POULTRY COVERAGE STUDIED:

The avian flu virus cost giant Perdue Farms and Mountaire Farms as well as a number of individual poultry growers dearly in thousands of destroyed chickens, considerable clean up costs and lost income. Perdue and Mountaire may recover some of their costs from an industry indemnity fund. But the small individual poultry growers have no such insurance to help if they lose income when diseases fells their birds. There is no indemnity fund for the growers and the two livestock insurance programs currently offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture apply only to cattle and swine. “We don’t have any fowl insurance at all,” Shirley Pugh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency, told Associated Press. There is a chance that could change. The USDA has hired a risk management consultant to conduct a feasibility study of a federally subsidized livestock insurance program, similar to federal crop insurance. It was to be a pilot program in Alabama, Georgia and Maryland, but officials with Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., an industry trade group, persuaded officials to include Delaware and Virginia. The consulting firm, Watts and Associates of Montana, is scheduled to report by October.