford lab manufactured milk who he said was made out of chemicals and synthetic vitamins.

Sodhi – visibly infuriated with the American NGO also said, “PETA wants Amul to snatch livelihood of 100 million poor farmers and handover all its resources built in 75 years with farmers’ money to market genetically modified Soya of rich MNC at exorbitant prices, which the average lower middle class can’t afford.” The Amul MD added that switching over to vegan milk would mean handing over resources built by using farmers’ money to markets which sell genetically modified Soya produced by municipal corporations at outrageous prices.

Interestingly, for an NGO which claims to stand for animal rights, it surely does have an outrageous track record. In 2012, the organisation itself had killed nearly 90 per cent of all the cats and dogs dropped off at its Virginia shelter, blaming them for being unadoptable and disease ridden.

Read More: Amul was one of the reasons why India ditched RCEP because Amul isn’t just a company, it’s an emotion.

PETA’s attempts at trying to destroy India’s dairy industry by targeting Amul will surely fail, since the cooperative behemoth has the backing of all Indians, except, of course, a few far-left extremists in the country.