Campaign for healthy poultry

Last month, Greenpeace opened a new website, Yutmayiz.org, to disclose the negative effects of the poultry industry on the environment and human health. However, after only two weeks, a major company blocked access to the site with a court order. In a couple of hours Greenpeace launched a new website called Yutmayiz2.org, continuing the campaign from where it was interrupted. 

Food companies are responsible to the consumers on health and environmental matters. It cannot be accepted that they silence their critics who base their statement on scientific data and reports. Besides, nobody can be proven right by silencing others. 

The Yutmayiz (Do Not Swallow) campaign demands that the use of antibiotics in chicken to accelerate their growth should immediately be abandoned, as well as to give up on genetically modified organism and abandon using medication and chemical fertilizers in the production chain. The protection of the rights of farmers, protection of diversity in chicken species, protecting animal rights, keeping feces in the ecology cycle to avoid polluting the environment and water resources are also among demands.

As awareness is rising in ecologic matters globally, international consumer behavior also changes in that direction; consumers no longer demand manufactured goods but environmentally-friendly and healthy food.

It cannot be said that animal and poultry husbandry sectors are able to keep up with this new trend. In a relatively short time, such as 20 years, while the amount of chicken consumption per person has almost tripled in Turkey, our traditional vegetable protein-based palate is disappearing. 

A perception is being formed as if chickens are the only way to meet our protein needs. While the sector constantly claims that we do not consume adequate chicken, statistics show that chicken consumption per person in Turkey is 1.5 times the world average. 

Nobody is telling anybody else to “close their factories,” but a restructuring of the companies and a rearrangement in the poultry sector so that they meet the expectations are demanded.  

Indeed this transformation does not happen overnight. Exactly for this reason, Greenpeace wants companies to prepare a systematic and transparent roadmap and share them with the public to make this transformation happen until 2020, a transformation that is a must when human health and the future of the world are taken into consideration. 

While there are so many shadows cast on the poultry sector, especially in recent years, and while it is the public health in question, you would expect that the sector would be engaged in an effort to eliminate these.  
However, the head of the Turkish Poultry Meat Producers and Breeders Association (BESD-BİR) said they would continue using genetically modified organism feed and that we should get used to living with genetically modified organisms.  

Is that so? 

I am not getting used to it and from now on I will not eat any poultry.

If he is so comfortable with it, then he can make his children eat them.