Organic farmers cry foul over 'biosecurity' threat

Jody Paterson
Times Colonist

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

ATTEMPT TO HALT AVIAN FLU: Fraser Valley organic chicken farmer Brad Reid, who has 10,000 birds, fears his flock will no longer be allowed outdoors.

B.C.'s beleaguered organic chicken farmers fear the worst for their industry if the Fraser Valley bird flu epidemic leads to a ban on raising chickens outside.

The possibility was floated on a Vancouver radio talk show Tuesday by Ray Nickel, spokesman for B.C.'s poultry marketing boards. Migratory birds can spread avian flu through their droppings, and Nickel speculated that tough new "biosecurity" strategies in the works for B.C. could deem that any outdoor time for chickens is too risky.

They don't get much as it is. The tens of thousands of birds packed into each of the Fraser Valley's massive poultry barns never see the outdoors. Only birds destined for the free-range and organic markets have any time outside, and only certified organic birds are guaranteed regular stints in the yard.

But even that could end if federal authorities decide to guard against future outbreaks of the disease by simply preventing domestic birds' access to the outdoors. That would be a disaster for the organics industry, as outdoor time is both a requirement for certification and one of the reasons consumers choose organic.

"It's a huge fear that we have, that this will be used against us," says Abbotsford organic chicken farmer Brad Reid, adding that he "felt the chill down my spine" when he heard Nickel's statements.

Nickel was unavailable for comment after the show. A spokeswoman with Vancouver public-relations firm Wilcox Group said a string of media interviews had left Nickel "too exhausted" to do any more.

Organic producers have been fighting B.C.'s four poultry marketing boards on several fronts in recent years, battling to make their place alongside a powerful industry that at first ignored organic farmers and now wants them in the fold. A class-action suit launched by organic producers opposed to being forced into the marketing-board system was recently certified in B.C. Supreme Court.

But this latest wrinkle is far more serious than the skirmishes around quota and fees that have dominated the debate so far. The irony is that the very farm practices that limit the devastating spread of avian flu are the ones now being blamed, says Saltspring Island organic farmer Tom Pickett.

"If you read the news carefully, you'll see that what's going on right now is the result of raising birds on factory farms," says Pickett. "They're the problem, yet it's being used to go after small producers. I'm starting to feel like a dope dealer, sneaking around with a chicken under my coat."

The Matsqui barn where the first cases of avian flu were found in February is a so-called factory farm, but a relatively small one -- just 16,000 birds. The big barns that line many of the rural roads in the Fraser Valley contain 40,000 or more chickens living in crowded conditions, a combination that has proved particularly deadly in the current outbreak. On the farm where the epidemic started, almost 2,000 birds died from the disease in one day.

Fed antibiotics throughout their short lives, the factory chickens' weakened immune system can't cope with disease. And when one chicken gets sick in a barn that allots little more than half a square foot of floor space per bird, they all do.

Small outbreaks of less lethal strains of avian flu occur in B.C. every two or three years, and usually can be contained. But the H7 strain that hit the province six weeks ago is spreading so rapidly that 19 million birds -- every chicken, duck and turkey from Vancouver to Hope -- are going to be killed in an attempt to stop it.

It's a first for B.C., but massive culls due to avian flu have become common elsewhere in the world in recent years. The 17 million infected birds killed in Pennsylvania in 1983 were an anomaly at the time, but the last seven years have seen three mass slaughters in Hong Kong, a cull of 15 million birds in the Netherlands, another five million slaughtered in Virginia, and a catastrophic outbreak in January that left both chickens and people dead in 10 Asian countries.

That's telling us something, says John Wilcox, an organic market gardener on Saltspring. Everything from the natural genetic diversity of poultry to the conditions that they're raised in has been tampered with to improve production, he notes. As B.C. producers are discovering, the price for that is high.

"Federal agricultural policy has put such emphasis over the years in developing a factory-farm industry that I can't help but see this as the inevitable consequence," says Wilcox.

"I feel like this is a real bellwether, a warning that we need to change the way we do things