THAILAND: Bird Flu Raises Political Stink, Hurts Farmers Most

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 27 2004 (IPS) - A plague of dead chickens is raising a political stink in Thailand, whose government is being pilloried for placing profits over the lives of the country’s rural poor.

A plague of dead chickens is raising a political stink in Thailand, whose government is being pilloried for placing profits over the lives of the country’s rural poor.

Also exposed is the government’s disrespect for transparency.

Since the weekend, the administration of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has been forced to endure the consequence of its economic bias and its lack of regard for an open, democratic culture.

This has come in the form of the death of two boys due to the bird flu, up to 10 people coming under surveillance for possibly having the disease and 13 provinces being declared epidemic zones.

At the international level too, Bangkok is paying dearly for what critics say was a ”cover up” by authorities to hide the true picture of avian flu in Thai chicken farms in recent weeks,

The harshest rebuke was delivered by the European Union (EU), whose statement virtually accused the Thai government of resorting to lies to protect the country’s highly lucrative industry of chicken exports. Thailand is Asia’s largest exporter of chickens.

”Given the unfolding events in Thailand last week, the admission by the Thai prime minister that things were not as the public was led to believe, an independent verification of these measures and its impact in Thailand will have to take place,” declared the EU’s statement published in ‘The Nation’ newspaper on Tuesday.

”In these circumstances à of non-transparency àa complete reliance on Thai assurances does not seem to be the best way to go forward. We believe à credibility and trust à can only be rebuilt by confidence-building measures,” added the EU.

The parents of a six-year-old boy who was the first to die from bird flu this month also hurled accusations at the Thaksin govenrment. ”Why didn’t the government tell the truth? Why the cover-up? Had they admitted the existence of the disease, we would not have eaten that chicken,” Chamnan Bunmanut, the victim’s father, was quoted as having told the ‘Bangkok Post’ newspaper.

Till last Thursday, the Thai government denied that bird flu was rampaging through the country, despite reports from poor rural farmers that their poultry had been dying in the thousands since late last year.

The government had been saying that the deaths were due to fowl cholera – and that hence, humans were not susceptible.

The Thai government’s change of tune, however, came with the harsh economic truth it was forced to swallow by the weekend. Japan and the EU, unimpressed by Bangkok’s denial strategy, had slapped a ban on importing Thai chickens.

These two economies account for 80 percent of Thailand’s chicken export industry, estimated at 1.25 billion U.S. dollars. Thailand shipped close to 540,000 metric tonnes of chicken meat to its foreign markets last year.

Currently, Thailand is among the nine Asian countries hit by avian influenza, an infectious disease that not only kills domestic poultry like chickens but, since 1997, has jumped species – the H5N1 virus strain – to infect 18 humans in Hong Kong, six of whom died.

The other affected countries are Cambodia, Japan, Indonesia, Laos, Pakistan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.

By Tuesday, an estimated 10 million chickens had died due to the flu or had been culled.

Already, some Thai researchers are expressing concern about the social cost of the massive culling of chickens on the rural poor, who have been largely dependent on poultry farming as a source of income.

”This will force a large number of farmers out of business,” Nipon Poapongsakorn, senior consultant at the Thailand Development Research Institute, a Bangkok-based independent think-tank, told IPS. ”They will go bankrupt.”

Studies done by Nipon reveal that 97 percent of the farms in Thailand have less than 100 birds and supply close to 30 percent of broiler meat for the market. The remaining 70 percent of the chicken meat comes from just three percent of the farms, which are private sector, industrial-size ventures.

According to an official from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), an estimated 3.5 million families make up the small poultry farms sector. Of that number, government officials reveal, close to 600,000 families have been affected by the bird flu or the mass culling.

The small farmers have to pay this price for no fault of their own, Nipon asserted. ”I believe that the private sector influenced the government’s policy (about the initial silence over the bird flu).”

”And officials who had the authority to monitor (disease outbreaks) did not dare to speak the truth because of pressure from high up,” he added. ”This is not transparency.”

Wth the bird flu far from contained, an FAO official is also raising the alarm about how this mass death of chickens will affect food security in the country and the region.

”Massive culling will have an impact on food security. It can be potentially very serious,” Samuel Jutzi, director at FAO’s animal production and health division, said on the sidelines of conference on ‘Structural Change in the Livestock Sector’, which began here Tuesday.

Some conference participants predicted that it would take six months to a year for Thailand’s poultry sector to get back on its feet – and that, too, only after the flu has been contained.