GRAIN

April 2006

According to this report from GRAIN, the centralised, top-down response to avian influenza by United Nations (UN) international agencies like the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is devastating small farmers and perpetuating the crisis. The report highlights how the FAO has shifted its poultry production policies from family poultry farms to large-scale factory farms, and states that the WHO has shown little regard for the negative impacts of its recommended bird flu control measures on small farmers. The WHO is also criticised for its private database of bird flu sequence data, data which is extremely valuable in the global race for bird flu vaccines, and available to only 15 laboratories worldwide.

The report refers to the way that international funding is allocated and distributed as a further detriment to small farmers. According to the report, funding is only offered on the condition that governments follow the guidelines provided by the WHO and FAO, which include controversial measures like culling, drug stockpiling and long-term restructuring of the poultry industry. It is also noted that those affected by avian flu are rarely adequately informed about the disease, and that there has hardly been any effort to include local communities in decision making and strategising against the disease.

The report concludes that the UN institutions at the forefront of the global response to the virus have lost a sense of rural realities, and that the destruction of native flocks and the restructuring of the poultry sector towards factory and large-scale farming has disastrous consequences for rural people, and merely perpetuates the current bird flu crisis.

GRAIN website.