• Avian influenza: They locate up to 61 outbreaks of bird flu in France, most near the border with Spain

"Hundreds of thousands" of ducks will be slaughtered in the next few days in southwestern France, the Agriculture Minister announced on Friday, speaking of a "race against time" against a "highly pathogenic" bird flu virus.

Since December, "almost 400,000 ducks have been slaughtered in the

Landes department

. There will be hundreds of thousands more, it is a certainty", declared

Julien Denormandie a

few hours before visiting the affected breeders in this department, which is the main producer of fatty webbed.

The minister has admitted "not being able to say" how many ducks will remain, of the 5 million currently being raised in the department.

"My goal is to conserve as much as possible. The goal is to massively depopulate to contain the epidemic."

Several hundred thousand slaughtered ducks is already a "colossal figure, but unfortunately it is still not enough", Denormandie has estimated.

"It is clear that we have gone fast enough," he acknowledged, and has justified measures such as the extension of preventive slaughter to create a 5 km crawl space around the sources of contagion, as well as "buffer zones" where it is prohibited the entry or exit of poultry.

But "culling a duck farm is not something that is done in an instant," Denormandie said, referring to strict health protocols.

As for the compensation to the breeders, he has ensured that the first installments will be paid from next week.

The

H5N8

strain

of

bird flu

, which is also abundant in other parts of

Europe

, was first detected on a farm in

France

in early December, prompting an embargo by

China

against French poultry.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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