ABOUT 20 countries are now banning poultry imports from France as a result of an outbreak of bird flu in the country.
The states imposing total or partial restrictions include "Japan, Hong Kong, Morocco, Egypt, Thailand and North Korea", junior trade minister Christine Lagarde said today at an agricultural fair in Paris.
She said the bans affected five per cent of the total export market for poultry and poultry goods such as foie gras.
The total export business in the sector is worth 1.4 billion euro ($2.25 billion) a year.
The bans were put in place after French authorities announced on Sunday they had detected the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu in a turkey farm in the east of the country.
France is the fourth-biggest poultry exporter in the world, after the United States, China and Brazil.
There are 30,600 commercial poultry farms in the country, which produce 700 million birds a year and represent total annual revenues of six billion euro ($9.66 billion) including exports.
Sixty-five thousand people are employed in the sector, though owners have had to proceed with lay-offs in recent weeks because of the free-fall in domestic and foreign demand.
The biggest importers of French poultry and associated products are Germany, Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Saudi Arabia.
France is also by far the biggest exporter in the world of foie gras, producing more than 16,000 tonnes a year.
The discovery of the H5N1 virus on the French turkey farm in the village of Versailleux last week was the first confirmed case in commercial production in the European Union.
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