Government expects Haiti to lift ban on chickens and eggs today

SD. The commission of government officials that travelled to Haiti yesterday to deal with the issue of the ban on the import of chickens and eggs into the neighboring country only brought back expectations that today the Haitian authorities would lift the ban.

"The Haitian authorities suggested that they were going to submit this request (to lift the ban)for the renewal of the export of meat and live animals and that they are going to submit it tomorrow (today) to the Council of Ministers which definitely should approve it," said the Minister of Industry and Commerce, Jose del Castillo Saviñon upon his arrival from Haiti.

However, he did not specify at what time the Haitian Council of Ministers would meet to deal with the issue.

Castillo Saviñon explained that during the meeting they offered explanations to the Haitian authorities-represented by the ministers of Agriculture, Public Health and Population and Industry and Commerce-regarding the non-existence in the Dominican Republic of the bird flu, a situation that he noted was ratified by the Pan American Health Organization ((PAHO).

He reported in addition that on Tuesday of next week technicians from the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture will visit the country to meet with Dominican technicians in this area and establish a protocol with the goal of "improving the commercial conditions of the farm products between the two countries."

In the meantime, the Dominican Minister of Agriculture, Luis Ramon Rodriguez, who also was part of the commission, noted that this protocol will establish the permanent rules for the export of chickens and eggs.

Rodriguez pointed out that yesterday the Haitian authorities asked that as part of the protocol, that "the products come from commercial poultry producers that have high standards of sanitation in their coops."

He told reporters that the Haitians said that the since 2008 the Haitian government has carried out 44,500 tests on birds without detecting a single case of bird flu.

Regarding the reasons as to why Haiti imposed the ban, Rodriguez said "that the press in Haiti apparently confused what is the H1N1 virus (human influenza virus) with the H5N2 virus (bird flu) and that was when the confusion arose and from there the confusion grew and took hold."

He added that in the face of this situation "they admitted that they had to preserve the health of the Haitian people and the first thing they did was to close the frontier and then obtain information, this was what they told us."

Besides Castillo Saviñon and Rodriguez, the commission was composed of the Minister of Public Health; the ambassador Roberto Martinez Villanueva, and the director of the Center for Exports and Investment of the Dominican Republic (CEI-DR), Jean Alain Rodriguez.

For the Haitian government, according to the commission, the representatives were Florence Duperval Guillame, the Minister of Public Health and Population; Wilson Laleau from Industry and Commerce and Thomas Jacques from Agriculture.

Senate

In the meantime the Dominican Senate asked the Haitian government yesterday, by means of a resolution, to reconsider this decision and begin positive steps towards the development of commercial relations with reciprocal respect and support.