Avian flu devastating SA's poultry industry

"I don’t think people understand what farmers and their staff are going through,” says a chicken farmer from Gauteng.

It was about 5pm when he received a call he had dreaded his farm manager: about 15 laying hens in one of the battery houses had died. On hearing this, he knew they had been struck by avian flu.

The slaughter of 30 000 of his approximately 200 000 chickens then had to commence, in order to prevent the spread of the disease.

“Animal health guidelines say you have to wring their necks one by one or gas them. That same afternoon, we gassed them. The next day at 4am, we got people in to help load all the carcasses and bury them, according to the protocols. Every broom, every piece of paper and every item of protective clothing worn during the slaughtering and burial went into the hole with the carcasses, as well as prescribed chemicals,” he said.

The slaughtered chickens amounted to 60 tons of meat, wiping out a large part of his farm. If the farmer had had to transport 60 tons of chicken meat to the nearest specially approved landfill, he would have had to hire three trucks.

Simply killing the chickens and getting rid of the carcasses, according to the guidelines, cost him about R32 per bird. He added that he was now also unable to farm for four months, since his farm was under quarantine.

He is one of more than 100 farmers whose commercial farms have been brought to a complete or partial standstill by the latest epidemic of a highly contagious variant of avian flu.

Damage

During the last major epidemic, in 2017, the industry suffered an estimated R1.8 billion in damage. However, the current losses are already three times as much.

The farmer said that, besides the financial devastation he had suffered, it had been emotionally difficult killing his hens. Gassing, he said, had been a better option than wringing their necks. “The SPCA comes to ask how you’re going to slaughter them, but how can you wring their necks? Or expect it from your workers? They look after those hens every day,” he said tearfully.

Another farmer said that, after two traumatic days of neck-wringing, he had called in the state veterinarian and his team to continue the job themselves.

Two highly contagious bird flu variants, H5 and H7, are raging in Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, the Free State and North West. The disease can kill all a large farm’s chickens within a week. Even if only one bird dies of the disease, all the others have to be disposed of.

The industry says the only solution is vaccination, which is done in the US, Mexico, Europe and many other parts of the world. However, after the 2017 avian flu epidemic in South Africa, calls for government to introduce those vaccines were largely ignored.

Estimation

During that year, 5.4 million chickens were culled at an estimated loss to the industry of R1.8 billion.

Farmers bear the cost of vaccines themselves, but cannot import them until the state has approved them. Although government has now agreed to this in principle, it may take two to six months to get the vaccine here, says Izaak Breitenbach, head of the broiler section of the SA Poultry Association (Sapa).

About 5 million of the country’s approximately 25 million commercial laying hens and almost 2.5 million of the nearly 8 million broiler breeder chickens have died of the disease since the beginning of this year, or have been culled in terms of the guidelines.

That amounts to 20% of the country’s laying hens and 30% of the breeding chickens, says Breitenbach.

He added that the epidemic had seemed to peak in mid-September and that the number of infections was beginning to decrease to two per week.

However, Albie Esterhuizen, CEO of CC Chickens in Kroonstad in the Free State, which supplies broilers to the market, said there had been a new “explosion of cases”, with three outbreaks at farms in the past week. “The disease is so contagious that here in Kroonstad, a farm was infected by bird flu from another farm 100km away.”

Quarantine

A total of 108 farms, or 12% of the chicken industry, are under quarantine.

At a session of the portfolio committee on agriculture, land reform and rural development on Friday, Sapa estimated the current losses of the egg and broiler industry to be R4.8 billion.

The major listed poultry companies, Astral Foods and RCL Foods (which owns Rainbow Chicken, among other entities), said they had already suffered losses of R220 million and R115 million, respectively.

Chris Schutte of Astral said that South Africa was the only country in the world that failed to compensate farmers for chickens which they had to destroy to prevent the spread of the disease.

The regulations pertaining to animal health do provide for applications for compensation, but when asked how much was budgeted for this, the department of agriculture declined to give a figure, saying:

Any government money is subject to the prescriptions of the Public Finance Management Act and part of the department’s budget process.

Johan Willemse, an independent agricultural economist, said that, for the sake of food security, government should offer a safety net for farmers who suffered damage.

“The US, for example, has a system in place in which farmers are compensated if government forces them to cull animals. It’s in the national interests. The risk is too great for farmers to bear alone.”

Breitenbach said egg and chicken meat shortages would get worse over the next few weeks.-Fin24