Poultry industry struggling hard for survival

FE Team | Published: January 07, 2012 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00

Arafat Ara
The country's once potential poultry industry is struggling hard to survive as nearly 10,000 poultry farms were shut over the last 12 months due mainly to the outbreak of bird flu, industry leaders said.
The farm owners feared that the number of farms would further decline in coming days if the government did not take any effective measures to protect the Tk 300 billion industry from being destroyed.
They said an investment of Tk 20 billion has already perished due to the shutdown of the poultry units that has triggered panic among the farmers.
According to the statistics of the Bangladesh Poultry Industries Association (BPIA), the country had an estimated number of 64,000 poultry farms in 2011 against 74,000 registered in 2010.
"But unfortunately the government shows that only 170 farms were affected in the last year," said BPIA Joint Secretary General Khandokar Mohsin.
He said though the Avian Influenza is spreading gradually there is no proper initiative from the government to prevent the disease.
A maximum number of poultry farms have been affected by the flu this season, he said adding the farmers cannot always identify it as the symptom of the flu is similar to other diseases like ranikhet, bronchitis, mycoplasma etc.
He said, last year the authority gave assurance of introducing bird flu vaccine to prevent the disease. "But there was no progress seen in this connection," he said.
"If the government does not take proper measures to prevent the disease and give adequate compensation, the sector will not survive in future," said Mr Mohsin adding the farm owners get poor compensation compared to their loss.
He noted that the growth of the industry was shrinking due to lack of fund.
Banks are not interested to give loans to poultry farms mainly due to the Avian influenza.
Usually 10,000 new farms enter into the sector a year but last year only 1800 farms joined the industry, the sector insider mentioned.
The farm owners also expressed their fear that the country's unemployment problem would increase significantly in future days if the situation continued as a large number of unemployed and semi-employed youths depended of this industry.
Department of Livestock Services Director Musaddique Hossain said for preventing the disease the department has already taken up an awareness programme.
He said they trained up poultry farmers in every division to face the influenza.
According to Livestock Department nearly 16000 chickens were culled and 46,740 eggs were destroyed in the past two months due to outbreak of bird flu.
Bird Flu or H5NI virus first broke out in the country in 2007 when more than a million chickens were culled and tens of thousand of small farms were closed as the flu ravaged the industry for more than six months.