India's poultry industry, despite being a significant producer globally, faces challenges in establishing a strong foothold in the international market. This paper titled "India's Poultry Exports: Navigating Global Market Dynamics" examines the current state of India's poultry exports, identifying key markets and evaluating India's export potential through the application of the gravity model. The study utilizes data from 115 trading partners over the period 2012 to 2021, addressing zero trade observations using the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) method, which effectively accounts for heteroscedasticity and non-linearity in trade data. Our findings reveal that India's primary export destinations, including Oman, Maldives, Japan, and Russia, have largely exhausted their export potential, while significant opportunities remain untapped in markets such as Qatar, Pakistan, the UAE, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The study highlights that a 1% increase in the GDP of trading partners results in a 1.44% increase in India's poultry exports, emphasizing the importance of targeting larger economies. Additionally, geographical distance negatively impacts trade, underscoring the importance of proximity in export strategies. Surprisingly, larger populations in importing countries are associated with reduced exports, suggesting a complex interplay between demand and supply factors. The analysis of India's Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) and Revealed Symmetric Comparative Advantage (RSCA) indexes indicates that India does not possess a comparative advantage in exporting poultry products, although there has been an improvement in competitiveness, with RCA values nearing 0.9 in 2023. The study concludes by recommending a strategic shift towards less saturated markets to maximize India's poultry export potential and enhance its global trade footprint.
