India has cultural and religious concerns on import of dairy products from the United States, a top Obama Administration official has said, adding that it is continuing to work with Indian authorities to open up its huge dairy market.

The issue was also taken up by the US during the November visit of the President, Mr Barack Obama, to India, the US Agriculture Secretary, Mr Tom Vilsack, told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing on free trade agreement.

Testifying before the same Congressional committee, the US Trade Representative, Mr Ron Kirk, said the US has tried to engage India at multiple levels in this regard, but nothing seems to have worked so far.

“We have engaged the Indians in every forum, every opportunity — from when the (Indian) Prime Minister was here; I myself have been to India twice; Secretary Vilsack has had his team with us. We continue to push,” Mr Kirk said.

“We thought what we had was an acceptable resolution of it, in terms of how we feed our animals and get them ready, but they came up with yet another creative response,” he said, without elaborating further.

“One thing we did do is, last year, because of cases like this, for the first time now, in addition to our 301 report, we just published our annual report on sanitary and phyto-sanitary barriers that farmers and ranchers incurred in and around the world.

It helps to inform our work to try to work with you on how we can attack those,” Mr Kirk said.

Sharing lawmakers frustration in this regard, Mr Vilsack said the US had opportunities to visit with the Indian agricultural minister on several occasions, both here in the US and in India.

“The discussions we’ve had have been primarily focused on the dairy industry. As you know, there are cultural and religious issues that are raised whenever we discuss dairy, and we are continuing to work to try to reassure that we can meet the cultural and religious concerns, in terms of an understanding of the physiology of cows and how they digest feed, and how we can reassure folks that what — the product that they’re getting is appropriate,” he said.

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