# 2953
Around the world, about 1 person in 6 lives with daily food insecurity – in other words – hunger.
The FAO (Food & Agriculture Organization) estimates that over 1 Billion people will go hungry this year, and that about 2/3rds of them live in the Asia/Pacific region.
Over the past two years more than 100 million more people, according to the FAO, have fallen to the ranks of the daily food insecure.
The reasons for this include higher food prices, the global economic recession, along with crop losses due to changing climate patterns and diseases.
Reuters has a report on this growing food insecurity this morning. First the article, then some discussion about how this might affect bird flu control measures – particularly in the Asia-Pacific regions.
Food security still a problem as hunger rises: FAO
Mon Mar 30, 2009 7:20am EDT
BANGKOK (Reuters) - A fall in grain prices has led to the impression that food security is no longer a concern, but the number of people without enough to eat is still rising in a world facing recession, the United Nations said Monday.
"The level of prices is still 19 percent above the average of 2006 ... so we're still in a period of high prices," Jacques Diouf, director-general of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), told reporters at a conference in Bangkok.
In addition, recent FAO studies showed that even though prices had fallen in international markets, retail prices in most developing countries had not.
"Not only is the crisis here, but it's been worsened by the financial and economic crisis," Diouf said.
Stocks for cereals were at a 30-year low, and he described the situation as "very fragile."
Against this backdrop of increasing food insecurity, rising food costs, and recession we also have a serious zoonotic disease – bird flu – becoming endemic in many regions of the Asia-Pacific region.
Poultry - whether factory-farm produced or from backyard flocks - is a major source of income, and food, for hundreds of millions of people living around the world.
China, which produces more poultry than anyplace else on earth, reportedly raises about 15 Billion birds each year.
Anything that seriously threatens their poultry industry also raises the specter of mass hunger in the world’s most populous nation.
China, like Indonesia and Egypt, has adopted poultry vaccination as their primary method of controlling the H5N1 bird flu virus. They have, for years, conducted mass poultry vaccination drives several times each year.
Recently, however, we’ve seen growing evidence that these vaccines may not be preventing the disease – but that they are only hiding the symptoms.
Asymptomatic, but infected birds, have become the new concern.
(see The Winter Of Our Disbelief for more details)
Leading scientists such as Zhong Nanshan of China, have stated,"The existing vaccines can only reduce the amount of virus, rather than totally inactivating it.”
Dr. C.A. Nidom, whose name has appeared often in this blog, was quoted earlier this month in Poultry Indonesia as saying:
Poultry Indonesia Printing Edition, March 2009
(excerpts)
Chairul Anwar Nidom, a virologist with the Tropical Disease Centre at Airlangga University in Surabaya, said a common policy on bird flu was lacking among government agencies, making controlling the disease more difficult.
Nidom criticized the government’s policy of vaccinating poultry rather than culling, believing that it masks the virus, and ultimately contributes to its mutation.
The OIE (World Organization For Animal Health) recently reaffirmed their long-standing position that vaccination of poultry cannot be considered a long-term solution to combating the avian flu virus.
In Avian influenza and vaccination: what is the scientific recommendation?, the OIE reiterates their strong recommendation that humane culling be employed to control avian influenza, and advising that vaccines should only be used as a temporary measure.
While the OIE concedes that some nations may require the use of vaccines for `several years', they strongly urge that countries move away from that program and towards the more conventional culling policy.
They call this shift away from vaccines an `Exit Strategy’, something which China has shown no move towards.
For now, at least, most of the nations currently utilizing poultry vaccines don’t appear to be moving towards any `exit strategy’.
Despite growing concerns over asymptomatic poultry, and the danger that might pose to humans, the need to preserve their poultry industry is great – particularly in times of increasing food insecurity.
The Agriculture Ministries of many nations are caught in the middle.
A move towards culling, and away from vaccines, would involve the loss of huge quantities of badly needed food. Something that could become politically destabilizing in some regions.
Culling is also far more problematic when you are dealing with millions of small holdings – backyard chicken coops – instead of more centralized factory farms.
And the greatest impact would be in the areas currently most affected by hunger today.
The Asia-Pacific region.
Despite the downsides to using vaccines, the pressures of food insecurity today make it very difficult for nations like China, Vietnam, and Indonesia to move away from their use.
The choice in many of these countries literally boils down to increasing hunger today in order to decrease the possibility of a pandemic someday in the future.
All of which goes to show just how complex and difficult the decisions are when trying to eradicate H5N1 around the world.
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