Poultry Industry and Bird Flu

GRAIN, an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge, has just come out with a report that places primary responsibility for spreading H5N1 avian influenza on the international poultry industry.

Here is the article abstract:
Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and -- while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances -- its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels. Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out. To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world. This paper presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry.

This report is also highly critical of official governmental and UN responses to bird flu outbreaks and containment measures. This may be one of the more important bird flu stories to come out this year--emphasizing the multiple problems with producing and shipping potentially H5N1 carrying factory-bred poultry, and even poultry feed that contains rendered chicken parts, across the globe.

Once again, when you scratch H5N1 beneath the surface, what you find instead of wild birds spreading the disease, is an enormous network of international trade, and poor biosecurity, with people, wild birds, and small-scale poultry operations as the primary victims.