With chicken farms across the US hit by what US media outlets have called “the worst avian influenza on record,” the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine yesterday said that it has banned the import of chicken products from 15 US states identified as areas affected by the outbreak.
Bureau Director-General Chang Su-san (張淑賢) said that if an outbreak occurred in another US state, the bureau would add it to the list and block its raw and processed chicken imports.
The outbreaks in the US could spread nationwide, in which case the bureau would consider banning all chicken products from the US, she said.
A report published yesterday by Fox News called the outbreaks of H5N2 and H5N8 subtypes in the US “the worst outbreak of bird flu on record,” saying that as many as 33 million chickens have been — or are expected to be — destroyed.
Of the 15 US states on the prohibition list, Arkansas and Kansas have the highest output of chicken products, Animal Husbandry Department Deputy Director Wang Chung-shu (王忠恕) said.
However, the prohibition has not yet affected chicken prices in Taiwan, he said, adding that many chicken vendors have reserves that they obtained earlier this year to prevent possible shortages due to local avian flu outbreaks that led to a massive chicken cull.
Chicken vendors had imported more than 70,000 tonnes of chicken from the US before the outbreaks, which would be sufficient to meet the nation’s demand over the next three months, he said.
Even if a shortage in chicken products from the US were to affect Taiwan’s overall supply of chicken, broiler chickens raised domestically would soon be able to close the supply gap, as broilers take just five weeks to mature, he said.
However, even with the nation’s stable supply and demand, there is no guarantee that the cost of chicken will not rise, as prices are determined by market factors, Wang said.
The Council of Agriculture said that the nation consumes more than 900,000 tonnes of chicken annually, with 70 to 80 percent farmed domestically.
Chicken from the US constitutes about 100,000 tonnes of annual imports and represents more than 10 percent of the nation’s overall supply, it said.
Additional reporting by Sean Lin
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