Bird flu scare pushes rate of eggs, broilers down

Sushil Manav

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, January 7

The bird flu scare has hit the business of poultry farmers hard in the state as the wholesale prices of eggs and broilers have witnessed a dip of 25 and 50 per cent respectively in the past week.

The wholesale prices of eggs, which was Rs 600 per hundred till the end of December, has dropped to Rs 450 today while broilers were fetching price of Rs 60 per kg against Rs 120 earlier.

“It is not the disease which is causing us losses. The panic created by media reports is doing the damage,” said Surinder Bhutani, general secretary of Haryana Poultry Farmers Association.

Bhutani, who is also chairman of the north zone chapter of National Eggs Coordination Committee (NECC), claimed that though there is very little decrease in the number of people consuming poultry products, the bird flu scare has provided the traders an opportunity to pressurise poultry farmers to bring down rates.

“The traders simply decrease their orders or show reluctance in lifting our products citing flu scare. The poultry farmers cannot stock the products for long looking at their shelf life and have no other alternative than to slash the rates. But we know that the end customer is not getting any benefit of the cuts in rates,” he added.

Meanwhile, poultry farmers in the state admit that though bird flu comes every year with migratory birds and the scare remains till the end of January or the first week of February, it was for the first time — in the past 15 years — that such a large number of birds had died in the state. But there is no official confirmation of the bird flu in the state as of now.

Over four lakh birds have died in Panchkula district of Haryana alone so far in the past week.