takeo town – Takeo province officials destroyed 159,000 duck eggs from Vietnam on Thursday and declared the country free of bird flu, though reports said Thailand banned the import of Cambodian chickens after many near Phnom Penh died mysteriously last week.
“There is no bird flu disease in Cambodia,” said Takeo Governor Lay Sokha at the egg-crushing ceremony. Officials and reporters wore masks and gloves to protect them from touching—and smelling—the eggs, which were buried inside a 3-meter deep ditch lined with ashes.
Officials seized the eggs on Sunday, enforcing a ban on the importation of chickens, ducks and eggs from Vietnam and other countries with known cases of avian influenza, commonly known as bird flu.
“If we could not crack down on smuggling eggs and poultry meats into Cambodia, the bird flu disease would be widespread in our country and then people would face a crisis, and, finally, they would get the disease too,” Takeo’s governor said.
Takeo officials are confident the country is disease-free, despite reports in several Thai newspapers said Thailand banned the importation of all poultry products from Cambodia after hundreds of chickens in farms near Phnom Penh died last week. Thai Embassy officials could not confirm the reports on Thursday.
Veterinarians suspect that the dead birds near Phnom Penh died of Newcastle disease or cholera, both of which are deadly to birds but cannot be transmitted to humans. Agriculture Ministry officials are still waiting for the results of tests conducted in France to determine how the birds died.
“As a preventive measure, we will ban the import of chickens from Cambodia…pending the outcome of the test,” Thai Agriculture Minister Newin Chidchop was quoted as saying in The Nation, a newspaper in Thailand.
Officials said Thursday that a Thai ban on Cambodian chickens is unlikely to have much impact since Cambodia exports only a paltry amount of poultry.
“Statistically, Cambodia never exports poultry to Thailand,” said a senior official at Camcontrol, a department in the Ministry of Commerce agency that inspects imports. “We just export fish, rice and soybeans to Thailand. Cambodian people feed chickens only in their families, not in a big industry, so we don’t have enough chickens to export to other countries.”
On the Cambodian-Thai border, officials said that they had not received instructions to stop chickens from being exported to Thailand and, even if they did, they would not have much to stop. They are much more concerned with stopping Thai chickens from entering Cambodia.
“We strictly check imports because we do not allow Thai chickens,” said Prak Samdara, a customs official at the Poipet border checkpoint. “Usually we have no Cambodian chickens that are being exported because it is sold only in Cambodia.”
In Takeo, officials said that the nine people detained for transporting the eggs would not face criminal charges. Rather, the seven vehicle-owners will be fined an unspecified amount, said Chinda Bandhit, vice chief of Takeo’s customs office.
The eggs traveled on more than 30 oxcarts from Vietnam past official border checkpoints and were transferred into vehicles that were bringing them to Phnom Penh, Chinda Bandhit said.
The egg owners, however, denied his account, claiming they bought the duck eggs from villages and communes in Takeo’s Kiri Vong district and were never informed of the ministry’s directive banning egg imports.
“I paid more than $600 to buy duck eggs and sell them in Phnom Penh,” said Mam Chanthy, resident of Kiri Vong who has sold eggs for more than four years. “It is not justice because officials never questioned me about the seized eggs and tried to force me to fingerprint a report that said the eggs were smuggled from Vietnam.”
(Additional reporting by Daniel Ten Kate and Thet Sambath)
