The financial impacts of the avian influenza outbreaks on Turkish table egg producers

Abstract

A face to face survey was carried out in randomly selected 124 layer producers in 7 most important egg producing cities in Turkey between September 2006 and May 2007 in order to investigate the financial impacts of the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) outbreaks in Turkish commercial layer-egg producers. The financial analyses were divided into 3 periods, namely ‘before the outbreak (October 2004-January 2005)', ‘during the outbreak (October 2005 - January 2006)' and ‘after the outbreak (February-May 2006)'.Comparing the egg prices ‘before the disease’ with the situation during the outbreaks, the egg prices dropped from 0.091 YTL/egg to 0.038 YTL/egg. On average, the rate of capacity utilization, enterprise incomes and profits declined by 40%, 75% and 200% respectively. 14.5% of the producers had to stop production for about 5 months. 64.5% invested on average 6,648 YTL/enterprise to improve bio-security. The debts of the enterprises increased 3–4 folds due to the disease outbreaks, with 87% of the producers having to outlay an extra 153,426 YTL on average from their personal funds.In the ‘after the outbreak’ period, the prices and sales of table eggs recovered and even exceeded those of the ‘before the outbreak’ period, and the producers who managed to continue production appeared to be better off.