January 25, 2006

Dutch farmers will shun poultry vaccines if it affects exports

Dutch farmers will not be vaccinating its poultry against bird flu if it meant rejection from consumers, industry officials said on Tuesday.

Unless farmers can get assurances that vaccinated poultry could still be exported, current proposals to vaccinate poultry will likely end in failure, Jan Wolleswinkel, chairman of the Dutch poultry farmers organisation, told Reuters.

The Netherlands is one of the world's top poultry exporters. It will likely face trade restrictions from the EU and other countries if it begins a vaccination campaign for its flock of 90 million poultry.

Plans to launch a mass vaccination campaign came under consideration earlier this month due to the bird flu outbreak in Turkey.

The Netherlands would most likely have to negotiate its export trading status with every EU member state separately if its poultry is vaccinated, a ministry official said.

80 percent of the country's annual poultry meat production of about 600,000 tonnes is exported mainly to Germany, the UK, Belgium, France, Ukraine, Japan, Poland and Russia. The Dutch poultry industry export market was worth EUR1.6 billion (US$2 billion) in 2004. A bird flu outbreak of a different strain led to culling of over a third of the flock in the Netherlands in 2003, causing EUR0.5 billion (US$0.6 billion) in losses.

The EU typically bans livestock and meat imports from countries that use vaccination, but EU farm ministers agreed to update its bird flu law to allow countries greater flexibility to vaccinate poultry last month. However, no other EU country is considering preventive vaccination at the moment.