Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo says relocating chicken slaughterhouses away from the city center must be done to minimize health risks, despite an outcry from poultry vendors.
Vendors staged a large protest Monday outside the City Council to denounce feared job losses
and declining income ahead the plan to relocate fowl slaughterhouses from inner city areas as mandated by a 2007 bylaw on bird control.
“The enforcement of the bylaw enforcement begins on April 1,” Fauzi said Monday.
Five protests against the planned move have already been held by poultry vendors concerned that the longer commute between the slaughterhouses and markets will eat away at their income.
They add that consolidating the city’s many slaughterhouses into just a handful will leave many slaughterhouse employees out of a job.
At a meeting with the protester’s representatives Monday, Selamat Nurdin, head of the City Council’s Commission B on economic affairs, said the commission would meet with experts Tuesday next week to study the economic and social impact of the policy.
He added the commission would also check on allegations of unfair business practices by the management of one of the newly appointed slaughterhouses in West Jakarta.
Under the bylaw, only five city-appointed slaughterhouses will be allowed to operate – in Rawa Kepiting, Cakung and Pulo Gadung in East Jakarta; in North Petukangan in South Jakarta, and the privately owned PT Kartika Eka Dharma in West Jakarta. Some are still under construction.
“There’ll definitely be people laid off as a result of the move, but we’re trying to keep it at an absolute
minimum,” Selamat told The Jakarta Post.
He added the commission would urge a delay of the bylaw’s enforcement until September, to further study the impact of the relocation.
Governor Fauzi, however, said any delay would be too costly for the city.
“I wouldn’t outright say no to a delay, but if in the meantime we have a fatality that forces us to cull entire poultry populations, who’s going to take the fall?” he said.
Bird flu has killed 282 people worldwide since it began ravaging poultry stocks in 2003, the World Health Organization (WHO) says on its website.
Indonesia is the worst-affected country, with 161 infections since 2005, 134 of them fatal.
Jakarta Poultry Vendors Union (HPUJ) Siti Maryam said her group would have preferred an intensified sanitation drive at existing slaughterhouses over the current proposal to consolidate and move slaughterhouses to the city’s outskirts.
The union lists 1,153 slaughterhouses in Jakarta’s five municipalities, which process 600,000
chickens a day.
