A dream built bit by bit is slowly coming to an end before his eyes, and Sohag seems able to do nothing but stand and watch in tears. On the three-storey farm Sohag Sheikh built over 20 years in the yard of his home, about 8,000 hens have died of bird flu in the past three months. Various medicines and vaccines have not saved them.

The farm's layer hens once produced thousands of eggs a day. With two decades of work gone in three months, Sohag is broken, and the pressure of his debts has left him at a loss.

Farmer Sohag Sheikh said: "I have been in the poultry business for 20 years. Building up capital little by little in a small farm, I reached 11,000 hens. But from December last year the hens suddenly started dying. At first I thought it was an ordinary disease and gave various medicines and vaccines. But since December about 8,000 have died. Now only three thousand are left, and they are dying too. Every day hens die, and I fill sacks with them and bury them or throw them in the river. My family and six employees depend on this farm, and I have to pay each of them Tk 16,000 a month. I had invested about half a crore taka in the 8,000-hen farm. Everything is gone."

The farmer says that in good times shopkeepers and instalment lenders would come to his house eager to supply goods and loans, even delivering feed and medicine to his door. Now that things have gone badly, they are demanding double. "Where it was one lakh taka, they are demanding two lakh. The shops are demanding more than I owe. I am asking for time, but no one will give it. Instead they are threatening to file cases. If everyone keeps pressing me like this, I have no way out except suicide. I am still alive only because of my child."

Sohag's wife, Akalima Begum, said: "We have lost everything. If the people we owe would give us a year, we would pay them back little by little. Now they are all pressing us at once."

Upazila livestock officer Dr Palash Kumar Das said: "We are going to inspect the farm. Samples will be collected and tested. Necessary action will be taken once we get the report."

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.