George Chizyuka
Many thanks and congratulations on a very useful exercise!

Asifo O. Ajuyah
Hello Guèye,

I wish to express my sincere appreciation to you and your team (R.D. Branckaert, A.W. Speedy) for the high level of professionalism, dedication, fairness, confidence, and dexterity exhibited throughout the duration of this global Internet conference. I presume all other subscribers hold similar opinion as evidenced by their sustained interest and contributions to the conference proceeding.

This conference has enriched my mental repository in a multi-directional fashion through global peer contacts, cross-pollination of knowledge and ideas relating to the village chickens from Africa through Asia, North America and across the Pacific Island countries. I hope someday functional citation of an improved version of the proposed method on the estimation of digestibility in the village chicken will be reported in the literature.

Finally, I will presume that we all look forward to the next INFPD/FAO electronic conference in the year 2000, meanwhile keep up the good works Guèye and team; you are all truly great and deserve to be our representatives in Rome.

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Tushar K. Mukherjee
Dear Dr Guèye,

You and your colleagues must be congratulated for holding a very informative electronic conference. There are many new things I learnt from the conference, especially some of the experimental results on feeding trials. I have no doubt in my mind this conference has contributed tremendously to our knowledge on disease investigation, management, nutrition and even some in-situ conservation.

As the marine catches are decreasing in many parts of Asia, poultry will be the main animal source for a balanced diet of well-to-do as well as poor people of the developing and developed nations of Asia. In this connection I would like to mention a few points:

1. In-situ and Ex-situ conservation of indigenous poultry breeds should receive attention from National and International planners. I make this point as the constant dilution of these breeds by commercial strains will, one day, cause the complete extinction of the original indigenous breeds. For example, in Malaysia the Cantonese chicken cannot be found anywhere today. There must be similar cases in other countries.

2. It is possible today to breed a synthetic line which will look like the typical village chicken of any country by incorporating the major genes such as Dw and Na, and a combination of specific plumage colour genes. In fact some Western European Companies are already doing this. Knowledge of this kind of breeding programme should be instilled in some national breeding programmes. People like Professor Merat of France and Professor Horst of Berlin have done lot of work in this regard.

3. Integrated breeding and nutrition work as developed in villages of Taiwan should be published in different languages and sent to respective countries. In this connection your organisation might be able to help.

Anyway you have done a very good job during the last few months. Keep up the good work.
Best wishes to you, Dr Branckaert and Dr Speedy.

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Este Koster
Dear Sir,

I found that the papers contained interesting and useful information. The electronic medium made it possible to share thoughts and gain information and not having to travel a lot of miles to a conference venue.
Congratulations!

E. Babafunso Sonaiya
I have followed the proceedings of the electronic conference and would like to make some comments as it is coming to an end. I shall dwell mainly upon the points raised in Lead papers 3 and 4 by Kitalyi and Ajuyah, respectively, but also refer to other submissions presented during the conference.

I think we now have sufficient preliminary baseline information to start designing more specific studies in Family Poultry (FP) in all the regions. To do this we need to clarify some of our terms and assumptions. Family poultry is not synonymous with Local chickens as improved birds are raised by smallholder family poultry producers. Family poultry is not the same as backyard or semi-intensive or even grazing systems (as in S.E. Asia) and caretaking system (as in Africa). Many families especially in urban and peri-urban areas use exclusively improved birds in intensive systems of management (deep litter or battery cage). Family poultry is defined by the source and type of capital and labour more than land area, flock size, location or management of the birds. It is therefore important to state precisely what type of FP system is being studied or reported upon.

It is also important that we provide real data as distinct from mere figures that do not show the means, standard deviations, variances, correlations and regressions. This conference has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that we ought to move in the direction of obtaining hard data that can be used in explanation, prediction and planning policies and development projects.

We ought to focus our research on the following factors: housing, health and disease control, feed resources, marketing and product utilization, bird type and flock size. We need to ask what kind of housing to recommend for the extensive and semi-intensive systems. The housing (which does not have to be a house) will not be used all day. What is the appropriate stocking rate (0.1m2/bird of Huckzermeyer, 1976)? What is the cost effectiveness of improved housing? We must relate cost of housing (and health and feed improvement as well) to increased sales and consumption in the different management systems. Improved housing resulted in lower mortality in Gambia (19 percent) but what is responsible for the difference in mortality between Ethiopia (66 percent) and Tanzania (33 percent) where no improvements were made (Kitalyi, 1998).

