Biosecurity Assessment of Poultry Production Clusters in Vietnam

Abstract

Over a decade fighting with the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), the Government of Viet Nam has made huge efforts to enable its poultry sector to deal with emerging infectious diseases (EID). Government's attempts of promoting large industrial production through establishing poultry production clusters (PPCs) to restrict the emergence and transmission of diseases constitutes one of the most remarkable but controversial debates. In that context, the Center for Agricultural Policy (CAP) under the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development (IPSARD), financially supported by the International Development Research Center (IDRC, Canada), executed a research on several impacts of PPC's establishment, including economic aspects, social factors, human health, environment protection and EID management. This article introduces an important part of the research which assesses the biosecurity level of PPCs, using the biosecurity scoring methodology proposed by Les Sim from IDRC based on FAO definition of biosecurity. Study results show that the overall biosecurity level of farms in PPCs is only slightly better than the biosecurity level of small farms located in residential areas, but farms in PPCs are not as good as farms outside PPCs in many important aspects of biosecurity. This raises the demand for more appropriate Government policies on investments and supports to develop and improve the biosecurity level of PPCs.