South Africa’s agricultural authorities have gone to a great deal of trouble to set out how poultry farmers can claim compensation for chickens they are ordered to cull because of bird flu outbreaks. Unfortunately, it’s all wasted effort, as the government resolutely refuses to pay any compensation at all.
Details of the bird flu compensation procedures are contained in a new vaccination strategy document published by the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD) in November last year. While it focuses on aligning South Africa with the international move towards vaccination against bird flu, it also has a lengthy section on compensation.
It says that any chickens infected by or in contact with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) must be destroyed, but goes on to explain that, in terms of the Animal Diseases Act of 1984, compensation can be claimed from the Director of Animal Health at DALRRD.
Compensation must be based on “fair market value”, the law states, or alternatively the director can set compensation at “any amount fixed by him in accordance with any criterion deemed applicable by him” in order to “fix a fair amount as compensation.”
It’s all set out at great length, with numerous excerpts from the applicable legislation.
What the department does not tell the world is that it has already determined that the “fair amount” they have fixed is zero. In their view, chickens infected by or in contact with bird flu have no value, so no payment is due.
This is worse than wasted effort – it’s counter-productive, because the refusal to pay up, as other governments around the world have done, not only brings great hardship to poultry farmers, but it actively works against all official efforts to control bird flu outbreaks.
A poultry farmer faced with losing his livelihood if all his chickens are culled, has a strong incentive not to report an outbreak immediately, or not to report it at all in the hope that enough chickens will survive to provide him with some income.
That, in turn, enables the spread of the disease that the government and the poultry industry are trying to stamp out. It is also a threat to food safety.
We also know that the value is not zero – the South African poultry industry has estimated at R9 billion the losses suffered by farmers in the 2023 bird flu outbreak, which was the worst in the country’s history.
Huge losses, no compensation, many small-scale farmers out of business, and many workers reliant on small-scale farmers without jobs. That, unfortunately, is not part of the government’s policy explanation.
