Have you seen how expensive eggs have become? Well, the reason behind it are cases of bird flu in Europe and Spain.

Granada has spent the last two and a half years free of the H5N1 virus but poultry farmers are now ‘more nervous than a turkey at Christmas’ about should the virus get hold of the province.

The Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación announced the prohibition of rearing free-range chickens in areas of risk in Andalucia, Castilla y León and Cataluña, where there have been outbreaks. Granada is not one of these risk area… yet. This discision was taken because of the risk of contagion from migratory birds.

Granada is a heavy weight in the poultry business, especially in the north of the province and on the border with Almería, where they specialise in chicken meat rather than eggs.

It’s the small-scale, poultry farmers that are the most worried because if a case is detected amongst their birds, they would have to put them all down; an economic blow that a small business can’t survive.

Granada has 4,337 poultry farms, which represents 24% of the total in the whole of Andalucia, so you can see why an outbreak of bird flu in the province would be a disaster.

However, the majority (3,570) of those poultry farms are not really farms but rather families who keep lots of chickens for eggs and meat for themselves and not as a business. There are 193 poultry farms who produce chicken meat, 17 turkey-meat ones and other kinds of edible birds.

Finally, going back to the price of eggs, so far, more that 2.5 million hens have been destroyed in the whole of Spain, which has caused an increase of 31% in their price.

(News: Granada, Andalucia)

Keywords: Bird Flu, H5N1, Poultry Farms, Birds Put Down, Eggs, Price, Turkey

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