"The MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture Food and Forestry) already received the second questionnaire submitted by the Bureau of Animal Industry but they are still translating the 26-page reply to the eight-page questionnaire of the MAFF," said Joseph Sison, agricultural attaché in Tokyo. He said it will take at least two months before the document is translated into the Japanese language.
Sison said that if the MAFF is satisfied with BAI’s answers, a technical team would be sent to the Philippines to validate the latter’s report that would be crucial to making a decision on whether or not to finally allow the Philippines to resume its chicken exports.
He said the Japanese sentiment over the ban on chicken exports from the Philippines is why it took the latter so long to reply to its first and second questionnaires.
"It’s not being said outright but the implication is that because it has taken some time to come up with satisfactory answers, there is this perception that there could be a cover-up of some sort about the real situation in the Philippines. We don’t have a bird-flu outbreak, we know that for a fact, but we have to prove to the Japanese government that there has been no outbreak in the country," explained Sison.
"Japan has never allowed chicken exporting countries plagued with the bird flu virus to resume fresh chicken exports," he said, adding that major supplier Thailand is now only exporting boiled chicken to Japan.
Before its poultry farms were devastated by the H5N1 bird-flu strain, Thailand was supplying 60 percent of the "yakitori" chicken market in Japan. Brazil has replaced Thailand in this particular market.
The Philippines, one of the few remaining countries in the region that has not been affected by the dreaded bird flu virus, is shifting its focus and is now looking for other markets.
Agriculture Secretary Domingo F. Panganiban has expressed the Philippine government’s mounting frustration over Japan’s reluctance to reopen its market for processed chicken which was interrupted last year because of a suspected incidence of a bird flu virus in a small poultry farm in Calumpit, Bulacan.
The Philippines which voluntarily halted exports of chicken to Japan after the Calumpit incident, was subsequently declared as bird-flu free by the Australian Animal Health Laboratory (AAHL), the regional reference laboratory for AI (avian influenza) of the Paris-based Office International des Epizooties or OIE which is a unit under the World Health Organization for Animal Health and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).