Photo Credit – FAO
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As I touched on yesterday in Food Insecurity, Economics, And The Control Of H7N9, the impact of China’s H7N9 avian flu outbreak on the food supply, and their local economy, is likely to be substantial.
Even if the virus never manages to produce a human pandemic.
With no effective poultry vaccine at this time, mass culling remains the only method of controlling the spread of the virus.
As the following report illustrates, between the destruction of their flocks and sparse demand for their products due to fear of the virus, China’s poultry industry is reeling.
Xinhua Insight: Chinese poultry industry struggles to survive H7N9
English.news.cn 2013-04-22 20:54:20
BEIJING, April 22 (Xinhua) -- Lin Yuanzhong has killed more than 40,000 ducklings in the past 10 days as there is no sign anyone will patronize his duck breeding farm in Zini Town, Longhai City in east China's Fujian Province.
"If this continues for another 20 days, all the feed manufacturers, breeding farms and poultry raisers will be bankrupt," said Lin, who has been engaged in the industry for decades.
Even though the fast spread of H7N9 avian influenza has so far only hit Shanghai, Beijing and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Henan, the ensuing fear has reached nationwide.
The outbreak since earlier this month has given China's poultry industry its hardest hit in a decade, with drastic declines in both poultry prices and consumption.
Xiao Zhiyuan, director of the poultry association of south China's Guangdong Province, labeled the current crisis "the worst in history."
While human losses are always our first concern when a new virus emerges, the economic losses due to this emerging avian virus cannot be ignored.
Whether through factory farms, or small backyard holdings, the raising of poultry contributes much of the protein consumed in the Chinese diet, and is a strong factor in the local economy.
Serious damage to their poultry industry would not only increase food insecurity – in what is an already undernourished China - it could cause widespread economic damage as well.
Food Insecurity map - Source FAO
Both of which have the potential of becoming major destabilizing influences, whose consequences – while impossible to predict - might be felt well beyond the borders of China.
