You tell me

Poultry in infected areas are being suffocated, burnt and buried

I feared that bird flu would come to my chickens and it has. A few days ago my chickens started dying. Over 1,000 died and so I have had to destroy them all.

All 15,000 of them.

The culling is almost finished. It's been a traumatic experience.

Government health officials have been carrying out the process which involves suffocating each bird with a polythene bag, then once they're dead dumping them in a dug pit where the bodies are set alight and burnt. We've then had to bury their remains - just ash from their carcasses.

Idle

I am going crazy.

At the moment I have nothing to do, I have no meat to eat or money and I have no-one to help.

QUICK GUIDE Bird flu

All I do is sit out, and watch people go by.

The passers-by commiserate with me and I commiserate with them. We pray that our God almighty will give us back our livelihoods.

We sit idle together and talk like people condemned to death. What more can we do for ourselves?

Around me, very few farms are left unaffected and even the ones that have been so far lucky, might not remain so - they might not survive either.

Suffering economically

It is not just us farmers though, it affects everyone.

Many have found helping the health officials with their grim task a traumatic experience

When I first broke the bad news to my wives, one of them fainted. I had been employing 25 workers on my farm but now I don't have money to eat, never mind pay them and some look like they are going to commit suicide.

There is no hope anymore.

Businesses downtown in Kano are suffering terrible losses. Traders that make their living from selling poultry feed like corn or nut cake to us farmers are now all out of business because we are not in business. The people that sell chemicals or veterinary drugs are too. Those that used to buy our eggs to sell on cannot buy anymore.

And anyway no-one will buy eggs. People are even afraid to eat chicken meat.

We have been granted a meeting with the Emir [King] of Kano on Thursday. We are hoping that our reception with him will encourage him to appeal to the people to keep going, to try and get things back to how they were.

Economically we are all suffering and so we need him to reassure the people that things will get better and life will improve, that all this will pass.

Neither fair nor adequate

We are waiting to see but the compensation the government is offering is not enough. We've been told we'll be paid 250 naira ($2) per chicken.

This is neither fair nor adequate. We should be given at least 1,000 naira ($10).

Auwalu: Before bird flu Have Your Say Q&A: Bird flu

We've been told that we'll be compensated this week but I can't be sure it will happen.

I need 15m naira ($60,000) to get me financially back where I was and that doesn't include the profit I would've made if none of this had happened.

Personally I do have some credit facilities available but half has already been taken up as a loan from the bank for this financial year.

I understand why we had to destroy all our birds. As large-scale farmers we don't have a choice - to succeed again as poultry farmers we can only move forwards by completely ridding our area of this virus.

If it remains we cannot go on.

Dependent

However the small farmers do have a choice. They will not willingly come out and declare their birds are infected unless the government pays them more than what they can get at the market.

Auwalu Haruna's poultry farm is in Kano state

As big farmers, our livelihoods are dependent on the government and the small farmers.

Our livelihoods mustn't die like our birds have.

The whole of Kano state must be placed under quarantine and all infected birds must be culled.

We have been speaking to some non-government organisations about assisting us to improve our farm conditions and I hope that they will come to our aid, by sharing their knowledge and providing us with materials to keep our birds safe.

And to anyone else that might be able to help, I appeal to you now: Please help us.