The federal government intends to regulate the working of 26,000 poultry farms, mostly small, in a bid to stamp out the Avian influenza virus which now visits the country frequently. But how far it can provide safe environ to this vital sector which meets the growing chicken meat demand , now roughly at 480,000 tons a year, is anybody’s guess.

A high alert was declared a week ago following a major strike by the virus in Karachi’s farms. Pakistan came on the bird flu map in 2006 and there had been 79 eruptions in 2007 along with the first human casualty.

Although the details of the new strategy are yet to be made public, the animal husbandry commissioner has made it clear that the ‘open policy’ of allowing an entrepreneur to set up a poultry farm after obtaining just an NOC from the relevant authorities will be replaced with a formal registration system. Since the reorganization of the fast expanding poultry sector is of the essence to its future, it is appropriate to have a look at some recent developments and experiences of other countries in this respect.

First, there is nothing new about bird flu. It has always lived peacefully with wild birds and chickens for centuries. What is new is its highly pathogenic strain called H5N1 which has badly mauled the poultry sector in Asia. The bird flu is so common that most of wild fowls often remain infected with some mild form of it and that it has no effect on people.

But H5N1 strain’s unique biology makes it a killer both for the wild fowl (5,000 fowls died after the disease was reported in Karachi in last days of January) that carry it and the domestic birds that get exposed to it (about 10,000 chickens died or were culled so far). Then, it can jump from birds to humans. Currently, much of the world is on the alert for outbreaks of this lethal strain. Millions of birds have died or been destroyed in dozens of countries since the H5N1 strain emerged in South-East Asia in 2003. A recent study claims that bird flu does not, and cannot, evolve into deadly forms in backyard farms (rural areas and small units in urban areas) because low-density and genetic diversity keep the viral load to low levels there. It is the commercial sector where it attacks. In fact, backyard poultry is the victim, not the source, of bird flu strains brought in from elsewhere.

Second, world consumption of meat has grown dramatically during the last 40 years, more so in the Third World where the western way of life, with its heavy consumption of beef burgers and chicken nuggets, has been strongly promoted by mass media. Then, consumption of poultry has risen much higher than that of other meats. Its world output increased from 8.9 to 70.33 million tonnes in 40 years. And still there is a big pressure on commercial farms to produce more poultry.

Third, just as the world is undergoing climate change, it is also undergoing a major transformation in diseases. And, here too, human actions are at the heart of the problem. In fact, the very forces driving climate change are also at the root of global disease change. According to the FAO, “upsurges in animal disease emergencies worldwide are linked to the increased mobility of people, goods and livestock ” (globalisation), “changes in farming systems ” (more factory farming), “and the weakening of many livestock health services ” (neo-liberal privatisation and deregulation). The problems are thus systemic.

So, it is the industrialisation of today’s poultry sector which is creating conditions for bird flu to emerge again and again and spread rapidly. The example of Bangladesh is quite illustrative. The country is seen as a success story of the “livestock revolution”, having converted about half of its national poultry production from backyards to intensive and semi-intensive industrial farms. The micro-credit NGO, the Bangladesh

Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) was instrumental in this transition by financing groups of poor women to set up thousands of mini-factory farms.

In the process the BRAC became a major, vertically integrated poultry corporation, with its own large-scale hatcheries, poultry farms and feed mills that supply the smaller units. The corporate NGO also played a central role in the national bird flu preparedness activities backed by the World Bank. In 2005, the government contracted it to monitor “hotspots ” in the country where migratory birds flock, and to convert the country ’s open-house hatcheries into bio-secure closed facilities. But these actions failed to stop the bird flu outbreak of March 2007 which happened at a completely closed poultry farm – one of the country’s largest broiler operations and hatcheries. From there, it spread quickly through the smaller model farms and some other large-scale operations.

But what happened in Laos is a different story. The major reason why the country has not suffered widespread bird flu outbreaks like its neighbours (Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam and China are the most affected) is that there is almost no contact between its small-scale poultry farms, which produce nearly all of the domestic poultry supply, and its commercial operations, which are integrated with foreign poultry companies.

Laos effectively stamped out the disease by closing the border to poultry from Thailand and culling chickens at the commercial operations. The government is less concerned about the disease spreading out from the affected farms because, unlike in Thailand and Vietnam, small-scale farmers in Laos are not supplied by big companies with day-old chicks or feed and, outside of its capital, poultry is produced and consumed locally. Poultry production is also more spread out in Laos. It is less dense, less integrated and less homogeneous – all of which keeps bird flu from spreading and evolving into more pathogenic forms.

The Laos experience suggests that the key to protecting backyard poultry and people from bird flu is to protect them from industrial poultry and poultry products. It rejects corporate approach to poultry development, which encourages farmers to sell their poultry and its products to more distant markets and to use off-farm inputs, such as feed and day-old chicks supplied by large companies. Traditional farmer knowledge and biodiversity combined with simple bio -security measures appropriate to small farms may be all that is required to manage the disease effectively in most rural communities.

Hence, as Pakistan moves to re-organise its poultry sector to keep the bird flu away the Laos’ experience needs to be kept in view. Currently, it is the commercial poultry which is expanding faster (about 320 million broilers and 410 million day-old chicks a year) while rural poultry’s growth is slower (38 million day-old chicks). What is needed is an understanding of the dynamics of the disease in local contexts, not a blind adoption of corporate-led big solutions for wiping out the disease which can ultimately wipe out the foundations for long- term, pro-poor solutions in the process, but not the disease itself.