April 6, 2004

 

 

Canada To Cull 19 Million Poultry In Bid To Stop Bird Flu

 

Canada have announced that it will cull up to 80% or 19 million chickens and turkey in bird flu hit British Columbia in a bid to halt the rapid spread of the virus.

 

The disease has spread to 18 farms in British Columbia's Fraser Valley since inspectors found the H7N3 virus in a barn east of Vancouver on Feb. 19, leading countries such as the U.S. and Brazil to restrict shipments from Canada. The H7N3 strain is harmful only to birds, unlike the H5N1 strain that has been blamed for at least 23 human deaths in Asia.

 

Canada will cull birds on 600 farms as it tries to stop bird flu from finding its way into flocks outside the western province. Canada is the world's ninth-largest producer of chickens, slaughtering about 630 million a year, 100 million of them in British Columbia, according to Chicken Farmers of Canada.

 

"Our preoccupation is to stop the spread of this disease, and to stamp it out," Agriculture Minister Bob Speller said at a press conference in Ottawa.

 

Some 38 countries that have restricted imports of Canadian poultry. Exports make up about a tenth of Canada's C$1.5 billion of chicken sales, according to industry figures.

 

The cull will stall production in a zone that stretches west from Vancouver to Hope, British Columbia for several months as farmers complete the cull and inoculate their barns. Farmers tend to restock their barns six to eight times a year, said Lisa Bishop, a spokeswoman for the Chicken Farmers of Canada, which represents 2,800 producers.

 

The group backed the slaughter, as did processors in the area. British Columbia's poultry industry contributes about C$850 million to the province's C$136 billion gross domestic product, the fourth-largest provincial GDP in Canada. Canada's economy produces good and services worth about C$1.1 trillion a year.

 

"Let's bite the bullet," Ken Huttema, president of K&R Poultry Ltd., which processes chickens, turkeys, ducks and pigeons in Abbotsford, British Columbia. "The sooner we get it done, the sooner we can rebuild."

 

Huttema, 43, said he doubted poultry prices would rise much because of extra production in other parts of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.

 

The country's fowl producers tend to sell at home rather than abroad because the government regulates production and limits competition from imports to keep prices higher.

 

Poultry and egg farmers were Canada's wealthiest in 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available. They had cash and assets worth C$2 million more than their debt and other liabilities. The average farmer's net worth was C$822,000.

 

Many of the birds set for slaughter are free of the disease and can be sold after they are tested, Speller said. Producers will be compensated under existing federal programs, the minister said. He declined to guess how much they would receive.