Protecting marginal chicken farmers

The country's poultry sector is again in distress. But it is not due to any manmade crisis often created in the sector by the so-called profit-hungry syndicates. As in the past years, here nature is at work. A report published early last month (April) referring to the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) said that mild to moderate heatwave was sweeping across 14 districts of the country and it might continue. The affected districts include Manikganj, Faridpur, Rajshahi, Pabna, Dinajpur, Sirajganj, Tangail, Lakshmipur, Feni, Jashore and Chuadanga. Last month, Baghabari of Sirajganj experienced the temperature at 38.2 degree Celsius, which experts termed moderate. However, as in the previous year (2024), the heatwave showed no sign of respite and on the 10th of this month (May), Chuadanga recorded 42 degree Celsius. Dhaka, too, did not lag behind, because on the same day, it recorded its highest temperature at 40.1 degrees Celsius. Similarly, according to the BMD, last year, 51 out of 64 districts of the country suffered blistering heat between 40 degree Celsius and 43 degree Celsius. What was the fallout from this extreme heat particularly on the poultry sector of Bangladesh? A report said, poultry farmers in the countryside might face 30 per cent production loss. The story is more or less the same this year, too.  As claimed by the Bangladesh Poultry Association (BPA) in a recently published report, during the month-long heatwave, the poultry farmers have sustained a loss of about Tk 3.0 billion. The reason, according to BPA, is death in large numbers of the chickens of broiler and layer varieties. Broilers, notably, are reared for meat, while the layers for egg. As the reports go, thousands of these birds are dying everyday due to extreme heat. The situation has been further  compounded by load-shedding. The administration, on its part, appears to be either clueless, or accepted it as fait accompli. Especially, most at risk are the broiler and the Sonali  varieties of poultry birds that are dying, according to reports, at a 10 per cent rate, while the mortality rate of the layers is 5.0 per cent, the report goes. The victims of the heatwave are obviously not the corporate poultry companies, but the traditional marginal farmers who cannot afford air coolers and other modern facilities to protect their chickens. Since the marginal chicken farmers lack the capital to recuperate their investment so lost, they would usually give up on chicken farming altogether and look for other ways for survival. They may even migrate to cities to make a living either by selling labour or doing odd jobs. Since, these millions of marginal chicken farmers across the country meet more than 80 per cent of the demand for cheap protein both in the form of meat and egg, it is easily imaginable what a devastating impact they would leave on the country's nutritional health as well as food security if the marginal poultry farmers go out of business in droves. In fact, the corporate sector with its 20 per cent share of meat and egg production will not be in a position to bridge the nutritional gap any time soon. There is no scope to think that heatwave is a fortuitous event. It is clearly a product of climate change.

The elaborate report on the temperatures caused by heatwaves is to stress the fact that heatwaves and the high temperatures they generate are not a passing event. The deleterious impact of this prolonged heatwaves on the country's primary source of nutrition, poultry farming, is not going to ease off in the future. It is not only the poultry sector alone, the entire  livestock sector will suffer the consequences of heatwaves, moderate or extreme. The coming years may be still worse. So, we have already passed the phase of complaining about  how the marginal poultry raisers are at the receiving end and how much loss they have incurred during the last one month of extreme heatwave. Even so, it would be worthwhile to have an assessment what the marginal chicken farmers have gone through during the last one month of uninterrupted heatwave. Since the poor poultry farmers have no arrangements for keeping their chicken coops cool say by using air coolers as the corporate poultry industries do, they either leave the birds to their own devices or may provide them with sufficient water to drink or sprinkle water on them. This traditional approaches to keep the animals cool no doubt work. But what can they do when the chickens begin to eat less or even stop eating? If the temperature is above 35 degree Celsius and the relative humidity is above 70 per cent, the birds are in a hazardous condition. Unlike many mammals, chickens have no sweat glands. So, under extreme heat they cool themselves mainly by panting. But that is the natural way they try to survive in the face of extreme heat. Moreover, extreme heat along  with attendant high level of humidity brings with it avian infections from Clostridia, Salmonella, Coliform bacteria and so on. These conditions worsen during extreme heat. But without necessary intervention from the government both in terms of veterinary service and finance, how can these marginal poultry farmers hope to survive?

Now the challenge before the government is enormous. The government will be required to come to the aid of the millions of poultry farmers spread across the country in a big way. Since the heatwave is not a temporary issue, the government will have to adopt a long-term strategy to address the heatwave-related problems in order to save the marginal chicken farmers. In this connection, the veterinary department will be required to be updated with modern researches on how the advanced nations are coping with extreme heat so far as protecting their poultry birds are concerned. However, traditional knowledge would also be important here, since our chickens grow in the open and have higher level of immunity. The country's veterinary scientists will have to blend traditional knowledge with modern knowhow to find out the most appropriate answer to protecting chickens against extreme heat.

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