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Profit, plague and poultry
The intra-active worlds of highly pathogenic avian
flu
Chris Wilbert
In 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers
– obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung
edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears of the state,
helping warn of new border incursions. These incursions are posited as taking an
avian form that may bring with it very unwelcome pathogens. Everyday avian
observations and knowledges of migratory routes are being reinvented as a kind
of border patrol, a first line of veterinary surveillance. Birdwatchers and
others are being asked to look out for any signs that wild birds may be dying
from the highly pathogenic form of avian influenza known as H5N1, one of sixteen
or so strains of flu virus endemic to wild birds and transferable to domestic
poultry and also, in the right circumstances, to pigs and other animals.
Such appeals to amateur enthusiasts, walkers, farmers, and even hunters are
not new. In 1933 the renowned animal ecologist Charles Elton called for amateur
naturalists to act as the eyes and ears of ecological research centres such as
the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford University.1 Elton argued that local
observers could be useful for amassing empirical knowledge of animal
populations, just as they were at giving information to detectives at Scotland
Yard (the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police) about crimes. In the 1930s
this worked in ways which allowed ecologists to popularize their nascent
discipline, involving amateurs while holding on to their own cultural authority
in professional centres of calculation. The difference today is that
supranational state organizations are now taking on the ecologists’ previous
role. For example, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) now argues
that farmers, and others, should be enrolled to act as early-warning networks.
But the FAO is also proposing high-tech surveillance – for certain wild birds to
be fitted with ‘backpacker’ telemetry systems networked to satellites and
computers to monitor wild birds’ annual migrations.2
As such, the knowledges of birdwatchers, and others, are being reconfigured
(albeit as a minor part) in a renewed bio-geopolitics: the monitoring of animal
health, locations and routes in the service of potential disease- (or, as
Foucault would have had it, plague-) control, a management and surveillance of
wild and domestic animal populations in the service of the health of human
populations. The big fear is that this ‘new’ strain of avian virus may spread to
farmed bird populations, increasing the possibility of rapid mutation and the
risk of generating a new pandemic virus for humans via avian–human linkages, and
a potential repetition (though in different ways) of the influenza pandemic of
1918–19 that killed upwards of 40 million people across the globe.
The dominant media stories that follow the above narrative are somewhat
oversimplified, and national governments and supranational organizations
such as the FAO, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and World
Health Organization (WHO) are doing little to counter such media reporting – at
least in their public pronouncements. It also increasingly appears that media,
agribusiness, governments and global veterinary surveillance organizations are
conspiring to blame wild birds, and small-scale poultry producers, just when
much other evidence is pointing to large-scale factory poultry farms as the
disease factories of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) strains.3 These
same organizations and governments seem to be colluding in claiming that
‘closed’ export-oriented factory farms are the answer to preventing avian flu
outbreaks.
We need to see how this fear of avian flu is being used by, and draws
attention to, the practices and public discourses of governments, corporations,
and transnational animal and veterinary organizations that have sought to police
trade in domestic animals, and the movements of pathogens among livestock and
poultry, since the early twentieth century. In short we need to look beyond the
often simplistic media narratives focusing on bird migratory routes and their
supposed ability to spread highly pathogenic viruses, and to question the ways
food is produced and traded, as well as the harm being done – ecologically,
socially, and to animals – by agribusiness.
With the attempts to extend social health and veterinary surveillance around
the world, especially more fully into the modernizing nations of Southeast Asia,
we see a further merging of biopolitics with geopolitics. There is a
proliferation and globalization of what sociologist Nikolas Rose calls a demand
for collective biopolitical risk management, where contemporary biopolitics
becomes risk politics.4 For example, with regard to avian flu some scientists
and politicians argue that just one territory lacking effective veterinary
surveillance can open all other territories to possible pandemics. The EU, the
USA and Japan, as well as the World Bank, promised over US$1 billion in early
2006 for biosecurity so that developing countries can operate effective
surveillance and monitoring systems of people and animals. These monies are
undoubtedly needed to develop laboratories, social health systems and the like,
to be able to protect their populations from potential harm – at least in the
immediate future. Yet, as with all regimes of biopower managing life from
‘above’, there is also a deeply troubling aspect to how states and suprastate
organizations – often with close relations to the World Trade Organization and a
wider neoliberal politics – will operate such systems and who will benefit from
them. Moreover, the reasons why such developing countries have not been able (or
at times willing) to develop such health systems for themselves is casually
overlooked. Here we might ponder on how more than two decades of neoliberal
restructuring, massive national debts, corruption, arms selling/buying, and
other factors have contributed to a state of affairs in which health-care
systems in the developing world have been rendered moribund for the majority of
their populations.
