The Minister of Agriculture believes that the production model of foie gras must be reviewed, by limiting the transport of palmipeds, vectors of influenza virus transmission.
French duck farmers are more than ever exposed to the threat of bird flu. As of February 10, the Ministry of Agriculture identifies 231 H5N8 outbreaks in nine departments of southwestern France.
Faced with this threat, Henri Emmanuelli, Socialist President of the Landes Departmental Council, suggested Monday the establishment of a crawl space in order to be able to set a date for resuming production, as was done last year. The latter was immediately followed in the footsteps of the Minister of Agriculture who also has his plan to avoid the stagnation of the foie gras industry.
2 million ducks slaughtered
Stephane Le Foll said on Monday that it was necessary to review “the model of production of foie gras, by limiting the transport of palmipeds, vectors of virus transmission”. Two million ducks have been slaughtered to date to limit the epizootic.
“There are things that have happened that should not have happened,” said the minister to Agence France Presse (AFP). “If we apply biocontrol rules with an unchanged production model, it will be useless”, he added, indicating that “the multiplicity of transport is a viral vector too”. Stéphane Le Foll now wishes to sign a contract with the Interprofessional Committee of Palmipeds in Foie Gras (Cifog) to limit this transport.
An investigation for aggravated deception
If followed up, these declarations would call into question the current segmentation between duck breeding and foie gras production. Today, these animals move from one hyper-specialized farm to another: breeding farms, hatcheries, chick farms, outdoor range farms, feeders, and eventually slaughterhouses and processing. Each operation requires the transport of thousands of animals at each stage, sometimes from one department to another.
An organization long questioned by the Confédération Paysanne for which the industrialization of production “provokes and amplifies health crises”. The union pleads for “autarkic” farms, where everything is done in the same place. Finally, during this outing, the Minister of Agriculture did not want to comment on the judicial information opened last week by the Paris prosecutor’s office for aggravated deception. The H5N8 avian influenza epizootic may have knowingly been spread in the southwest.
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