Monday 27th February 2006

News Story

Netherlands

A new and extremely important report has come out today from GRAIN, about the mistaken policy analysis and debate surrounding the current Bird Flu crisis.

While panic in the media and at government levels is focused on the threat from migratory birds and small-scale free-range poultry operations, the real reason for the development and spread of the disease has been quietly ignored.

The GRAIN report shows that emergence of bird flu follows the global poultry industry's movements - and NOT migratory bird movements. The large-scale, confined, and frankly disgusting, factory farming conditions that characterise the global poultry industry are likely to be the real cause of the mutation of bird flu into its deadly form. The widespread movements of the industry's chickens and hatching eggs, are likely to be the cause of its spread.

Small-scale, free-range poultry farms and migratory wild birds are however being unfairly blamed for the crisis.

This report is therefore extremely important in the current debate about bird flu, especially as authorities prepare their policies. If wild birds and free-range operations are incorrectly identified as the problem, we are looking at a situation that not only fails to address the problems, but could have disastrous consequences for biodiversity, farmers' livelihoods, and livestock diversity.

"A burning question is why governments and international agencies, like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), are doing nothing to investigate how the factory farms and their byproducts, such as animal feed and manure, spread the virus," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN.

Please find the report attached here, and available at www.grain.org. Please ensure that it gets widely circulated to colleagues, policy makers and media in your country. With the recent discovery of Bird Flu in Nigeria, policy makers in Africa may be nearing a state of panic, and they need all the relevant information they can get.

Food & Farming