WB offers RI funds for bird flu fight
Rendi A. Witular, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Amid concerns over Indonesia's shortcomings in dealing with the bird flu outbreak, the World Bank (WB), one of the country's major lenders, has offered financial assistance to the government to overcome the virus.
The offer was conveyed during a telephone conversation between the bank's president Paul Wolfowitz and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on Saturday, so the country could carry out a mass cull of infected birds in a bid to reduce the number of human infections.
"This is a new offer from the bank. President Susilo will seriously follow up on it. For sure, international cooperation is needed to combat this disease," presidential spokesman Dino Pati Djalal said on Tuesday.
Dino said the amount and the form of the assistance would be discussed later at ministerial level.
"Indonesia is not asking for financial assistance from the bank. It is the initiative of the agency. The cooperation we need is not limited to funds only, but also in technical matters and in monitoring (the development of the disease)," he said.
The World Bank is currently seeking some US$1 billion from rich nations around the world to prevent further outbreaks of the disease and improve detection of human cases in Southeast Asia.
The bank's offer comes as the international community shows concern over the government's slow response to the outbreak here, amid fears the virus could mutate into something more easily spread among humans.
The Ministry of Agriculture has conceded that killing all birds within a three kilometer radius of affected areas is the best way to combat the virus.
However, the ministry says it lacks sufficient funds, be it to compensate poultry farmers whose birds are culled, or even to slaughter the birds.
Currently, the ministry has only allocated Rp 134 billion (US13.4 million), plus an additional Rp 107 billion, this year to handle the issue.
Aside from budgetary constraints, bird flu containment in Indonesia is made more difficult by the fact that many people in cities and villages raise chickens in their backyards.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported from a bird flu conference in Geneva that representatives from Indonesia, Laos and Cambodia said they needed cash now to detect the earliest signs the avian flu has become dangerous to humans.
Indonesian State Minister for National Development Planning Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the country would need at least $130 million to control outbreaks among birds.
Minister of Agriculture Anton Apriyantono, who also attended the conference, said that last year Indonesia spent only $55,000 of its $10 million annual agriculture budget to compensate farmers for culling 450,000 birds.
He said Indonesia needed to double payments -- to 80 U.S. cents a pound -- to encourage farmers to report sick birds.
The latest data from the ministry shows that as many as 16.2 million birds have been killed due to the virus, which has spread to 22 of archipelago's 33 provinces since late 2003. It jumped species to pigs earlier this year.