To stop deadly strains of bird flu from mutating and infecting humans, millions of infected poultry will have to be culled as soon as an outbreak is reported and farmers must be compensated, agriculture specialists said on Wednesday.

“Our biggest challenge is the poor, small-scale farmers,” Christopher Delgado, a World Bank agricultural economist, told IRIN at an international conference on bird flu that opened in Bamako in Wednesday.

More than a 100 countries and international organizations are represented at the three-day conference where experts exchange information and government ministers agree on policies and funding objectives. Delgado led an interagency task force that wrote a report for the conference on controlling the spread of bird flu in developing countries through compensation.

He said the prospect of killing poor people’s chickens en mass is “obscene”. Poultry has become an increasingly important source of protein in developing countries with production growing annually by 5.9 percent per capita, compared to cereal production, which has only grown by 0.4 percent, according to Delgado.

“It’s the little guy producing a few hundred chickens who will get wiped out unless compensation schemes are properly worked out,” Delgado said.

The schemes must work quickly, he said. Experience has shown that culling must take place within 72 hours of a reported outbreak or else the disease will become far more difficult and expensive to contain.

If the compensation money is not readily available poor farmers are likely to do whatever they can to resist losing their livelihoods, Delgado said. Governments in poor countries generally have little extra money to spare and donor emergency funding is not always expeditious.

Creating institutions to disperse money quickly has already been a problem in developing countries where outbreaks have occurred, Delgado said. Compensation money has disappeared because of corruption, while even honest government officials have been wary of dispersing money quickly in case the claims were false.

The containment of outbreaks in Vietnam in 2003 and 2004 worked better but some officials said that the success was in part due to the government’s authoritarian approach. An estimated 17 percent of the total poultry population was culled.

The Delgado-led report praised the work of the Vietnamese government but called for no more than 10 percent of a nation’s poultry to be culled, and only five percent in the case of poor countries where people have few alternative sources of food. The remaining infected birds should be vaccinated, the report said.

The report also said that governments might need to compensate not just farmers but also feed suppliers, workers and transporters.

But the first step that governments need to take in creating a good compensation scheme is often legislation, Delgado said.

“After all, this is an issue about the state destroying private property for the public good,” he said.