Bird spaces
The geographer Steve Hinchliffe has argued
that ‘viral patterns are often tragic patterns. They are also sometimes
revealing patterns’.5 Some of these revealing patterns have emerged in reports
from the Thai-based organization Focus on the Global South on the emergent H5N1
avian flu outbreaks in Southeast Asia. They show how large export-oriented
poultry factory corporations in Thailand, especially, have been seeking to
extract commercial advantage from the recent outbreaks. Until 2004 Thailand was
the fourth largest poultry exporter in the world, mostly to the EU and Japan.
Thai corporations dominate the whole Southeast Asian region in a vertically
integrated production process. Like the USA – which dominates the global poultry
industry – much of the production is done on highly intensive family-run farms
that have little bargaining power with the huge corporate ‘integrators’ that
provide the chicks and feed, and buy the product. Focus on the Global South
point to how the Bangkok-based Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) has, in league with
the Thai government, sought to put blame on small-scale poultry farmers for the
transmission of avian flu from wild birds to domestic poultry, falsely claiming
that large farms were free of bird flu.6 At the height of the outbreak in
Thailand the deputy prime minister argued for the avian flu crisis to be turned
into an opportunity – this opportunity was, of course, one only for CP and its
like. Similarly, the corrupt and authoritarian Egyptian government sought to
blame backyard and roof-top poultry production in rural and urban areas when
H5N1 was confirmed there in February 2006 – and this at a time when the majority
of the population are increasingly impoverished and undernourished.7
In this
process small peasant farmers are likely to be denied their ability to produce
their own food. Compensation for slaughtered poultry, if available, is often
woefully inadequate and may have encouraged people not to report disease
outbreaks. The crucial fact that peasant farmers are losing an important source
of much-needed cheap food and income has been sorely missing in many discussions
of the potential pandemic in mainstream media scare stories focusing on wild
birds. Moreover, this opportunistic use of the avian flu outbreak by business
and government elites for their own purposes is threatening to sabotage
developing movements to encourage and improve urban and peri-urban agriculture
that could (if best practices are encouraged and developed) improve access to
food and provide much-needed income for some of the poorest people in the
rapidly growing cities of the developing world.
Recently, the FAO has also argued that it is small-scale poultry producers
that provide the main access point for highly pathogenic avian flu virus from
wild birds. As the campaigning group GRAIN has argued, hardly a doubtful word
has been said by the FAO and WHO about large-scale intensive poultry production
in their various public reports on avian flu.8 Moreover, it seems that evidence
for the supposed need to move poultry production into intensive units – as, it
is claimed, these units have higher standards of biosecurity – is weak to say
the least.
Looking more closely at the arguments blaming small-scale poultry production
and wild birds problematizes them. First, it is claimed that avian flu is a
problem among wild birds that is then easily transmissible to free-range or
backyard poultry. Yet conservation organizations such as Birdlife have argued
that the media depictions of H5N1 as a wild bird phenomenon just do not add up.9
Notably, the routes of H5N1 outbreaks do not correspond to wild bird migrations.
In the UK we have seen the media and the government implying that birds move
geographically from China and Southeast Asia to Russia, Turkey, eastern Europe,
then to western Europe and beyond in some inexorable flow from ‘the Orient’ –
with all the connotations that still has. But this does not correspond to
Birdlife’s considerable knowledge of wild bird migrations. For example, they
have argued that it is unconvincing to blame wild birds for the hotspots of
avian flu around places like Qinghai lake in China. First, birds that died there
did so after being there for several weeks. Second, the lake is surrounded by
large poultry operations and an interlinked fish farm industry that uses chicken
faeces as feed. Birdlife argue that it is more likely that the poultry
operations are infecting the wild birds with their waste and that the subsequent
outbreaks around the region show more of a correlation with road and railway
connections than with bird migratory routes. Why, further, if wild birds were
the vectors of this disease, is it not found in more of the main bird migratory
routes, and why do countries such as Laos (situated close to Thailand, Vietnam
and Cambodia – where outbreaks have been greatest) only have outbreaks in the
areas of the few factory farms (owned, incidentally, by the CP Group from
Thailand)?
