In Laos, where not one human case has been reported, 80-90 per cent of the poultry is raised by small farmers who have less than 28 chickens and ducks. Curiously enough, local breeds fetch twice the market price as exotic chicken breeds, something that may be repeated in Indonesia. Bird flu outbreaks in poultry in Laos have been blamed on imports from a large commercial poultry operation in Thailand, something the Thai poultry producer has refuted. See Human Cases of Avian Flu Since 2003.
Vietnam
Vietnam, however, has been the hardest hit country in terms of human cases and there too, like Laos, the poultry sector is largely built on small producers. The difference is the large dependence in Vietnam on Thailand for poultry inputs. However, Vietnam did not have any cases of avian flu in poultry for an entire year before cases have recently resurged. Not bad for a country full of water, known to keep viruses alive, people working in rice paddies full of birds and people who love to eat duck. In Vietnam, educational campaigns in the countryside and a vigorous culling program when bird flu is detected seems to work.
Nigeria
Nigeria has a lot of backyard birds and large commercial poultry operations as well. It is suspected that H5N1 bird flu came from imported chicks. In Nigeria, like Indonesia, bird flu is endemic in more than a dozen provinces, but bird flu has not been reported in humans yet. Nigeria has banned backyard poultry farming in cities, but it would be too soon to say this is the reason for the zero human case report. Indonesia’s human bird flu victims largely come from small villages, not from large cities. Perhaps there have been some human cases of bird flu that have gone unreported in order to save commercial poultry operations, or perhaps Nigerian people are more careful in handling poultry struck dead from bird flu.
Thailand
Thailand has a huge commercial poultry industry that supplies the entire region of southeast Asia with eggs, chicks, food and poulry meat. Thai commercial poultry producers are under fire because they supply a good deal of poultry products such as eggs, chicks and feed to Vietnam and Cambodia as well as to other countries in the world such as Indonesia and Thailand. 70 per cent of Thailand’s poultry population is in large commercial operations.
Bird flu outbreaks have been met with mass culling and mobile educational campaigns and laboratories that seem to have been successful deployed. Altogether Thailand has suffered from 17 cases of avian flu in humans in 2004, 5 in 2005 and in 2006 with a total of 17 mortalities. This is far from Indonesia with over 60 deaths. I would voucher that in order to protect Thailand's important poultry sector, stronger efforts have been made to educate people, provide poultry with high quality bird flu vaccinaions and stamp out bird flu outbreaks by mass culling.
One Thai poultry farm pops up in many countries and some point the finger at Charoen Pokphand (CP) who GRAIN claims is Asia’s biggest producer of poultry and poultry feed, but say that the factory farm influence in the world is “systemic” and CP is only one example of how one large poultry producer can influence poultry markets the world over. CP seems to have business with the countries that have had major H5N1 avian flu outbreaks including Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Turkey. Turkey, in turn, sells live birds to Eastern Europe which GRAIN claims imports millions of birds.
So what should we do to stamp out avian flu?
Instead of believing people are too stupid to know when their chickens are sick and leaving the raising of poultry to the factory farming of just a few breeds, perhaps the emphasis should be on better community education, vaccination, separating large poultry operations and their by-products from small farmers and local markets and fair compensation for culling when birds fall ill. Now that sounds like a good policy for many years to come.
As the FAO states, “As in other parts of the world, producers, including smallholders, can also make a significant contribution to surveillance.”
Avian flu has not been an easy problem for anyone to solve, but the only way to stop people from dying is to eliminate avian flu in poultry. So countries where there is avian flu in poultry and people, spend some of that international donation by compensating farmers for sick birds, come down hard on large commercial poultry producers that export infected products and empower the little guy, and gal, to save the world.
Sources:
- GRAIN. Fowl Play: The poultry industry’s central role in the bird flu crisis. February 2006.
- Fitri, Emmy. Banning Backyard Poultry. The Jakarta Post. January 15, 2007.
- Reuters AlertNet. Bird Flu-Hit Indonesia to Ban City Backyard Poultry
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).Avian Influenza Disease Card.
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The Hen Which Lays the Golden Eggs. February 2006.
- FAO. Position Paper on Avian Influenza. 2004.