Saudi Bans Poultry, Eggs From India, Others
A doctor in a hazmat suit paused, thinking of his own kids, before making the call.
The ban landed in Riyadh like a stone in still water, but its ripples would travel thousands of miles—to a poultry farm on the outskirts of Mumbai, where a man named Prakash stared at his phone and felt the ground shift beneath him.
For twenty years, Prakash had raised chickens. He knew their sounds, their rhythms, the way they pressed against each other when scared. He knew which ones would lay well and which ones would end up in the export crates bound for the Gulf, where Indian poultry had become a staple in markets and kitchens from Jeddah to Dammam. His father had started the farm with a hundred birds. Now they had ten thousand, and a contract with a distributor who promised the Saudi market was just the beginning.
That was last month.
Now Prakash sat on an overturned crate, scrolling through the news on his phone. Saudi Arabia’s Food and Drug Authority had published its list: forty countries under full ban. India was on it. His birds, healthy and vaccinated and ready for shipment, would stay in their coops. The distributor wasn’t answering calls. The feed supplier wanted payment by Friday.
Half a world away, in a village outside Birmingham, an English farmer named Margaret heard similar news on the radio. The United Kingdom was on the list too. She’d been shipping eggs to the Gulf for a decade—brown eggs, free-range, the kind wealthy Saudis paid a premium for at specialty grocers in Riyadh. Now she stood in the henhouse, breathing in the warm, dusty air, and tried to calculate what this meant for her son’s school fees.
The SFDA called it precautionary. Avian influenza. Global health assessments. Epidemiological changes. The words were clean, clinical, designed to reassure. But there was nothing clinical about the fear spreading through farming communities across forty nations—from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the highlands of Ethiopia, from the outskirts of Cairo to the hills of Nepal.
In a small office in Riyadh, a Saudi official named Faisal reviewed the list one more time before signing off. He thought about his own children, about the eggs they ate for breakfast, about the invisible threats that moved across borders in shipping containers and cargo holds. His job was to keep them safe. His job was to say no, even when no meant empty tables somewhere else.
The ban exempted poultry products that had undergone adequate heat treatment—canned goods, cooked meals, things that couldn’t carry the virus. But most of the trade was fresh, live, vulnerable. Most of the trade stopped.
Prakash finally stood up, brushed off his pants, and walked toward the coops. The birds clucked softly, oblivious to geopolitics, oblivious to the list that had just redrawn their future. He opened the gate, scattered feed, watched them gather at his feet. Tomorrow he would call the bank. Tomorrow he would figure out how to tell his wife that the savings might not last. Tomorrow the ripples would keep spreading.
Tonight, he just listened to the birds.