In extensive systems, methods for estimating Scavengeable Feed Resource Base (SFRB) are required. Existing methods (Gunaratne, Roberts, et al.) are not exact but they really need not be, as the SFRB is merely a guide on the provision of supplementary feed. The bird can balance its ration if cafeteria choice feeding is used. There is a need to develop such feeding systems for scavenging birds of all species. The suggested modification of Ajuyah (free communication), and the tabulation protocol of Kitalyi for this modification, should considerably improve accuracy of estimating SFRB but will be very difficult to carry out even under research conditions.

There is no disease-free system and surely we know that the intensive, all-in all-out, broiler system is still plagued by myriads of disease conditions with the appearance of new ones like Sudden Death Syndrome, ascites, etc. Scavenging is not a sufficient reason not to develop a health programme. The new free-range systems in developed economies still have health programmes. What we must look for are effective ways of delivering conventional vaccines and new types of vaccines that can be used in the unrestricted free-range systems. We should watch carefully the results of the IAEA/FAO co-ordinated research programme on this (INFPD Bulletin Vol. 8 No.4). In addition, indigenous health remedies must be honestly studied and implemented as appropriate. Modern human and veterinary medicines started with concoctions and there are biological resources in the ecosystems of developing countries that have definite medicinal properties.

Market research must accompany other developmental research but causes (be they social, cultural or economic) of low home consumption of poultry products by family poultry producers themselves must be investigated and overcome.

Gender research in family poultry is overwhelmingly important but there are few gender experts with enough time or interest in family poultry research and development. Family poultry researchers must acquire expertise in gender analysis and use such expertise in all their research.

On the whole, this has been a very stimulating conference and the global spread of contributors and subscribers has been very impressive. Credit and thanks go to the managers of the conference in FAO and to all contributors.

I look forward to the next electronic conference later in the year or as soon as possible.

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Reginald De Deken
Dear Dr E.F.Guèye and co-workers,

Congratulations for this excellent initiative. The conference offered a lot of discussion materials. We will make use of them during the "Cours International de Production et Santé Animales Tropicales" organised by the Veterinary Department of the Institute of Tropical Medecine (ITM) of Antwerp.

Robyn G. Alders
I have enjoyed participating in this electronic conference and would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Guèye and co-workers as well as the FAO for facilitating this venture.

Mr. Eng-Leong ("Jacky") Foo
Dear Guèye and co-workers,

I like to congratulate you and your group for setting up and conducting this well-organised Electronic Conference. It can serve as a good model for people who are interested to start to organise Internet Conferences, and we can expect to see more of such activities in the future.

I am organising an Internet Conference on "Material Flow Analysis of Integrated Bio-Systems" next year, and so I like to invite participants from this list to join the LISTSERV list "ET-W11@segate.sunet.se", which will serve as an announcement list.

I hope that some participants from this Family Poultry Group will be able to present papers on the material flow in family poultry systems. Material flow analysis provides households with the map or plan for successful operations since it provides information on requirements, how much land and feeds are needed, how much feed you can produce and how much money you can make. For example - if you have say 30 chickens, can you draw a schematic diagram to demonstrate the material flow into such a system, i.e. on how much feeds and/or land is needed for semi-scavenging chickens? Can you cultivate or grow chicken feed e.g. earthworms, termites, maggots and how will this influence the material balance and economics? How can you integrate other farming and livestock activities with raising chickens or integrated/rotate raising chickens with a vegetable plot? How can you use industrial wastes as chicken feed? In W. Samoa for example, brewery spent grains and copra are often used as supplementary feed for scavenging family poultry.

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Jonathan G. Bell

I would like to say a big thank you to Dr. Guèye for his tireless work in administrating the conference, to Dr. Branckaert for his foresight in conceiving it and diligence in bringing it to pass, and to Dr. Speedy for his technical support. I'm not quite sure how to initiate a round of applause in an electronic conference - I guess messages of appreciation replace it.

