Egyptian farmers forced to kill swine herds
Posted: Thursday, April 30, 2009 9:19 AM
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Cairo, Egypt
By Charlene Gubash, NBC News Producer
CAIRO – Amidst overflowing bags of garbage, Abu Sayed raises pigs, chickens, ducks, pigeons and goats on a small muddy plot of land in order to feed and clothe the extended family of 14 with whom he shares a blackened makeshift shack.
Since he doesn’t own a radio or a TV, we were the first to inform him that the Egyptian government decreed on Wednesday that his pigs, along with all 300,000 pigs in the country, had to be slaughtered as a precaution against the spread swine flu; despite the fact that no cases of the H1N1 swine flu virus have been reported here and it is spread by people, not pigs.
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| Charlene Gubash/NBC News |
| Egyptian farmer Abu Sayed looks at his pigs before he was forced to bring them to a slaughter house. |
Half of the families’ annual income comes from the sale of their small herd of 25 pigs, which usually sell for about $45 a piece.
Sayed looked away as he responded to the unwelcome news about the mandatory slaughter and said, "The interest of the country is more important than anything."
But his brother Ahmed Mohammed was less magnanimous. "If they want to do this, they must find some other kind of income to replace it. All the family depends on the money we get from the sale of the pigs. My mother is sick. She needs money to get medicine for her diabetes and needs to get her eye infection treated."
Encouraged by his brother’s frankness, Sayed ventured an opinion. "Before they take a decision, they have to see what people can do instead to make a living."
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| Charlene Gubash/NBC News |
| Abu Sayed and his sister Karima Mohammed. |
Main source of income: gone
The brothers’ family has experience with the government’s hasty and heavy-handed decrees. They used to haul garbage for a living with two donkey-drawn carts. One day the government arbitrarily decided to forbid donkey and horse drawn carts from certain Cairo districts. During their rounds, police seized their donkeys and broke one of the carts. They had to pay a fine to get the second cart back. It now sits idle in their yard.
With their main source of income gone, they were no longer able to send their children to school. They don’t know how they can recover if they lose their tiny swine herd.
"We buy clothes for the children from the sale of the pigs," said the brothers’ sister Karima Mohammed.
Even with their meager income, the family does without even the most basic necessities. Youssef, the youngest child at 18 months, walks barefoot amidst the refuse. Because their shack has no plumbing, the women carry plastic jerricans of water on their heads from a water source nearby for the use of both the family and the livestock.
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| Charlene Gubash/NBC News |
| Some of Abu Sayed’s pigs before heading to the slaughter house. |
‘How can we kill the little ones?’
An Egyptian cabinet spokesman had initially suggested that herders would be reimbursed for each slaughtered pig, but on Wednesday the minister of agriculture said that since farmers were allowed to sell the pork of fit animals, there would be no need for compensation.
But Sayed said it would be impossible to salvage the meat by slaughtering and freezing the herd at once as the government decreed. "We sell two or three at a time at the request of the butcher. We are not butchers. We raise them. We can’t do that. How can we kill the little ones?"
Meanwhile, the government also sent a health ministry employee to inoculate all 14 members of the family against swine flu on Wednesday.
"How do they make a decision without figuring out how people will live," Sayed asked.
The United Nations said the mass cull of up to 300,000 pigs was "a real mistake" because the new viral strain – a mix of swine, avian and human viruses – has not actually been found in pigs.
Still, on Thursday, the state began confiscating animals anyway.
Police and health officials arrived at Sayed’s house early in the morning Thursday. They threatened to arrest him if he did not surrender the animals, and after hitting him on the head and legs several times, he gave in.
When he arrived at the slaughterhouse with the animals, he received no compensation from the government, instead he was actually charged for the cost of slaughtering the pigs. He was also told that he would be given the meat after the animals were slaughtered so he could try to sell it. But Sayed and others say the pork sellers now refuse to buy the meat and have closed their shops.
Author's note: In response to some of the comments below, the Sayed family is Muslim, although many of the families that raise pigs in Egypt are members of the country's Christian minority.
