March 3, 2006

600 poultry workers demonstrate in Cairo

About 600 poultry workers demonstrated in central Cairo on Wednesday, protesting the government's placid response to their losses after a nationwide cull was ordered and little reparations were made.

Protesters further demanded that retail poultry shops be reopened, following a government ban on sales of non-frozen poultry.

Cases of the virus have emerged among birds in 14 of 26 Egyptian governorates and  one million farm birds have been culled across the country over the past week.

The Egyptian government however, does not seem intent on meeting their demands.

The authorities are still monitoring the situation closely to see when it would be safe to allow the poultry industry to start functioning again, said Mona Mehris, an official at the agriculture ministry's Institute for Animal Health.

Shortly after the crisis was announced, the government offered to buy healthy poultry from farmers and compensate farmers culling their fowl. Taxes and debts owed by chicken farmers were cancelled to alleviate the damage to the industry.

But no compensation package was offered to cover the financial woes the farmers are undergoing.

The economic crisis poultry farmers are facing would not be eased in the long term by the government's current strategy, said Wagih Abdel Aziz, director of the Cairo-based Southern Centre for Human Rights Studies.

It is extremely worrying that a industry that employs two million people is not getting any long-term economic plans from the government to sustain itself, he said.