Dr. Asifo O. Ajuyah
Hello Huque,

Thanks for your paper on poultry production and utilization pattern in Bangladesh. It contained pertinent production indices that could mirror the situation prevailing in other developing countries. However, data on per capita rural consumption of poultry meat instead of percent consumption would be a better indices of nutritional objectives of the village chicken within groups (landless, small, medium and large). In addition, production objectives (income, food, etc) seem to be quite different between the four group of farmers, what about their production systems?

Regarding your comparisons between the village ducks and chickens, you did not provide explanations why the potential of the indigenous ducks for egg production is greater than that of the indigenous chickens. Are there specialized duck farmers in Bangladesh? Or chicken farmers also raised ducks?

I would presume that greater genetic improvements must have occurred within the duck population than within chickens. In addition, under rural situations, ducks are better scavengers than chickens.

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Prof. Tushar K. Mukherjee
Dear Emdadul,

I read your interesting and well-written article on 'Family poultry production and utilization pattern in Bangladesh' presented in the E-Conference of INFPD/FAO. Could you please give me some additional information on poultry mortality and disease patterns of landless, small, medium and large farms. In Malaysia there is a renewal of interest in village chicken production because of lean and tasty meat production, and to enhance the income of rural farmers in two poorer states in the East Coast. Bangladesh's large farmers' model will fit here. Is it possible to inform also what was the supplementary feeding regime in the large farms, besides the feed the chickens obtain through scavenging. I am now a member of the Committee on Small Farm's Native Chicken Development of the local Veterinary Department. It would be appreciated if you could provide us with the above information.

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Dr Jestina F. Kusina

The results of your survey are very interesting. You seem to have covered quite a large area and for quite a long period. However, I would like to know whether the breeds of the chickens monitored in the survey, especially the layers, were the same across the areas.

The data on utilization pattern shows that the landless people (I assume they are also the poorest) benefited from keeping poultry. I would like to commend them for saving some of the eggs for home consumption.

Here in Zimbabwe, I am in the process of formulating projects involving village poultry to run for quite a number of years. I would like to start with a baseline survey to generate information needed to identify and formulate projects with the beneficiaries• input and participation. I realize that the objectives of your survey and the one that I would like to carry out may be different, but I will also need to do a monitoring study and evaluation of the projects at some stage. Therefore, I would like to ask you what sort of problems you encountered and how you handled them during the study, bearing in mind the large number of households and vast differences in the area. Did you do any gender analysis together with this study, or was it not important in your study?

Is it also assumed that the flock dynamics (demographics) of the chickens were directly influenced by season of the year through planned cullings of cocks and specific hatchings during parts of the year as you mention in your paper. Could other seasonal effects have played a part in this, e.g. seasonal effects of nutrition, diseases and mortality due to other environmental factors like rain, cold and predators?

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