ISLAMABAD, May 4: The poultry industry has sought a 10-year tax holiday in the upcoming budget as a compensation for over Rs10 billion losses it has so far suffered from the ongoing bird flu crisis.

The industry has also asked President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to start eating chickens at public meetings to give a message to the nation that poultry products are still safe to eat. This move, it added, was likely to reinstate consumers’ confidence in chicken products almost shattered by media reports of a possible pandemic in the wake of spread of H5N1 virus through human to human contact.

“The poultry industry is sinking. People are flying from this business with huge losses and no apparent signs of any compensation from the government. Fifty per cent of the poultry farms in the country have so far been closed,” said Abdul Basit, senior vice-president of the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry while talking to Dawn.

Mr Basit led an eight-member delegation comprising representatives of the Pakistan Poultry Association who called on Food, Agriculture and Livestock Minister Sikandar Hayat Bosan here on Thursday. Members of the delegation, senior officials of the food ministry and Mr Bosan also ate chickens at the end of the meeting.

The delegation criticised what they called ‘irresponsible’ warnings by the World Health Organisation (WHO) regarding a pandemic. They asked the government to influence the WHO officials not to use such statements detrimental to poor countries like Pakistan at a time when not even a single case of human to human contact of the bird flu virus had been reported anywhere in the world.

“The WHO has been given $500 billion for research on bird flu. Now, to save their own posts and get their contracts extended its officials are issuing warnings instead of coming up with anything substantial. They have destroyed Pakistan’s poultry industry and must be warned against this,” the delegation told the minister.

The delegation also appreciated the government’s move of presenting four chicken dishes at an official dinner party hosted for Uzbekistan President Islam Karimove during his ongoing visit of the country.

The delegation also demanded an end to 10 per cent duty imposed by the government on soyabean food. The twenty-five per cent duty imposed on pre-transportation poultry houses and 15pc GST should also be withdrawn, they demanded.

“We have also demanded the government to come up with a mechanism to provide up to Rs1 million interest-free loans to the poultry industry people,” Mr Basit said.

The food minister said the proposals would be forwarded to the Federal Poultry Board for discussion in its next meeting before presenting them to the government for consideration in the next budget.

The delegation informed the minister that over 1.2m people were associated with the poultry industry and security of their livelihood was the duty of the government.

They said chickens comprised 45pc of the overall meat consumption of the country. If people stopped eating chicken products prices of other food items would increase to an unexpected level.

They informed the minister that only in Lahore consumption of mutton had witnessed more than three times increases. Before the bird flu crisis, about 300,000 animals (sheep, goats) were slaughtered on monthly basis in the Punjab’s capital. However, only last month, the number of slaughtered animals had reached one million.

This would greatly increase demand for mutton and beef and the country would be unable to produce animals with such a ratio owing to which it would only rely on imported meet from other countries, including India and Iran.