*********************************************************
Following is a transcript of the remarks made by the Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr Yeoh Eng-kiong, at a media session after visiting the Hong Chi Pinehill Advanced Training Centre today (May 18):
Reporter: Dr Yeoh, some poultry traders are demanding the Government to increase the number of live chickens to 80, 000 after the next rest day. What do you think of that? Is that reasonable?
Dr Yeoh: Well, do you think it is reasonable? I think we have already said that currently we are maintaining the level of imports at 30, 000 because of the new quarantine arrangements, as you know, with the outbreak of the avian influenza in the region of such scale which is really very alarming to the global community and is very alarming to our Hong Kong community. Because of the new quarantine arrangements, which are much more vigorous than before, both the Mainland authorities and ourselves have agreed we need to review how these new quarantine arrangements are working out first. So for the time being, we are maintaining the level at 30, 000 until we evaluate this situation. But on the other side, we have already told the trade that the practices in the past cannot continue and if we are going to continue to have live chickens in the territory, there must be some changes to the practices. One of the practices that we are proposing in the markets is to reduce the density of our stalls in the markets. The objective is to reduce the number of stalls to half so that we will have double the amount of space. What we are trying to do is to increase the space provision for each stall so that the markets will be less crowded and we can improve the hygienic conditions. So as such, we have to have a reduction in the number of stalls. So obviously the number of chickens in the markets cannot be increased. Our objective is mainly to improve the hygienic condition by increasing the space for each stall and our objective is to double the space for each stall. Then we need to look at the number of chickens that need to be supplied to the markets will really depend on the physical re-engineering exercise.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)
Ends/Tuesday, May 18, 2004
NNNN
