Farms without ducks or poultry from Thursday, for a month, in 68 communes of the Landes, Pyrénées-Atlantiques and Gers, this is what predicts an unprecedented hornet’s nest which should stem the epizootic of avian flu in these departments .
On the initiative of inter-branch organizations such as Cifog (foie gras) and Anvol (broilers), the “Adour Plan” foresees that between 15 December and 15 January the municipalities of these three south-western departments, affected by a high of animals, are “emptied” or nearly so of their poultry.
Affected by four successive waves of the disease, farmers came to the conclusion “that there were too many birds together in the same place, at the same time,” explains Marie-Pierre Pé, director general of Cifog. With a peak of tension on December 15, “a moment of systematic escape”.
Thanks to this anticipated depopulation, professionals, aware that they cannot “avoid” the introduction of the H5N1 virus, hope to avoid its spread. “We can’t have a fire that we don’t control,” summarizes the president of Cifog.
The Adour Plan, accompanied by the compensation announced by the government, is envisaged as a “resilience tool to overcome the winter” and avoid the millions of massacres of the last epizootic. According to a census by the Ministry of Agriculture, around 21.8 million animals (palmipeds and poultry) were culled in France from August 2021 to May 2022.
The exceptionally early resurgence of the epizootic this summer, with 164 outbreaks on livestock registered since 1 August, has already led to almost 1.3 million slaughters, according to the latest official data. No cases have been reported so far in the farms of the three departments affected by the Adour Plan.
At the same time, an experiment conducted by the Directorate General for Food on so-called autarkic, low-density farms is planned for early 2023.
In this production model, the duckling never leaves the farm again until it is made into a finished product. “We are not spreading the virus,” said Julen Perez, a farmer in the Basque Country who was affected by the culling of all his ducks in January 2022.
Thus, self-sufficient “pilot” farms will be selected to study their functioning and interactions with the environment, “in the face of a virus that has become endemic”, underlines the farmer.
