Case Studies: South and Southeast Asia

What the Investigations Show sets out the general pattern documented across industrial animal agriculture worldwide. This page follows that pattern into South and Southeast Asia, a region that contains some of the largest cattle populations on earth, some of the fastest-growing broiler industries, and two of the world's most institutionally developed halal certification systems — Malaysia's JAKIM and Indonesia's BPJPH/MUI. It is also a region where the animal trade intersects with border politics, communal tension and rapid coastal ecological change in ways that are specific to it.

A region of contrasts

India has the world's largest cattle and buffalo population but, under state-level restrictions on cow slaughter, exports almost no beef from cattle; its major livestock export product is carabeef, meat from water buffalo, which is not covered by cow-protection laws. Pakistan and Bangladesh both run large, largely informal urban dairy sectors alongside expanding commercial broiler industries. Indonesia and Malaysia, the world's two largest palm-oil producers, have broiler and layer industries that are increasingly vertically integrated with global feed supply chains, and both have built state-backed halal certification bodies that now certify not only slaughter but much of the packaged food industry.

The India–Bangladesh cattle trade

Because cow slaughter is restricted or banned in most Indian states while beef consumption remains legal and demand strong in Bangladesh, a large informal trade moves cattle across the roughly 2,200-kilometre border, much of it on foot or by river, from as far away as Rajasthan and Haryana [1]. India's Border Security Force (BSF) intercepts large numbers of these animals each year — one 2019 report cited 36,672 cattle intercepted over eleven months — but interception does not equal welfare: reporting found more than 2,000 of those seized animals died over seven months from starvation, disease and neglect while in official holding, described by officials themselves as a resourcing failure [2]. A 2022 parliamentary panel heard BSF's own leadership describe ailing and dying cattle at the border as actively hampering the force's operations [3]. Academic ethnographic work on the trade situates it within a longer history of cow-protection vigilantism, in which allegations of cattle smuggling have on occasion been used to justify mob violence against Muslim and Dalit traders and transporters [4]. The animal-welfare and human-rights dimensions of this trade are, in other words, entangled rather than separable: the same informal, unregulated corridor that leaves cattle without food or veterinary care for days also exposes the people moving them to serious risk.

Buffalo meat export

India is among the world's largest exporters of buffalo meat (carabeef), much of it to Southeast Asia, the Gulf and North Africa. Because water buffalo fall outside most Indian states' cow-protection statutes, this export industry has developed large-scale abattoirs and cold-chain infrastructure that does not exist for cattle. The welfare and slaughter standards in these plants vary considerably by state and by exporter, and independent auditing is uneven; buffalo meat exports are, for many Gulf and Southeast Asian buyers, a halal-certified product, which brings us to the certification question addressed later on this page.

Pakistan's dairy sector and urban tabelas

Pakistan has one of the largest dairy herds in the world, but a large share of its milk is produced not on rural farms but in urban and peri-urban tabelas — dense buffalo and cattle sheds located inside or at the edge of cities such as Karachi and Lahore, kept for direct fresh-milk sale with minimal pasture access. These operations sit between the smallholder and industrial models: animals are typically confined in crowded, often unsanitary urban lots for their entire productive lives, without the space or grazing access of a rural herd but also without the scale economies or biosecurity of a modern dairy. FAO and national livestock data describe this informal peri-urban dairy sector as supplying the majority of milk consumed in Pakistan's major cities, which means most urban dairy consumption in the country runs through confinement conditions that are, if anything, less regulated than the industrial systems described on Dairy and Eggs.

Broiler expansion across four countries

Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia have all seen rapid growth in broiler production over the past two decades, following the same confinement and rapid-growth model documented globally. Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular, have integrated poultry vertically with domestic feed-milling industries that increasingly rely on palm-kernel meal and imported soy, tying broiler expansion directly to the deforestation questions discussed below.

Antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance

WHO and FAO assessments of poultry production in South Asia have repeatedly flagged the region as one of the most antibiotic-intensive in the world, driven by the incentive to use routine, low-dose antimicrobials as a substitute for the space, ventilation and biosecurity that would otherwise be needed to keep birds healthy at high stocking density. This is the same dynamic described in general terms on What the Investigations Show under health and antibiotics, but the regional data consistently place South Asian broiler production near the top of global antimicrobial-use rankings, which in turn is one of the clearer, less contested links between industrial animal agriculture and a documented public-health harm — antimicrobial resistance — that extends well beyond the animals themselves.

Palm oil, feed crops and deforestation

Indonesia and Malaysia together produce the large majority of the world's palm oil, and palm-kernel meal — a byproduct of oil extraction — is a significant, and growing, component of livestock and poultry feed worldwide, a link documented in detail by the Rainforest Action Network's "Feeding Deforestation" research, which traces millions of tonnes of palm products through animal-feed supply chains that are far less visible to consumers than palm oil in food packaging [5]. Palm expansion has been a documented driver of deforestation and peatland conversion in Sumatra and Kalimantan, with associated carbon emissions and the seasonal haze events that have repeatedly affected air quality across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The point for this series is narrow but important: some share of the environmental cost usually associated with palm oil in food and cosmetics should properly be allocated to the animal-feed side of the industry as well.