Avian flu strains are endemic in wild birds and probably have been so for
millennia, yet until recently it has rarely killed birds, seeming to exhibit low
evolutionary rates of change. While it is true that most of the sixty-two deaths
of people in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Egypt have been small farmers and
their families, poultry production has grown enormously in recent decades in
Asian regions. China alone produces over 9 million tonnes per annum, a tripling
of production in the 1990s. Nearly all of this increase has taken place in
intensive factory production units. Outbreaks of differing strains of avian flu
have also been growing hugely over the past decade. As both GRAIN and Mike Davis
(in The Monster at Our Door, 2005) argue, what has occurred fairly recently, and
through complex interlinked social, economic, ecological interventions, is that
avian influenza has taken on new qualities in recent years. As GRAIN argue:
The highly pathogenic strains of bird flu develop in poultry, most likely in
poultry exposed to milder strains that live naturally in wild bird populations.
Within crowded poultry operations, the mild virus evolves rapidly towards more
pathogenic and highly transmissible forms, capable of jumping species and
spreading back into wild birds, which are defenceless against the new strain. In
this sense, H5N1 is a poultry virus killing wild birds, not the other way
around.10
In a commentary on avian flu in the Korea Herald (14 November 2005), that
great advocate of animal ethics Peter Singer also blames factory farming for
causing highly pathogenic strains like H5N1. He argues that the billions of
dollars so far spent by the US government on stockpiling flu vaccines (and on
biosecurity worldwide), or on encouraging US pharmaceuticals companies to come
up with a vaccine, is really a subsidy to the intensive poultry industry. Animal
production in capitalism is full of such subsidies of course. It is also not
often enough stated that in many ways modern factory production of meat
encapsulates, and often leads, capitalist reorganizations and suffuses every
aspect of society. Indeed, the networks of modern intensive farming are so vast
we cannot see the ‘bare life’ of the animals for the industry.
Media panic or ‘the monster at our door’?
It is often
claimed that the potential avian flu pandemic has been hugely overstated, that
the mass media have latched on to a story of potential catastrophe and wildly
exaggerated the threat in order to profit from fears that they themselves have
helped generate. It is likely that in some ways this is indeed the case. Various
media sources have used aspects of our indeterminate knowledges of avian flu to
make their own points based on, for example, fears of other people’s eating
practices, and ways of raising animals, and of travelling – exploiting an
ontological insecurity linked with Orientalist notions mixed into contemporary
consumer practices.
Governments, businesses, media, scientific organizations, and even leftist
critics such as Mike Davis have all been criticized for exaggerating the
possibilities of avian flu. Claims have been made about profiteering by drug
companies – especially the makers of Tamiflu – and patent systems that deny
drugs to those most in need.11 Yet, while valid in many ways, these critical
claims about the avian flu scare as media panic miss other political processes
working around it. This might also be to take a too developed-world perspective
of the global and regional scales of food production. As such, it ignores the
environmental degradation of this global trade, the exploitation of farmers
forced into highly exploitative relations with CP and other food corporations in
Southeast Asia (or for that matter the USA, and many other countries) and the
control corporations have over the whole production process of poultry in
countries like Thailand. It also ignores the ways in which US poultry producers
are opportunistically looking for excuses to close down backyard poultry
production in the developing worlds for their own benefit, and the role of
supranational surveillance organizations like FAO, WHO, OIE, who, in their call
for effective veterinary surveillance systems, seem to be playing into the hands
of corporate intensive animal production. As such, it may well be to ignore how
geopolitics is being brought further together with biopolitics in ways that
extend the real subsumption of society under capital.
