Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK , Nov 16 2005 (IPS) – A summit meeting of Asia-Pacific leaders in South Korea, this weekend, will help clarify where in the pecking order East Asia s poultry farmers stand, as new commitments are made to fight the deadly bird flu virus.
This issue is part of a debate that is gaining momentum as the international community rallies together in a bid to combat a possible global pandemic being triggered by the H5N1 strain of avian flu.
And it is one that Asian countries like China, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia will find difficult to sidestep, since they have been the worst affected after the H5N1 strain of bird flu began sweeping through poultry populations early last year.
On Wednesday, China officially confirmed the death of a woman poultry worker in the eastern Anhui province, the first fatality in the major farming country. Beijing has announced plans to vaccinate all of the country s 14 billion poultry, sharpening the debate ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Busan.
Pre-summit reports suggest that the APEC meeting may give more weight to strengthening human health initiatives, such as cooperation to develop a vaccine to inoculate people from bird flu.
Foreign ministers of the 21 APEC economies will call for further support to establish a regional stockpile of antiviral medication , the English-language The Korea Times reported this week. Currently Tamiflu, the only known antiviral drug capable of protecting people from bird flu, is in short supply.
Giving priority to boosting human health defence is mainly the result of doomsday scenarios being painted by bodies like the Geneva-based World Health Organisation WHO).
Prognoses by WHO say that nearly 150 million people could die in a full-blown pandemic, triggered by a virus capable of being passed among humans. Justification for such a high possible death toll relies on the world s experience of the 1918 Spanish Flu when an estimated 50 million people died from a virus originating among birds but crossed the species barrier through mutation.
As of today, 65 fatalities have been recorded, out of the 126 people known to have been infected by the virus.
Yet, as The Korea Times reports, the pre-summit draft statement also talks about the need to strengthen regional and international surveillance and response systems, which will have some bearing on East Asia s poultry farmers.
The APEC summit, Nov. 18-19, will have leaders from the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Singapore and Malaysia among others.
There is still a window of opportunity to control the virus at its source, the poultry population, and farmers have to be helped if that is to succeed, Carolyn Benigno, animal health officer at the Asia-Pacific office of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said in an interview.
The APEC summit can help by throwing its weight behind the need to compensate poultry farmers to keep surveillance going , she added. There are only a few countries that have a compensation policy, which encourages farmers to help with the surveillance efforts.
Thailand, where 13 people have died due to bird flu since January last year, has the most comprehensive compensation policy for poultry farmers among all the affected countries in the region.
Last year, Thai animal health authorities paid farmers the full cost of the poultry that had died or been culled due to bird flu. This year, Bangkok introduced a revised policy that covers up to 75 percent of the cost of the price of an affected chicken.
The government also helped farmers to buy new chickens if they followed the proper instructions, like have bio-security measures for their poultry to block off contact with wild birds, Chanida Chanyapate, deputy director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based think tank, told IPS.
Despite such efforts, Thailand has been hit by another wave of bird flu in 21 provinces. This week, public health authorities unveiled a plan to monitor Bangkok more closely after an 18-month-old baby was detected with signs of bird flu. He had contracted the disease from infected poultry in his family s backyard.
In Vietnam, the worst affected country, where 42 people have died, farmers are compensated selectively for poultry culled or killed. And in the poverty- stricken Cambodia, where four people have died, compensating poor chicken farmers remains a remote prospect.
Across Asia, there are some 200 million small farmers who have between 10 to 100 birds, according to the FAO. In Thailand, one of the world s largest exporters of chicken meat, there are over two million people in the small-scale poultry sector.
Since the beginning of last year, over 170 million fowl have been culled or died due to the H5N1 virus, according to the FAO.
Such damage is wreaking havoc in the affected Asian countries, states the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (AsDB) in a recent study. One estimate puts the direct cost to the livestock in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam at 560 million US dollars.
The international community, however, has been slow to respond to the vulnerable poultry farmers of East Asia.
A plea by the FAO for funds to improve surveillance in bird flu endemic areas and not to compensate farmers has only received commitments of up to 35 million US dollars, just a third of the 100 million dollars that the Rome-based U.N. agency wanted.
At a meeting of 100 countries in Geneva earlier this month, animal experts drove home the message that the poor poultry farmers in bird flu affected countries cannot be viewed as a sideshow in the drive to combat the killer virus.
The message that the poultry farmers economic concerns have to be met, was highlighted in the first of the six measures that were prescribed to keep bird flu at bay: Improving veterinary services, emergency preparedness plans and control campaigns including culling, vaccination and compensation.
