ISLAMABAD, May 26: A number of poultry farms operating in the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad have shown their unwillingness to cull their birds infected by avian influenza after facing long delays in getting the compensation money from the government, sources told Dawn on Saturday.

The government has to pay 75 per cent of the cost of production of the poultry, which are culled after the detection of bird flu in farms, to owners as compensation.

During the last outbreak of the flu, some of the farm owners had to cull their birds, many of them in hundreds, in collaboration with the government authorities to prevent the spread of avian flu. But the government was unable to pay them the compensation amount on time.

“Yes, there was a bit of delay in disbursement of compensation money last time. That’s why some of the poultry farms, where bird flu was detected on May 23, had created some problems, but we have settled everything with them now,” Dr Rafiqul Hassan Usmani, official spokesman of the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock (Minfal) on Bird Flu told Dawn.

Dr Usmani said the government had to pay the first instalment of compensation money to the affected farmers within two weeks and remaining within two months. But, last time the process took a bit longer due to delay in the disbursement of funds. That’s why, some farmers had created problems on May 23. However, now everything was well under control.

Since Wednesday, the authorities have culled some 18,500 bird flu-hit birds in five farms located in the poultry pockets of Rawalpindi and Islamabad after the detection of the disease there. There are more than 60 farms in different poultry pockets of Islamabad and Rawalpindi and only their full cooperation can stop the spread of the disease.

Sources in the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock (Minfal) said even some of the five farms in Chak Shahzad, in which bird flu had hit broilers, Desi chickens and peacocks on Tuesday and Friday, were unwilling to cooperate with the government.

They feared that the infected birds in some farms of Rawalpindi and Islamabad could make to the market and ultimately to the kitchens of the consumers.

They said during the last bird flu crisis in Pakistan, the poultry farms had reportedly faced over Rs10 billion losses and the government was unable to compensate them. Later, the association developed a strategy to deal with the issue by creating artificial decrease in the production of the poultry to increase prices and regain the lost money.

They said even now the authorities feared an artificial decrease in production by the association, which could increase chicken prices even amidst the news of the spread of bird flu.

They said without the timely and full cooperation of the farm owners, the government could not control the spread of the viral disease because they were the farmers who first took the samples of the birds which died unnatural deaths to laboratories and inform the bird flu monitoring teams on their own.

If the farm owners were not satisfied with the existing compensation mechanism then it was almost impossible for the government to detect and stop the diseases from spreading, they added.

When contacted, Animal Husbandry Commissioner Dr Mohammad Afzal said the farm owners in Chak Shahzad had themselves taken the samples of the dead birds to the Poultry Research Institutes (PRI) laboratory on Murree Road, Shamsabad, for initial tests.

The samples were later taken to the National Reference Laboratory (NRL) in the National Agricultural Research Council (NARC) for further tests.

In response to a question, he said all the five infected farms had been disinfected and now the movement of poultry in the area had been completely banned in the three kilometre radius.