Nikolas Rose has recently argued that contemporary biopolitics has become
molecular politics due, among other things, to developments in biomedicine.12
But there is another sense in which molecular politics is also reconfigured
around risk. Late capitalism is characterized by greater and longer circulations
of bodies across borders – by increasingly globalized, speeded-up economies of
exchange and circulation of myriad materials. This creates increased
possibilities and risks for all kinds of mixings with other bodies and other
phenomena, in forms that differ widely in the ways power and agency are acted
and enacted in these spaces of circulation. There are increased opportunities
for recombinations of viruses moving with greater ease geographically within and
across differing spatial scales. This was shown in the recent SARS outbreak
where, within months, the pathogen was transmitted to over thirty countries in
every continent, through contacts made in hotels, airports, planes, and
hospitals, and other spaces of intense mobility.
SARS probably emerged
from a rare recombination of viruses – of avian and mammalian coronaviruses (a
virus in the same family as the common cold) mutating and transferring in a
highly virulent and contagious form to humans in and through the ‘wet markets’
of wild and non-domesticated farmed animals (such as civet cats) that have
increased in recent years to cater to a burgeoning middle-class consumer demand
in wealthier provinces of southern China, such as Guangdong, and in Hong Kong
and Beijing, where the SARS outbreaks were worst.
SARS, like highly pathogenic avian flu, has highlighted the current inability
of national and international veterinary and biomedical surveillance regimes to
cope with such emergent pandemics. We are told that SARS was reputably a rare
event, emerging from wild animals (often referred to as bushmeat) and
commercially farmed ‘wild’ animals being brought into contact with industrially
produced poultry, pigs, and other animals in markets, creating in such spaces an
environment for viruses to mix, mutate and spread into large urban populations
of people. The bushmeat market, also often fuelled by migration, travel,
commercial and illegal logging of forests (as well as the increasing tendency
for the EU and Japan, for example, to buy out the fisheries of impoverished
countries, leading to periodic shortages of protein in local populations),
increases opportunities for potential mixings of viruses as more wild animals
are hunted for food and brought into contact with people. Avian flu is
potentially more extensive than SARS in its forms, being tied more tightly into
the global poultry industry (in its myriad forms) and trade in animals (both
legal and illegal).
Intra-active worlds
This draws attention to the
complexities of intra-actions (a term that the feminist philosopher of science
Karen Barad uses to emphasize that natures and cultures do not simply interact,
but are always already mixed – intra-acting) in our diverse ecologies,13 to the
many unruly bodies in our worlds and their potential to throw up all kinds of
emergent forms of ‘life’ – some perhaps benign, others potentially pathogenic,
others somewhere else, for now. The various strains of HPAI are only one example
of a number of potential zoonoses (defined by WHO as diseases and infections
which are ‘naturally transmitted between vertebrate animals and humans’, though
this naturally hides the possibilities of what this may involve) that are
emerging in different geographies. Yvonne Baskin, writing about invasive species
(of which humans are the major example) argues that about three-quarters of the
156 emerging infectious diseases affecting people in the USA today are
zoonoses.14 Taking a wider geographical view, we might argue that zoonoses are
becoming one of the central concerns of global geopolitical–biopolitical medical
surveillance in the twenty-first century. Yet, in thinking about zoonoses like
the current strain of highly pathogenic avian flu or SARS, we might begin to
move in a direction which resists seeing these phenomena as specific objects
with predetermined properties and boundaries that simply flit from other
predetermined bodies, whether human or non-human: the model upon which much
scientific and veterinary surveillance policy and practice seems to be based. As
such, we might resist the urge to imagine that HPAI seems to do things by itself
– killing some birds, or (tragically and painfully) killing some people, making
other people very ill, and all the other things that happen around it. But,
concomitantly, we might also avoid the tendency to see the potentialities and
realities of avian flu as just the result of human activities that make these
zoonoses do the things they seem to do. For both these positions rely on a view
of natures battling and interacting against cultures, or vice versa, in
particular contact zones. Given the complexity of many emergent human-to-animal
diseases (and of everyday life generally), this overlooks the ways in which
natures–cultures–technologies are always already mixed up and mixing up –
intra-acting – in what we might better describe, think of and practise as
technonatures or socionatures, bearing in mind that these mixings can
happen in disparate ways, depending upon the different forms of intra-action
involved.
We engage with our worlds in ways in which agency is relationally dispersed,
where agency is an enactment, not a property that someone or something just has.
