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The Vietnam News

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Vietnam's first foie gras falls foul of bird flu

HANOI - It would have been Vietnam's first homemade, commercial production of foie gras, but the deadly bird flu has forced the slaughter of Hugh Adam's entire flock of geese. "I'm not in the geese business today," lamented the American consultant who is also a gourmet chef. Earlier this week, he turned over his flock of 500 to 600 birds to local authorities for slaughter.

They joined more than 20 million poultry in Vietnam already killed by the H5N1 virus or culled. At least 14 people in Vietnam and five in Thailand have caught the virus and died. Mass slaughter of poultry is believed to be the most effective way of containing the virus, strains of which has spread to 11 countries and has been reported in nearly all of Vietnam's 64 provinces and cities. Adams, a resident of Hanoi, had begun the production of the goose liver delicacy with a local partner on a trial basis, but was approaching the end of the process, that of feeding the poultry large amounts of food to enlarge their livers. He even played soothing Mozart music to the geese to keep them in fine fettle.

"We were on our third set of (20) geese," he said on Thursday. He had already agreed to supply foie gras to some local Hanoi restaurants from his first batch. Now, Adams also doesn't even have eggs, as 3,000 that were being incubated had to be destroyed. He put his losses in the thousands of dollars. But he said he wants to try to rebuild his inventory if the outbreak doesn't spiral out of control. "For me it's a little setback," he said, adding that he will import geese from China if Vietnam's bird stock is too depleted.

Reuters - February 12, 2004.