How Shit is Your Food? - an occasional series

The only large-scale farmers I've ever met have been Tory *s awsh in massive subsidy to produce chemical-doused food. My own instinct of the bird-flu panic has been that it tells us more about how we've industrialised food, and this has opened us up to some serious illness. Due to genetic selection and growth-promoting antibiotics, chickens raised for meat grow so fast that their hearts, lungs, and legs often can't support their unnatural bulk. Chicken faeces and bedding from poultry factory floors are common ingredients in animal feed. Hmm, sounds yummy. The whole thing is a food industry run for maximum profit which treat animals as a pure product. There's also the subtle racism of the coverage which portrays the pooor British farmer (always the victim) standing brave againt the foreign disease.

This report shows this to be exactly what's going on and suggests a completely different picture :

REPORT SAYS GLOBAL POULTRY INDUSTRY IS THE ROOT OF THE BIRD FLU CRISIS

"Small-scale poultry farming and wild birds are being unfairly blamed for the bird flu crisis now affecting large parts of the world. A new report from GRAIN shows how the transnational poultry industry is the root of the problem and must be the focus of efforts to control the virus. [1]

The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the H5N1 strain of bird flu. Once inside densely populated factory farms, viruses can rapidly become lethal and amplify. Air thick with viral load from
infected farms is carried for kilometres, while integrated trade networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old-chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eggs, chicken manure and animal feed.

"Everyone is focused on migratory birds and backyard chickens as the problem," says Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN. "But they are not effective vectors of highly pathogenic bird flu. The virus kills them, but is unlikely to be spread by them."

For example, in Malaysia, the mortality rate from H5N1 among village chicken is only 5%, indicating that the virus has a hard time spreading among small scale chicken flocks. H5N1 outbreaks in Laos, which is surrounded by infected countries, have only occurred in the nation's few factory farms, which are supplied by Thai hatcheries. The only cases of bird flu in backyard poultry, which account for over 90% of Laos' production, occurred next to the factory farms.

"The evidence we see over and over again, from the Netherlands in 2003 to Japan in 2004 to Egypt in
2006, is that lethal bird flu breaks out in large scale industrial chicken farms and then spreads," Kuyek explains.

[1] The full briefing, "Fowl Pay: The poultry industry's central role in the bird flu crisis", is
available here.