In this hemisphere, the United States and Canada have been grappling with an outbreak of mad cow disease which has the potential of inflicting severe damage on the beef industry of both of these countries. This past week, there have been reports of a new avian or bird flu outbreak in Asia, principally in Vietnam where twelve deaths have been reported.
The most populous nation in the world, China, has banned chicken imports from its neighboring Asia sister states.
Bird Flu has infected millions of chickens in Vietnam, South Korea and Japan, prompting these nations to order huge slaughters at poultry farms. In Vietnam, poultry production is a small farmer activity and it has been reported that the local sale of poultry has decreased by 80% causing a serious financial problem for farmers as well as placing Vietnam with a vexing food security problem.
Living in a global environment, no region is immune to the challenges of animal diseases and the impact at the national level, particularly when disease can infest humans plus create food shortages by contaminating the food chain.
This avian flu is spread by a virus – highly contagious among chickens and is believed to have spread to humans through contact with infected birds. So far, there have been no reports of the disease being transmitted from one person to another. The concern, however, by World Health Officials is that if human-to-human transmission occurs, it would turn bird flu into a deadlier epidemic than SARS.
Avian Influenza is a very serious disease of domestic birds, particularly chicken and ducks. It is appearing more and more frequently all over the world (in Hong Kong 1997/98, in the Netherlands and South Korea in 2003). The virus reservoir is the bird wildlife and there is no method available to control it.
The disease causes considerable economic losses, due to high bird mortality, mass killing of domestic birds and other measures. To date, there have been no reports of it reaching the Caribbean.
The discovery of the first case of mad cow disease in the United States was this past December; however, there is concern that we in The Bahamas are still to lackadaisical and not enforcing strict enough controls on beef imports. Controls are based on three components – monitoring the source of imports, surveillance and testing.
There is much trade in animal feed and animal products globally and no claim can claim to be absolutely mad cow free. In the case of The Bahamas, there is a high awareness by the Ministry of Agriculture but one has doubts as to whether or not a proper risk assessment has been conducted in order to ensure that risk animals and products have been excluded from our food chain.
Apart from the health dimension, there is also the supply side. The Bahamian market is minuscule compared to that of Asian countries like Japan, China, South Korea and Vietnam. This means that producers in the US will target the markets of the Asian countries, thereby creating a possible increase of prices for poultry products for the Bahamian consumer. There may even be big shortages in chicken products as an unexpected market has been created by the epidemic.
On the other hand, when the bird flu situation has been rectified and production in these countries is back to normal, the US will have huge surpluses which would then be dumped on countries like The Bahamas to further ruin the local poultry industry.
A country cannot continually respond by reacting to the uncertainties of dependence on food from imported sources. The world food supply is influenced by many factors; some of these factors do not consider our interests, thereby putting The Bahamas in an unfavorable position. There is no substitute for the maintenance of a minimum level of food security in several basic commodities. Our Agricultural Sector has to move in this direction in order to bring some semblance of sustainability to our food production system.
Bahamians are large consumers of chicken and beef products; however, our output in poultry products has been declining and no beef is being produced, yet all around us, the food supply is uncertain for one reason or another. A new focus is essential.
Godfrey Eneas, The Bahama Journal