I think the conference was a big success. It was genuinely worldwide, and permitted the participation of many people who would not have been able to come to a regular conference, including a number working in other fields. It has shown the serious interest that exists in family poultry throughout the world, and I think it has made an important contribution to the establishment of the science of family poultry.
Once again, a big thank-you to our organisers (applause)!

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Gavin MacGregor
Dear E. F. Guèye and co-workers,
Thank you for organising a very useful electronic conference. I have found the papers and various questions and comments to be most enlightening and useful.

Ed Wethli
Dear Dr Guèye, I would like to convey my sincere appreciation to you and your team for organising this extremely useful conference. This is certainly a creative way of holding such discussions.
I found the papers to be, on the whole, of a very high standard and particularly interesting. Even though I have been working with poultry development for many years, I acquired quite a bit of new information!
Once again, many thanks!

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Klim Huttner
was impressed with the way this conference is facilitated. Thanks to the Organisers.

Aichi J. Kitalyi
I commend the conference organizers for the good work done. It has been wonderful to share knowledge and experiences on this subject. Whenever I participate in these electronic conferences, I really appreciate the privilege, because I know there are so many of my colleagues in the developing world who are craving for such an opportunity, but it has not reached them. I do hope the modernization process in our countries will go faster so that more and more scientists from the developing world will have access to such conferences.
So again congratulations to all those who made the conference a success.

Christine Ahlers
Dear organisers and contributors,

I followed the First INFPD/FAO Electronic Conference on Family Poultry with huge interest. The opportunity to discuss, exchange views and share experiences, to contact people working on the same subject and get information about different projects on village chickens is very valuable. Thank you for taking the effort to organize this conference!

I have been working with about 70 small-scale poultry farmers in Malawi for one year. Many families did not understand my interest in their chickens at the beginning and the acceptance of different interventions varied. Nevertheless, any improvement was highly appreciated, because in that region chicken and fish are almost the only sources of animal protein for poorer families and women-headed households.

Changes are difficult to achieve in traditional production systems. Social and cultural aspects may have a higher priority than economic aspects. Since the losses -due to various reasons- in this production system are high and cannot be calculated it is understandable that the farmers are not very interested to invest time or money in their chickens. The success of any project is therefore depending on detailed data on constraints and productivity of the local chickens as well as on consideration of local conditions.

This electronic conference can facilitate the huge task to improve family poultry management by exchanging and discussing data and experiences. Hopefully most of the contacts and the exchange of information will persist and this conference will not be the last of its kind!

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Adama Traoré
[Message translated from the original French - E.F.Guèye]

“In my opinion this conference was very successful. It made it possible to mobilize expertise in rural or family poultry development issues. I somewhat regret the low level of participation of experts from our sub-region. This situation could be explained by their limited access to the Internet. This electronic conference allowed many specialists from different countries, or even continents, to get in touch and exchange views. These contacts should not be lost after this electronic conference, they must rather be maintained and strengthened. The conference made it possible, to my mind, to identify common topics and potential fields for regional co-operation. There are, for example, two areas in which regional co-operation could be contemplated:

- Control of Newcastle disease (ND). ND has unanimously been regarded as the most important disease devastating family poultry flocks in almost all regions. Development approaches based on low-cost and sustainable vaccination schemes could be investigated and implemented.

- Integrated animal production systems. They could associate poultry and/or bee keeping.

I seize this opportunity to congratulate Dr. Guèye as well as FAO for facilitating this venture, and I urge the network to continue this form of scientific co-operation. In the future, we will be targeting more restricted fields in order to allow thorough exchanges.”

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Avigdor Cahaner
The importance of peri-urban, semi-intensive, sustainable poultry production:

With much interest and appreciation, I have been following the First INFPD/FAO Electronic Conference on Family Poultry. The novel concept of an electronic conference has been matched by very thorough papers and many thoughtful comments. The organizers at the FAO and INFPD, as well as all contributors, deserve many thanks from everybody who is interested in the development of poultry as a major source of food, and also as an important source of income for families in developing countries.

