Japan provides US$200,000 grant to fight bird flu
Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The Japanese government has provided a grant of US$200,000 for the government of Indonesia to help fund the latter's efforts in combating bird flu.
The grant, which is the first of its kind, was officially handed over during a signing and exchange of letters ceremony here on Friday between Minister of Agriculture Bungaran Saragih and Japanese Ambassador Yutaka Iimura, on behalf of their respective governments.
"Learning from the previous severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, mutual cooperation and help is essential in coping with the current bird flu pandemic," said Iimura, who also mentioned that Japan itself was still struggling against the disease, which has caused severe economic losses to the poultry industry and raised widespread public concern.
As further explained by the Japanese Embassy's secretary for economic affairs, Hitoshi Oikawa, the grant will be used to fund three projects for the prevention and eradication of bird flu in Indonesia.
Out of the total grant, some $78,906 will be used to reduce the risk of human infection by providing protective clothes, masks, boots, gloves and goggles for high-risk workers, such as field veterinarians, medical workers and laboratory officers during vaccination and eradication activities in infected areas.
Another $111,161 will be used for a public awareness campaign on bird flu, through the provision and distribution of booklets, flyers, posters, video compact discs (CD) and radio spots.
The other $9,709, meanwhile, has already been used to fund an in-country workshop on the prevention and eradication of bird flu, held jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) last Wednesday.
Previously, Indonesia also received a $390,000 grant from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) under a technical cooperation program (TCP) to combat bird flu. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) had also allocated $800,000 for countries affected by bird flu in the region, including Indonesia.
Meanwhile, Bungaran said that the government itself had provided an emergency fund of Rp 215 billion ($25.6 million) for small farmers whose poultry had been destroyed under the mass- culling program.
Bungaran also said that the government had distributed about 50 million doses of bird flu vaccine -- 11 million of them for free -- throughout the country.
Data from the Ministry of Agriculture shows that the total number of poultry deaths from September 2003, when the outbreak first occurred, to February 2004 reached 6.2 million -- 400,000 of them as the result of mass culling.
No less than 84 districts in 11 provinces had been affected by an outbreak of the H5N1 bird flu virus strain as of March 2004.
"Although we are now seeing a decrease in poultry deaths, there are still new outbreaks like the recent one in West Kalimantan," said Bungaran, adding that the disease had created great difficulties for small farmers.
"What we therefore need now is to encourage the public to consume poultry again, and recover the 20 percent drop in poultry prices to prevent the farmers from going out of business," he said.