Shrimp, aquaculture and mangrove loss

Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia are among the world's largest producers of farmed shrimp, an industry that has been a major, well-documented driver of mangrove deforestation across Southeast Asia: a widely cited study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found aquaculture pond conversion to be one of the two leading causes of mangrove loss in the region between 2000 and 2012 [6]. Subsequent research has documented a further, less-discussed problem: many shrimp ponds are productive for only a few years before disease and soil degradation force abandonment, leaving cleared former mangrove land unproductive rather than returning it to aquaculture or restoring it, a pattern examined in detail in studies of pond abandonment dynamics [7]. Mangrove forests are unusually effective carbon sinks and coastal storm buffers, so their conversion for a boom-and-bust aquaculture cycle represents a particularly poor exchange in strict ecological terms, whatever its short-term economic return to individual producers.

Halal supply chains: what JAKIM and BPJPH actually audit

Malaysia's Department of Islamic Development (JAKIM) and Indonesia's Halal Product Assurance Agency (BPJPH), working with the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) on religious determinations, run two of the world's most institutionally mature halal certification systems, and both now certify a large share of each country's packaged food, poultry and meat industry. It is worth being precise about what that certification does and does not cover, a distinction discussed at greater length on Halal Certification. Both systems audit the slaughter method (a Muslim slaughterer, the invocation, the cut), traceability of animal origin, cross-contamination controls in processing, and ingredient sourcing. Neither system's standard certification criteria, as published, extend to auditing pre-slaughter husbandry conditions — stocking density, cage or shed type, transport duration, or feed composition beyond the exclusion of non-halal ingredients. A JAKIM or BPJPH halal mark on a packet of chicken is, in other words, a reliable statement about how the bird was killed and processed; it is not a statement about how it was raised, and should not be read as one.

The smallholder counter-case

It would be a distortion to describe the region as uniformly industrial. Across South and Southeast Asia a very large share of animals is still kept by smallholders: a household buffalo in Uttar Pradesh, a few goats behind a house in Sindh, village chickens scavenging in a Javanese yard. The FAO has repeatedly documented that smallholder and backyard systems remain a majority of holdings in South Asia even as they lose share of total output to integrated commercial operations. These animals are generally not confined for life, not debeaked, not bred to a growth curve their legs cannot carry, and are frequently known individually by the family that keeps them.

This matters for the argument the rest of this site makes, and it cuts against overstatement in two directions. First, it means that a blanket claim that “animal products today” are produced through systemic cruelty is not accurate everywhere; a reader in a village in Kelantan or rural Punjab may be describing a genuinely different practice from a reader buying broiler meat in Jakarta or Karachi. The classical fiqh discussion of nafaqa — the keeper's binding duty to feed, water, rest and not overburden an animal — assumes something much closer to the smallholder case, and in that case it is largely satisfiable.

Second, and less comfortably, the direction of travel is away from that model. The same FAO and national livestock statistics show commercial integrated poultry and dairy capturing a rising share of production in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, India and Pakistan, driven by urban demand that smallholding cannot meet at price. A reader who is genuinely buying from a neighbour's flock is in one moral position. A reader who imagines they are, while buying from a supermarket chiller supplied by a contract-growing operation, is in another. The honest question is not which system is theoretically possible but which one supplied the food actually on the plate — which is the question What the Investigations Show puts to the reader directly.

An Islamic-ethics reading

The material in this page raises the same principles as the rest of this series, but two deserve particular emphasis here. Fasad fil-ard, corruption or spreading harm on the earth, is language the Qur'an uses for damage that a community inflicts on its own environment and social fabric — and mangrove clearance for aquaculture ponds that are abandoned within a few productive years is a fairly literal instance of that: a once-functioning ecosystem converted into degraded, unproductive land for a short-term gain. Nafaqa, the duty to maintain an animal properly, applies as much to the cattle held for days without adequate food at a border crossing as to any animal in a Western feedlot; the fact that neglect in this case arises from an under-resourced interception system rather than a deliberate industrial design does not make it less of a breach of that duty, only differently caused.

The halal-certification question deserves its own comment. Haqq Allah — a right that belongs to God rather than to any individual claimant — is the traditional category for the requirement that slaughter be carried out correctly; JAKIM and BPJPH protect that right conscientiously within the scope they define. But ihsan, excellence, was described by the Prophet ﷺ as extending to how the animal is treated up to and including the moment of the cut, not merely the cut's mechanics. A certification system that verifies the mechanics faultlessly while remaining silent on stocking density, antibiotic load or transport welfare is doing its job as defined, but its job is narrower than the full scope of ihsan as the hadith describes it. Whether that narrower scope should be widened — and whether doing so is even practical for a state certification body — is a live and reasonable question for these institutions and their Muslim consumers to keep asking, quite apart from the separate legal argument made on Is Factory-Farmed Meat Haram?.