With regards to the objectives of family poultry production, there are a few thoughts I would like to share with the subscribers of the Electronic Conference. I am new to this subject, having been first exposed to it during the INFPD meeting in M'Bour, Senegal (December 1997). However, the different perspective (due to ignorance or naivety) of an outsider or newcomer may produce insights that might be missed by the expert. Moreover, I am currently involved in a study on the contribution of the naked neck gene to the adaptation of industrial broilers to family poultry production in hot climates near Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) and Calcutta (India). The observations and impressions from my visits to the project’s locations helped me develop my opinion regarding family poultry.

During the meeting in Senegal, the network changed its name from ANRPD (African Network on Rural Poultry Development) to INFPD (International Network on Family Poultry Development). The change reflected an increased emphasis on family-scale poultry production in "peri-urban" areas, in addition to rural poultry production. The market demands, and relative ease of marketing, have increased family poultry production by village families in peri-urban areas. Unfortunately, due to low productivity of the scavenging chickens, this type of family poultry cannot produce large quantities of poultry products at affordable prices, and thus producers hardly benefit from the new marketing opportunities. In some cases, the urban market is supplied by large-scale industrial poultry operations, but those hardly contribute to the economic and social situation of the people.

However, between low-input (scavenging) poultry and high-input (industrial) poultry, there are plenty of opportunities for medium-input (semi-intensive) family-run sustainable poultry production. This is the essence of my comment, because the policies, research, and extension activities required to materialize this potential are very different from those needed to improve the productivity of scavenging chickens. As scientists, our duty is to define future needs and the most important objectives related to them, in order to initiate the required research as soon as possible. Therefore I encourage all subscribers in the Electronic Conference to exchange their experiences and ideas regarding the development of sustainable semi-intensive family poultry production, and to try to set up guidelines for future research, covering poultry science issues as well as economics, marketing, and social policies. I am willing to start this process with my own observations.

First, I would like to argue that people, especially in developing countries, must care for more than just food security. They should be trained (and helped) to generate enough income to secure not only food, but also education and overall development for future generations. In order to turn poultry production into a significant source of income for the family, a balanced set of inputs must be invested. Two inputs are readily available: the family’s small piece of land, and the labour and attention of family members. However, in order to take maximum advantage of these resources, they must be accompanied by reasonable levels of other inputs, such as appropriate housing, productive stock, sufficient feed and veterinary assistance. Balancing the levels of these inputs in sustainable combinations is the key to successful family poultry production, hence organizational efforts and much research should be directed at this integrated objective.

Some aspects are well known, and have been discussed also during the Electronic Conference. Those and others are detailed below:

1. Interested families must start with free inputs (chicks, feed, medications) provided by GOs or NGOs, along with adequate extension services. Such a system has been applied in Sudan (described in M'Bour by Prof. Musharaf) and in India (information from Dr. Saha at the Nimpith Institute, West Bengal). Successful families use the initial income to finance their continued activities, expanding them at a rate that reflects their skills and motivation.

2. Adequate housing and equipment are required. I saw highly efficient and innovative low-cost constructions that used locally available cheap materials such as bamboo, dry corn stalk or palm leaves, used fishing nets, etc.

3. Adequate feed is required. It must be produced in professional feed mills, but with skilful (and research-based!) use of locally available low-cost raw materials.

4. Preventive medical measures should be practised, especially simple water treatments. To my surprise, mortality rate in the family-operated broiler farms I visited was rather low, partially due to lower stocking density and reduced growth rate (due to hot climate and/or sub-optimal feed). However, low mortality is mainly due to very intensive care by family members. This is the biggest advantage of family-operated poultry farms, with the family-owned chickens being kept next to the family house.

5. Except for reduced mortality, chickens of local strains exhibit a limited response to improvements in housing, feeding and sanitation, because they have never been selected under these conditions. The genetic potential for growth rate or egg production of rural breeds is much lower than that of industrial stocks. Therefore, a balanced set of inputs applied in semi-intensive poultry production must include stocks with high potential along with special adaptations to local conditions.

