Letter: Government policy and bird flu

I refer to an article titled “Science and policy collaboration: The bird flu case” by Yohanes Widodo of Yogyakarta (The Jakarta Post, July 21).

From a communications point of view, what you describe may be true, although as someone with 15 years of experience working for and with the poultry industry in Indonesia, I might say that you are over-simplifying the real situation by not including the entity that has been the decisive factor all along: the poultry industry.

The Indonesian poultry industry grew by itself without any nurturing guidance or regulation from the government. This led to the fact that the poultry industry has not really regarded the government as an equal partner.

From the poultry industry’s point of view, the government has never given them any benefit.

There has been little or no impact whether the government is in the picture or not. The Indonesian poultry industry thinks that it can grow its business without them, as has been demonstrated in the past.

Scientists and academics for most part are government employees and hence must be loyal and not speak out against policy makers.

This power structure may not be a problem when everything goes as usual — but when a high-impact disease like Avian Influenza is involved the government should take the lead and orchestrate all efforts on the domestic and international front to achieve a common objective: eradication of the disease.

This is the sine qua non for the government to gain the respect of all poultry industry stakeholders. But the poultry industry turned away, once again, from the government and did their business as usual, facing each problem, including the AI problem, as they came, one by one.

This made the disease, in the experts’ words, entrenched in Indonesia.

The poultry industry is the one that should be addressed in this case. They are the “public” you need to involve. End consumers have less interest in this problem. They show a weaker reaction over time to any AI outbreak news.

They may react strongly in the beginning, but over time they grow less and less concerned about the issue. This shows that poultry meat and egg consumption has not been affected by the recent news about an AI outbreak.

The poultry industry is the one that can make a change. The government should realize that.

Baso Darmawan
Bogor, West Java