March 31, 2004

EU Partially Lifts US Poultry Ban

The European Union Commission announced on Tuesday that it will scale down its US poultry ban to just the state of Texas where the outbreak of bird flu occurred.

The E.U. also has scaled back a similar ban in Canada to a part of the province of British Columbia.

Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection David Byrne said: "It is now timely to lift most of the import restrictions as all necessary information provided by the two countries indicate that the high pathogenic Avian Influenza outbreaks in the two countries have been confined to a limited area."

The E.U. banned U.S. poultry imports Feb. 23 after the state of Texas confirmed new cases of bird flu. It is the first time since 1983-84 that bird flu has been found in the U.S. Those cases were found in Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The U.S. is a major poultry exporter to the E.U. Last year, one in four imported eggs came from the U.S, worth around EUR20 million in trade. The E.U. also imported 450,000 one-day-old chicks, worth a further EUR2.5 million.

The E.U. banned poultry products from Canada March 9.

It also has banned the import of all poultry products from Thailand and other Asian countries hit by the bird flu outbreak. The ban on Thailand's lucrative chicken exports to the 15-nation European bloc was introduced Jan. 23. Last year, the E.U. imported 150,000 tons of chicken from Thailand. The ban will remain in place until Aug. 25.

The Asian strain of the virus is more deadly. It has caused over 20 deaths and led to the slaughter of tens of millions of chickens. There are no cases in the U.S. or Canada of humans becoming infected with the disease.

The E.U. had its own outbreak of bird flu in 2003, which resulted in the culling of 30 million chickens and other birds in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.