AFP, SONG PHI NONG, THAILAND

Sept 25: Suthat Toonsilpa's chicken farm barely survived Thailand's first outbreak of bird flu in late 2003, and he watched many of his neighbors go out of business.

But despite worldwide embargoes on raw Thai poultry, the 64-year-old says he's learned to adapt to a new way of doing business that has seen profits in Thailand's billion-dollar industry bounce back after a year of devastating losses.

Those lessons could become valuable to countries across the globe, if the disease spreads as feared through Asia and Europe. Suthat and the rest of Thailand's industry are emerging from a painful period of adaptation to a world in which bird flu is a fixture.

Thai farmers used to raise chickens in open-air pens, but since the outbreak they are required to have coops protected with plastic covers and to use more vaccines on their birds.

Thailand had hoped to declare itself free of bird flu in July, but with migratory birds believed to be spreading the virus around the region, isolated new cases continue popping up, keeping the raw chicken bans in place in the main export markets of Europe and Japan.

"It will be difficult to eradicate bird flu here, because we know the virus comes with migratory birds that keep coming every year," said Anan Sirimongkolkasem, the chairman of Thai Boiler Processing Exporter Association.

So the industry has started cooking chicken, which kills the virus and makes Thai products eligible for export. That has helped the export industry bounce back from a disastrous 2004, when exports tanked 42.4 per cent from the year before, to 561.8 million dollars.

Exports were back up this year and expected to reach 700 million dollars. Kasikornbank researchers project next year's exports will jump another 20 per cent and top pre-bird flu levels, reaching one billion dollars.

That's good news for farmers like Suthat, who expect bird flu to pose a growing international problem.

US President George W. Bush proposed just that last week at the United Nations, calling for a new international partnership to fight the deadly H5N1 virus, which scientists fear could mutate and pose a deadly threat to humans.

So far, the Asian industry has suffered the most, but European nations are increasingly concerned as outbreaks are detected far from Southeast Asia in Russia and Kazakhstan.

When bird flu hit China in the first four months of 2004, health officials culled nine million chickens in 49 regions. China, which was the world's fifth largest exporter of poultry in 2003, reportedly saw production fall by more than 20 per cent last year, while importing nations stopped their orders.

It's difficult to know if a massive poultry vaccination campaign and stepped up monitoring have helped to minimize outbreaks in China since then, but what is clear is that China takes bird flu very seriously, Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, the Beijing-based spokeswoman for World Health Organisation, told AFP.

Chinese scientists claim to have developed several vaccines to fight the spread of H5N1 in birds, but their usefulness remains unclear, Bhatiasevi said.

European nations have yet to detect any outbreaks, but governments have urged heightened vigilance in keeping poultry away from wild birds.

The Netherlands, where 25 million birds died or were culled in an outbreak in 2003, decided one month ago to require farmers to keep their poultry indoors, though later backtracked in favour of less strict flu prevention measures.

France has advised farmers to avoid feeding their birds outside. Some in the industry have warned that enclosing all the nation's poultry could be prohibitively expensive.

Producers of foie gras have warned that requiring enclosures for all poultry could force farmers to cull half their birds, because the nation doesn't have enough facilities for them. Belgium, Croatia, Lithuania and Poland have urged farmers to monitor their flocks and keep them away from migratory birds.

Germany announced in early September that it would test birds throughout the country, while three state governments require their farmers to keep poultry indoors. While the United States government worries about the threat of human transmission, the country's 50-billion-dollar poultry industry feels secure.

With 8.8 billion birds raised and sold in the United States, the country doesn't import any poultry, according to the US National Chicken Council.

The US government closely monitors migratory birds in Alaska who could carry the virus from Asia, and regular tests of vast numbers of birds have yet to turn up a single infection of the dreaded H5N1, he said.