The Papua New Guinea chicken industry has renewed calls for tighter quarantine controls on uncooked Australian chickens after an outbreak of bird flu in New South Wales.
For months the PNG poultry industry has been accusing Australia of dumping its excess chicken on the PNG market, undercutting local producers.
Then last week there was an outbreak of H7 bird flu on a farm at Maitland north of Sydney.
The general manager of Zenag Chicken in PNG, Stanley Leahy says the country needs far stricter quarantine protocols so that potentially infected imports can be kept out.
“Should something come in on that product it would cripple the industry overnight. So two different issues – one is the trade related issue and the other is the bio-security issue. The trade issue certainly has the big impact on us but the bio-security issue is one of those scary, scary ones which would cripple us overnight if we did get an outbreak of something.”
Source: Radio New Zealand International
