Serious steps have been taken towards developing the poultry industry which is facing many obstacles, reports Ahmed Kotb After several meetings between government officials and members of the poultry production sector, an agreement has been reached last week to start the implementation of the presidential decree number four which was issued in January 2011 and mandates the allocation of approximately 180,000 feddans for poultry farms projects. According to Abdel-Aziz El-Sayed, head of the poultry division at Cairo Chamber of Commerce, Minister of Agriculture Salah Youssef has agreed to allot 76,000 feddans in Beni Sweif, and 44,000 feddans in Menia, as well as 58,000 feddans by the Wahat Road in Giza for the purpose of increasing local production of fowl to 1.6 billion. "Current local consumption is estimated at 800 million fowls annually, 700 million of those are locally produced and the rest are imported," El-Sayed pointed out. Total investment cost of those new farms, he added, is estimated to be LE22 billion. "Production will start in a span of 3-5 years, and is expected to meet the rising demand and allow us to export the surplus," he said, adding that finalising ways to implement the projects should take a few weeks. Egypt used to export poultry worth of $10.4 million to 32 countries in 2005, just one year before the bird flu attack which led to the execution of tens of millions of fowls as a way to curb the epidemic. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), H1N1 virus, commonly known as bird flu, claimed the lives of 331 persons since 2003. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations listed Egypt as one of the top countries prone to bird flu risks in 2011. The Ministry of Agriculture's supreme committee to combat bird flu started to set some unorthodox rules that commensurate with the severity of the virus. Osama Selim, head of the committee and president of the General Authority for Veterinary Services, said that the committee decided to ration importing vaccines because there are already some 30 types of vaccines available in the market and not all of them are effective. Moreover, he added, "we demanded a halt to the act of total execution of birds in farms that report infections." "We aim to preserve the production of a total number of 22,000 poultry farms," he stressed. El-Sayed stated that the problem largely lies in the absence of the correct application of Article 70/2009 which prohibits the circulation of live poultry. "Most of poultry stores defy the article and take advantage of the unstable security situations," he said, adding that this is the biggest challenge to combating the epidemic. "Stores that sell live fowl are everywhere in the middle of residential areas. It is catastrophic." El-Sayed also said that the wastes of these poultry stores can spread epidemics and diseases very easily. "The article could be activated without having to shut down stores that sell live fowl because the Social Fund for Development can finance each store owner with up to LE50,000 to prepare the store with needed equipment for selling frozen fowl," he noted. However, El-Sayed stated, any efforts to preserve and develop the industry are useless if not accompanied by similar efforts to develop production requirements. "Research centres in Egypt should focus on developing alternatives to ordinary fodder, of which approximately 75 per cent consists of corn," he said. Almost 50 per cent of corn is imported. "Egypt should expand its production of corn to become self-sufficient and to bring prices down," he said. A recently published study by El-Sayed suggests that poultry constitutes 63 per cent of the total protein consumption by Egyptians. According to the report, an average Egyptian consumes 24 kilogrammes of animal protein each year, 15 kilogrammes of which are poultry meat. That is mainly because of its lower prices in comparison to fish and red meat. Prices of poultry in the local market are stable despite rising production costs because demand is lower than usual due to the industry's heavy dependence on tourism that is still far from normal levels. The price of a kilogramme sold at farms is LE9.5.
