CAIRO: Egypt plans to repay in kind farmers, whose birds are culled in areas affected by bird flu, following the failure of a previous financial compensation scheme, a health ministry official said Tuesday. The ministry is currently looking at this plan, whereby farmers would be given new, vaccinated, chicks when they lose their birds to a culling campaign, Nasr El-Sayed told AFP. We are hoping to launch the program next month, with pilot projects in Menufiya and Gharbiya provinces, he said, on the sidelines of a World Health Organization (WHO) conference on bird flu held in Cairo.
With 12 human deaths from the virulent H5N1 strain of avian influenza over the past year, Egypt has become the worst-hit non-Asian country since the epidemic first appeared in 2003.
The vast majority of human cases were reported in domestic rearings and the authorities have struggled to educate the public on the dangers of backyard farming, a significant source of income for many poor Egyptian households. Many people are still scared of reporting suspected outbreaks because they lose a source of income and they are afraid of retaliation from their neighbors if poultry is destroyed in their entire village, said Doctor Talib Ali Elam from the Food and Agriculture Organization. It s true that an incentive is needed but a lot of money was wasted due to widespread cheating when the first system of financial compensation was introduced last year, he told AFP. According to Sayed, more than 30 million dollars were spent by the government on a financial compensation program, with little success. Compensation in kind will be much cheaper, quell the fears of the farmers and increase the vaccination rates, said Talib Ali Elam, who first floated the idea to the ministry.
Health ministry spokesman Abdelrahman Shaheen stressed that the best tool to prevent a surge in human infections remained the ambitious awareness campaign launched by the government a few months ago. The biggest compensation for anyone is to have their life saved. I believe increased understanding that one s life can be in the balance is the best way of changing old habits, he told AFP. Some two million people are employed in Egypt s poultry industry but scores of Egyptians also rear fowl domestically, both in rural and urban areas, sometimes living in the room as the birds.
