Intensive farming of poultry is increasing the risk of bird flu and could lead to the spread of other diseases, an international group claimed today.
Conservation, farming and agriculture campaigners said governments were responding poorly to the outbreak of the deadly H5N1 virus, which has killed over 100 people so far, because they had yet to accept that the outbreak started at intensive farms.
They say it was then spread more by the trade of poultry, poultry products and poultry manure than by wild birds and chickens in backyard farms, which have become the focus for many governments' campaigns to fight the virus' advance.
"I don't think you would have seen this spread if it wasn't for the industrial type of farming that has been developed over decades and exported itself and its products," said Devlin Kuyek, a researcher at GRAIN, an international group campaigning for sustainable management and agricultural biodiversity.
"To make matters worse, governments . . . are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world.
"The strategy to contain H5N1 by destroying the genetically diverse backyard flocks and developing even more intensive poultry operations will, perversely, increase the possibility - likelihood some feel - of a human-transmissible version of lethal bird flu," Mr Kuyek said.
"Governments should be . . . working out what practical steps we can introduce to help small-scale farms."
Campaigners said the current outbreak of bird flu was sparked at factory farms in China and Southeast Asia and then sent round the world mostly in products and waste.
Bird flu has now been detected in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, prompting the killing of millions of birds.