Concerns on bird kill compliance in rural Vietnam

All fowl targeted in battle against flu
By Jan McGirk and Rafael D. Frankel, Globe Correspondents, 2/3/2004

BANGKOK -- Hour after hour throughout the past week, the mass cull continued with systematic haste. Thai soldiers and prisoners marched into chicken coops in 29 provinces, wearing surgical masks and shower caps.

Rubber-gloved hands grabbed hens off their roosting spots, jammed the squawking birds into fertilizer sacks, and then flung them into deep pits. Dirt was dumped on top and doused with quicklime before the cullers left for the next farm infected with bird flu.

Grim newsclips of the army's assault on 14 million Thai chickens were broadcast all week.

Nimit Saengchan is in despair. All 19,000 birds at his farm in Bang Lane district were destroyed last week, and he had to lay off his six workers.

"Now I have to find another job myself," he said.

Saengchan said he has loans to pay off, and the government's compensation of $1 per culled chicken won't stretch far. Without the 10,000 eggs he used to sell every day, he said he has no means of livelihood.

Farmers and vendors are being hit hard as 10 Asian countries confront the virulent H5N1 strain of the bird flu that already has wiped out tens of millions of chickens and ducks. At least eight people have died in Vietnam and two in Thailand, but so far there have been no reports of person-to-person transmission, a development that could trigger a human influenza pandemic.

In Vietnam, where authorities say they are prepared to slaughter every fowl in the country, most farmers and poultry sellers in cities appear to be acquiescing to government orders to sell their products to the state -- which then destroys them -- at well below market value. But in the countryside, authorities say, some farmers are trying to hold out.

At a market in the Mekong Delta town of Long Xuyen on Saturday, a half-dozen government health inspectors combed the hundreds of stalls looking for chickens, ducks, eggs, and any poultry products they could find.

"We know people are still hiding chickens, but the number is reducing," said the lead inspector, Le Van Thang, pointing to baskets of fowl his inspectors confiscated that morning.

Despite the government's effort, chickens and ducks can be seen roaming free in the small farms that line the hundreds of canals and rivers criss-crossing the Delta.

"We are sending inspectors to the large farms, but we can't go everywhere," Le said.

The World Health Organization, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Organization for Animal Health have all appealed to wealthy countries to compensate farmers across the region for their economic losses. Otherwise, specialists fear, cash-strapped farmers may sell tainted meat, which could infect kitchen workers and consumers.

Thailand's prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, has promised to suspend poultry farmers' debts for six months, although at least three months are needed for new chicks to mature enough to lay eggs.

Thaksin, a billionaire who once worked at a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise while attending college in Texas, is urging Thais to resume eating poultry. He pledged to pay surviving family members $75,000 if anyone died eating chicken cooked at a temperature above 168 degrees Fahrenheit. "When it's cooked, it's one million percent safe," he said in his weekly radio address.

Meanwhile, grief is galvanizing into anger and resignation. When all of one provincial farmer's hens were struck dead recently, according to media reports, she allegedly went berserk and started flinging their limp bodies onto other farms, apparently hoping that the flu would bankrupt her neighbors, too.

Many Thais think their leaders bungled the crisis by waiting too long to act, and they don't trust government authorities to protect them anymore, particularly after government spokesman Jakrapob Penkair admitted that a bureaucratic "screw-up" delayed eradication of bird flu in its early stages. The disease was mislabeled as fowl cholera, although some local veterinarians say they spotted avian influenza three months ago and were too intimidated to come forward with an inconvenient truth that would damage exports worth an annual $2 billion.

A sense of hopelessness pervades the market in Long Xuyen, Vietnam. Asked what he will do for money while the flu outbreak continues, vendor Do Huu Nghia, 40, said he will be jobless.

"I don't know how I will eat; I will be very poor," he said, dumping hundreds of his eggs into a basket government inspectors were waiting to collect.

Another poultry vendor threw up her hands as she listened to a government proclamation over a loudspeaker explaining the compensation vendors would receive for their products: While chickens usually sell for $2 each, and eggs for six cents, the government is only paying 75 cents in compensation for chickens and just over a penny apiece for eggs.

"Please tell the government we need help very badly," said the woman, who did not wish to be identified. "Please tell people to help us."

Farmers and vendors are not the only ones affected.

When the Thai capital was declared an epidemic center, traders at Chatuchak, Bangkok's biggest open-air market, raised a flap. The owners of an estimated 80,000 exotic birds -- ranging from fighting cocks to cockatoos and rare finches -- balked at killing them, although the law requires any stock within a three-mile radius of an infection zone to be destroyed. Authorities have granted a short reprieve to meet demands for a more selective cull that would spare birds issued health certifications by licensed veterinarians.

After officials at a quarantine checkpoint seized a champion rooster traveling to a cockfight, Bangkok's fighting cock breeders turned defiant. Rather than hand their prized birds over to be dispatched without dignity, the men slit the throats of 20 roosters at Chatuchak Market and tossed them into a soup pot. Then they slurped bowls of spicy Tom Yam Gai soup made from their birds.

Nikhom Apiratanakosol, head of the Fighting Cock Breeders' Club, complained that the government should have warned chicken owners about the epidemic.

"Officials let the disease spread widely and then ordered a sudden mass slaughter," he said.

McGirk reported from Bangkok; Frankel from Long Xuyen, Vietnam.

©2004 Globe Newspaper Company