We need to take a non-representationalist perspective engaging avian flu as an
emergent phenomenon made tangible only within complex open-ended networks and
discursive practices; to see highly pathogenic avian flu in terms of
more-than-human worlds – the boundaries of which potentially extend massively,
and which always contain potentialities of an excess that can give rise to new
productions of things. These complex spaces of avian flu are ‘bewildering
spaces’, to use a term coined by Sarah Whatmore.15
We might then argue that avian flu does not exist in and of itself as an
object (for even if it is argued by some that it can be identified in a
scientific lab it is only rendered visible within specific agencies of
observation). Avian flu, in its differing forms has diverse materialities. It is
always a part of various bodies, ecologies, networks of (in)adequate
technologies of surveillance and biosecurity, which include all kinds of rules,
veterinary techniques, forms of production, transport networks, slaughtering
practices, laws, and more. It may be emergent, but it seems there are many ways
of seeking to bring about its move back into its previous background than are
presently being admitted by global veterinary surveillance organizations. If so,
this will be a complex, ongoing and difficult practice, one that needs to be
integrated within goals to help provide good-quality, cheap food for the poorest
in modernizing worlds, to end corporate exploitation and intensive rearing
regimes, and to improve animal lives, whilst also reducing risk of viral
mixings. Blaming wild birds, or seeking to ban small-scale poultry production at
the expense of supposedly biosecure intensive factory farming units, is not
going to make avian flu go away. Intensive factory-farmed production of poultry,
pigs and other (formerly wild) animals looks more likely to be another
intervention within complex political–economic–ecological systems that have
helped facilitate the involutions (rather than evolution) of avian flu viruses
into highly pathogenic new forms. Where the current concerns about zoonoses may
help – if fear and panic are not allowed to dominate our actions in the search
for the health and veterinary surveillance systems that are urgently needed in
modernizing regions of the world – is in focusing on the development of another
biopolitics: forms of biopower from below. What could these be? And how could
they somehow include nonhumans in more open and ethical ways in new political
practices?
Notes
1. Charles Elton, Exploring the Animal
World, Allen & Unwin, London, 1933. 2. FAO press release, ‘Free
as a Bird – or Under Surveillance? Plan for Global Wild Birds Tracking System’,
1/6/06, www.fao.org/ag/againfo/subjects/en/health/diseases-cards/special_avian.html.
3. FAO press release, 1 June 2006: ‘Wild Birds’ Role in HPAI Crisis
Confirmed. But Scientific Conference Fingers Poultry Business’. This press
release focuses on wild birds, despite the claim that scientists have pointed to
the intensive poultry business as being the ‘factory’ of HPAI.
4. Nikolas Rose, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’, Theory, Culture &
Society, vol. 18, no. 6, pp. 1–30. 5. S. Hinchliffe, ‘Viruses’, in S.
Harrison et al., eds, Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture,
Reaktion, London, 2004, p. 228. 6. Isabelle Delforge, Thailand: From
the Kitchen of the World to Food Sovereignty, Focus on the Global South,
September 2004, www.focusweb.org/content/view/499/;
Chanida Chayapate and Isabelle Delforge, The Politics of Bird Flu in Thailand,
Focus on the Global South, April 2004, www.focusweb.org/content/view/273/.
7. GRAIN, The Top-Down Global Response to Bird Flu, April 2006, www.grain.org/articles/?id=12.
8. GRAIN Briefing, Fowl Play: The Poultry Industry’s Central Role in
the Bird Flu Crisis, February 2006, www.grain.org/front/?id=84.
9. See Birdlife’s website, www.birdlife.org/action/science/species/avian_flu/.
10. GRAIN Briefing, Fowl Play, p. 8. 11. GRAIN also point
to how data collected by WHO-collaborating laboratories (many financed by the US
government) on avian flu outbreaks is often not made public. Instead, it seems
to be available to pharmaceuticals companies. See GRAIN, The Top-Down Response
to Bird Flu, p. 2. 12. Rose, ‘The Politics of Life Itself’.
13. Karen Barad, ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway: Realism and Social
Constructivism without Contradiction’, in L. Nelson and J. Nelson, eds,
Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1996, pp.
161–94. 14. Yvonne Baskin, A Plague of Rats and Rubbervines, Island
Press, Washington DC, 2002. 15. Sarah Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies:
Natures Cultures Spaces, Routledge, London, 2002.
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