Empowering women to fight bird
flu By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Women from ethnic communities in
the hilly northern part of Laos have, for more
than a decade, been encouraged to go into poultry
breeding as a way of earning a living in Southeast
Asia's poorest nation.
However, this
initiative has come up against a daunting
challenge in the shape of the deadly bird-flu
virus that has flared up again in many parts of
Southeast Asia in recent months. To counter this,
the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is again turning
to women as
the
best defenders of their communities.
"Giving women the knowledge and tools to
stop the spread of avian influenza is absolutely
imperative," Manoshi Mitra, senior social
development specialist at the ADB, said from the
bank's head office in Manila. "They will be taught
how to identify the disease and equipped with
first-aid kits, too.'
"We have to convince
them that they are the ones who will lose if there
is an outbreak. It will impact them directly," she
said. "We want to employ one female poultry worker
for every community."
The project, which
gets under way in February, is geared to help
poverty-stricken ethnic-minority families that are
already disadvantaged because they speak a
language that is different from the Lao used by
the majority. An estimated 17,000 households in
400 villages are expected to gain from this
initiative. Across the rest of landlocked
Laos, breeding poultry has become the mainstay of
village economies. "It is evident that every
family has back-yard poultry - between 10 [and] 30
chickens per household," Abdulai KaiKai, project
officer at the United Nations Children's Fund
(UNICEF) office in Laos, said in an interview from
Vientiane. "The income from the sale of eggs and
chicken helps supplement the family income."
Since July, UNICEF has been leading an
awareness campaign in the provinces to stem the
spread of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza.
"There have been puppet shows and dramas with a
bird-flu theme that tell people what they should
do to stay safe," said KaiKai. "About a fifth of
the villages have been covered through this."
Laos has proved a mystery, since the
deadly H5N1 strain first appeared in the winter of
2003 in this region and kept reappearing
subsequently as temperatures dropped during the
winter. Laos has had very few bird-flu outbreaks
in its poultry population and none of the
country's 5.4 million people has fallen ill.
By contrast, all of its immediate
neighbors - China, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia
- have been hit by the virus, affecting both
humans and poultry. Vietnam and Thailand are
grappling with a new outbreak. Since the winter of
2003, 42 people have died in Vietnam out of 93
reported cases, while 17 people have died in
Thailand out of 25 reported cases. Cambodia has
recorded six deaths from six cases.
There
was a minor bird-flu outbreak in Laos in March
2004, with a bulk of the 46 poultry farms hit
being near Vientiane, the capital, and a second
outbreak last July.
"There has been no
evidence since December 2003 that suggests H5N1 is
raging through the villages," said Tony Williams,
avian-influenza team leader at the Food and
Agriculture Organizations's (FAO) office in Laos.
"Laos has escaped the worst of bird flu."
What has helped, according to the food
agency, is the relative distance of rural
communities from one another.
According to
the FAO, transporting poultry without proper
safeguards has been a key feature in fueling the
spread of the virus, with Indonesia, the
worst-affected country, illustrative of this
trend. By the end of January, Indonesia had
reported 63 deaths out of 81 cases of infection.
"Wild birds are less responsible for the
spread of the virus in the current outbreak," said
Hiroyuki Konuma, deputy head of FAO's Asia-Pacific
office. "The poultry trade and the movement of
live birds have played a role in spreading the
virus."
Since the beginning of the year,
the FAO has recorded new bird-flu cases in China,
Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria, South Korea,
Thailand and Vietnam. That is the same number of
countries - then all in Northeast and Southeast
Asia - that had recorded outbreaks in 2003. During
the 2005-06 period, the virus took wing, spreading
beyond East Asia to the Middle East, Europe and
Africa.
Until the current cycle of
outbreaks, now in their fourth winter season,
poultry breeding was promoted as an option for
women in rural communities for additional income.
"It was seen as a way for women to start a
business and take the first step out of poverty,"
said Anni McLeod, senior livestock policy officer
at FAO. "It required very little investment, it
could be managed by women and the turnover was
very fast."
Bangladesh, which has more
than 60 million people living in poverty, had
emerged as a celebrated example of this
development model before the latest bird-flu
outbreak. According to the ADB, poultry breeding
by some 500,000 people, most of them women, had
helped transform many poor communities.
They were able to "put more food on the
table, educate their children, and even save
enough to lease or buy agricultural land, thanks
to an innovative livestock project", said an ADB
officer. "The project [trained] women in raising
chicks as well as local hens and ducks, managing
poultry production and sales, and providing
veterinary care."
The regional financial
institution hopes to replicate in Laos the
successes in Bangladesh. "Bangladesh represented a
real success story," said Mitra. "It demonstrated
the importance of poultry breeding in lifting
women and their families out of poverty."
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