In summary, when comparing scavenging poultry with semi-intensive poultry, there is no "right" or "wrong". The former is more relevant to rural communities whereas the latter should be the choice of villagers in peri-urban areas. However, they are associated with quite different research objectives and extension activities. And because resources for research and extension services are limited, 'competition' is inevitable when priorities are being set. This is a challenge for policy people, but also for poultry scientists who should weigh the two 'options' in terms of scientific feasibility as well as potential contribution to mankind. The weighing must rely on expected changes in the future, rather than on past information or current situations. Therefore more weight should be given to future research related to sustainable semi-intensive family poultry production.

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James Gathumbi
Dear Dr. Guèye,
I wish to express my sincere thanks to you and your colleagues for having made this conference such a great success. I have found the exchange of information in the conference of great value.

Mmeta G. S. Yongolo
Dear Dr. Guèye,

It was unfortunate that I joined the INFPD/FAO Electronic Conference rather late when it was winding up. Thus, I received all the key papers and conference contributions. Yet, I have gone through them and found them to be very informative and educative with regard to the state of poultry production and research in developing countries. Therefore, I would like to join in expressing my congratulations to you and the co-organisers of the conference.

The current situation as highlighted by the key papers and the comments from contributors show that we have a challenge both in terms of quality and quantity of research work relevant for developing countries.

However, I feel that for a start most of information presented or made available can be used in extension packages to farmers at the moment. We have to start somewhere. For example creep feeding practices and improvised structures observed in some areas in Tanzania could be incorporated in extension packages. This could be one of the remedies to the high chick losses observed in scavenging village poultry. Apart from facilitating creep feeding they deter crawling and flying predators. It is not surprising that regions of Tanzania where such improvisations are commonly practised have paradoxically higher poultry populations. The creep feeding and improvised structures are made of simple locally available materials. Thus, they could be adopted without substantial increase in input costs to farmers.

I would also like to support what has been suggested by Prof. Sonaiya on the following:

First, it is important and urgent that the definition of FP or rural poultry is made. We have to compare and exchange experiences and results from different places and different research data. There is a need for an agreed definition of the existing different poultry systems in developing countries. The problems for the scavenging poultry system of production, which is characterised by
- very little supplementation if not accidental,
- presence of multi-aged birds in the same flock,
- free contact with other flocks night housed separately and presence in the shared environment with wild birds and other animals,
- minimal inputs and high dependency on the natural feed resource base.

Besides, problems encountered by poultry kept in village backyards are different to those found in peri-urban areas. In peri-urban areas, birds are confined, fed on concentrates, kept in similar or uniform age flocks, defined types (layers/broilers), disease control and treatment measures are practised.

Secondly I support the idea that we urgently focus on development of disease control programmes which should address the existing disease situation for the most devastating diseases. Of course, priorities will differ according to the system and which are the identified problems in specific areas. Moreover, they might change with time as the situation changes. I find this to be a necessity because experiences in Tanzania show that rural poultry keepers are always reluctant to invest in poultry or even collaborate with researchers, when they are sure that devastating epidemics are existing in their poultry population.

This underlines the importance of developing disease control programmes for any development strategy and further research activity. The birds have to survive so that they are available for research on how to improve their feeding, housing or marketing.
I am looking forward for much more active participation in the coming conferences.

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Aini Ideris
Dear Dr. Guèye,
I would like to congratulate you, Dr. Branckaert, Dr. Speedy and the rest of your team members for the excellent job done with the INFDP/FAO electronic conference. We can see the great interest of researchers world-wide in family poultry. I must admit that I gained a lot from this conference and has widened my circle of researchers with the same interests. My thanks and congratulations to the contributors as well.
Well done and all the best.

Quazi M. Emdadul Huque
Dear Dr. Guèye,
I would like to express my sincere thanks to you and your team members Dr. Branckaert and Dr. A.W. Speedy for holding this type of informative conference. I specially thank to you for encouraging me to participate in this electronic conference. This conference has given a cross section knowledge on rural chicken throughout the world.

Village chickens in different regions of the world have got natural selection through years together and production and reproduction performances based on the survivability and adaptability are fully dependent on socio-economic condition of the country or areas. This conference has stimulated ideas of scientists from developing countries where food security and poverty alleviation are the most important challenges for millions of people.

I congratulate the organisers again for this excellent idea.
Best wishes to you, Dr. Branckaert and Dr. Speedy

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