Filipino farmers call them Bulgarian. Little do they know the buffaloes they are referring to are Indian.

Filipino farmers call the Indian buffaloes 'Bulgarian Murrah'. The buffalo got labelled Bulgarian because it came via Bulgaria for experimental crossbreeding with the local buffalo called carabao.

Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) regulations prevented direct import from India but not from FMD-free Bulgaria that had crossed the Indian buffalo with the native buffalo and backcrossed 3-4 generations. However, the imported buffaloes still retain most of the Indian qualities.

Nearly a hundred pure Indian buffalos have thus been produced, one of them named Sharma - after Indian Ambassador Navrekha Sharma. And they have helped create a new mindset about the roadmap for dairying in the Philippines.

Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) executive director Libertado Cruz says: "Farmers loved our crossbred calf." It grew at more than twice the rate of native calves and gave more than five times the milk the native would give.

However, developing a gene pool with imports from Bulgaria was too expensive. Cruz pleaded with the bureaucracy to import breeding stock from India, treating the country that has pockets of FMD-free areas, like Europe where infected and uninfected countries exist across thin borders. But the FMD ban held.

In 1997, Cruz visited India to study the situation. Though the FMD ban kept Indian live animals out of the Philippines, there was no ban on meat as long as it is directly used for processing. Thus Manila's annual import of buffalo meat from India is equivalent to 350,000-400,000 live animals. And in an Indian slaughterhouse, Cruz found a partial solution to the problem he was facing.

Most of the 2,000 animals the slaughterhouse turned into meat every day were young, healthy females after one cycle of milking. Cruz made a deal with the butcher to set up a facility for collecting eggs from the ovaries of the animals that the butcher would discard, and fertilise them with the best semen samples he would obtain from India's National Dairy Development Board (NDDB).

The country is now on the move to declare the tiny Balabak Island at the southern tip of Palawan across the sea from the Malaysian state of Sabah as a quarantine facility for holding breeders it plans to import from India until they are tested FMD free for entering farms.

Some 10,000 male and female buffaloes are likely to be bought over the next five years for uplifting the Philippines' present negligible milk production. Citing that India has 98 million buffaloes, Cruz says, "10,000 we want to take from India would not cause any damage on their germplasm resource."

Last year, the Philippines imported nearly half-a-billion US dollars worth of milk and milk products - but not a drop from India. This level of imports - more than three-quarters of it coming from New Zealand, Australia and the US - will continue for some years, until the offspring of the Indian breeders will rise in such numbers to make a significant dent on imports.

Whether India, now the world's largest milk producer and a rising exporter, can get a share of that market could become an issue in the cattle deal.

A recent attempt by Amul to introduce its fresh milk on the Philippine market met with resistance based purely on prejudice. Though a litre of Amul at the retail price of P44.95 (more than Rs. 34) was the most economical fresh milk, some retailers rejected it. Because it was Indian and the name read backward as 'Luma' meaning 'old' in the Philippines' national language Tagalog, was not consumer-friendly in a predominantly youth market.

Addressing a visiting Indian pharmaceutical delegation earlier this year, the government-owned Philippine International Trading Corporation (PITC) chairman, Roberto Pagdanganan, spoke of such prejudices.

PITC recently began importing medicine from India for the newly established Botica ng Bayan stores as an alternative to the exorbitantly priced medicine of Western multinationals.