Egging on poultry farmers
By Brwa Ab. Mahmud - SLEMANI
SOMA Paper - Issue No.36 Friday, February 29, 2008  -   Thursday, March 13, 2008.
http://www.soma-digest.com/Details.asp?sid=98&stp=4

Despite operating at full capacity, local poultry farmers lament they cannot compete with cheaper Iranian products flooding the bazaars.

Most Kurds like to have eggs for breakfast, whether fried or boiled. Some prefer the whites, others prefer the yolks. In spite of the popularity of eggs, the Slemani area has only one poultry farm to produce chicken and eggs.

According to local poultry producers, the government does not provide sufficient support to the industry, despite its importance to the local economy. Kamel Faiaq Muhammed, also known as Haji Kamel, is head manager of the Kanakawa Poultry Farm.

“The government doesn’t care enough about this important local economic source,” he said.

“Even though the industry has been privatized, it requires a lot of governmental attention.” Haji Kamel, 60, says the farm is running at 100 percent production capacity, and provides eggs to the Slemani market, as well as other Iraqi cities.

One of the problems facing the local production, however, is competition from Iran. “The Iranian products are cheaper in the market, even though there is the added cost of taxes and transportation, so people don’t ask for the local products,” he said.

“We just can’t provide for the daily needs regularly and with a standard price.” The farm has nine fields, and six production lines for laying eggs. Three of the lines are for white eggs, which go to the Slemani market, and the other three fields are for laying brown eggs, and their production goes to the cities in the center of Iraq, such as Baghdad, “because usually the people there don’t like white eggs, but brown,” according to Nawzad Saeed Abdulla, an agricultural engineer and production manager.

The rest of the fields are for preparing chickens to lay eggs, two fields are for bringing up the chickens, one field is for incubating the primary eggs, and then transporting them to the up-bringing field. Abdulla says that because of the current problems in the market, the farm’s production covers just 50 percent of Slemani.

“Our daily production power is 750 cartons, each carton contains 360 eggs,” said Abdulla.

There are 400 persons working in different sections of the farm. There are nearly 55 various-purpose machines in each big hall, for air-conditioning, conveyance, transportation and hygiene maintenance.

The operation of producing eggs goes through several stages. “We bring 15,000 eggs from Holland, which are specific for bringing out layering chickens. These small chickens will cover two fields for laying eggs, and after 18 weeks they will be ready for laying for nearly one year,” said Abdulla.

“In this period, they need food and protection from diseases. We produce their food here inside the domestic area, but their vaccinations come from outside the country.”

According to Abdulla, the bird flu epidemic does not affect pet birds, so these kinds of birds and their production are safe for usage and consumption.

The Kanakawa Poultry Farm was built in 1975. It was a governmental project until 1988 when the government sold 14 projects, including Kanakawa, to the private sector.

“The productive power in 1988 was 25-30 percent, which was 186 cartons a day, but six months later, we reached 90 percent,” said Haji Kamel. After a year the productive power nearly reached its peak, until the uprising of 1991, when everything was lost.

“Some 480,000 chickens died,” he said. “We came back to nothing, and we had to start from scratch in 1996.” Following two years of hard work, the productive power again reached to 75 percent, and the farm can now produce at its highest capacity, said Haji Kamel.

The principal challenges faced by the farm can be solved through stronger government regulation of the sector, he added. “We talk too much, but we can’t do enough, because we don’t have a real country in which to wield that kind of authority,” lamented Haji Kamel.