Can't speak for anywhere but Atlanta, but chicken sales haven't slowed much at
all. I doubt that too many in the Black community have even noticed the issue.
Amy Harlib <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The price of globalization - corporate kleptocracy running rampant and
creating unintended consequences! The media ought to be jumping on this
story but of course, the same corporatists that control factory farms,
control the mainstream media!
The price of cheap chicken is bird flu
By Wendy Orent, WENDY ORENT is the author of "Plague: The Mysterious Past
and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease."
March 12, 2006 LATimes.com
CHICKEN HAS never been cheaper. A whole one can be bought for little more
than the price of a Starbucks cup of coffee. But the industrial farming
methods that make ever-cheaper chicken possible may also have created the
lethal strain of bird flu virus, H5N1, that threatens to set off a global
pandemic.
According to Earl Brown, a University of Ottawa flu virologist, lethal bird
flu is entirely man-made, first evolving in commercially produced poultry in
Italy in 1878. The highly pathogenic H5N1 is descended from a strain that
first appeared in Scotland in 1959.
People have been living with backyard flocks of poultry since the dawn of
civilization. But it wasn't until poultry production became modernized, and
birds were raised in much larger numbers and concentrations, that a virulent
bird flu evolved. When birds are packed close together, any brakes on
virulence are off. Birds struck with a fatal illness can still easily pass
the disease to others, through direct contact or through fecal matter, and
lethal strains can evolve. Somehow, the virus that arose in Scotland found
its way to China, where, as H5N1, it has been raging for more than a decade.
Industrial poultry-raising moved from the West to Asia in the last few
decades and has begun to supplant backyard flocks there. According to a
recent report by Grain, an international nongovernmental organization,
chicken production in Southeast Asia has jumped eightfold in 30 years to
about 2.7 million tons. The Chinese annually produce about 10 million tons
of chickens. Some of China's factory farms raise 5 million birds at a time.
Charoen Pokphand Group, a huge Thai enterprise that owns a large chunk of
poultry production throughout Thailand and China as well as in Indonesia,
Cambodia, Vietnam and Turkey, exported about 270 million chickens in 2003
alone.
Since then, the C.P. Group, which styles itself as the "Kitchen of the
World," has suffered enormous losses from bird flu. According to bird-flu
expert Gary Butcher of the University of Florida, the company has made a
conscientious effort to clean up. But the damage has been done.
Virulent bird flu has left the factories and moved into the farmyards of the
poor, where it has had devastating effects. Poultry may represent a family's
greatest wealth. The birds are often not eaten until they die of old age or
illness. The cost of the virus to people who have raised birds for months or
years is incalculable and the compensation risible: In Thailand, farmers
have been offered one-third of their birds' value since the outbreak of bird
flu.
Sometimes farmers who don't want to lose their investments illicitly trade
their birds across borders. In Nigeria, virus-infected chickens threatened
with culling are sold by the poor to even poorer people, who see nothing
unusual in eating a sick or dead bird. So the birds â and the bird flu
virus â slip away to other villages and other countries.
The Southeast Asian country without rampant bird flu is Laos, where 90% of
poultry production is still in peasant hands, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. About 45 small outbreaks in or near commercial
farms from January to March 2004 were quickly stamped out by culling birds
from contaminated farms.
Some researchers still blame migratory birds for the relentless spread of
the bird flu virus. But Martin Williams, a conservationist and bird expert
in Hong Kong, contends that wild birds are more often victims than carriers.
Last spring, for instance, about 5,000 wild birds died at Qinghai Lake in
western China, probably from exposure to disease at commercial poultry farms
in the region, according to Grain. The virus now in Turkey and Nigeria is
essentially identical to the Qinghai strain.
Richard Thomas of Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation
organizations, and others dispute the idea that wild birds carried the flu
virus from Qinghai to Russia and beyond. They point out that the disease
spread from Qinghai to southern Siberia during the summer months when birds
do not migrate, and that it moved east to west along railway lines, roads
and international boundaries â not along migratory flyways.
What evidence there is for migratory birds as H5N1 carriers is contained in
a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers examined 13,115 wild birds and found asymptomatic bird flu in
six ducks from China. Analysis showed that these ducks had been exposed
earlier to less virulent strains of H5 and thus were partly immunized before
they were infected with H5N1. On this slender basis, coupled with the fact
that some domestic ducks infected for experimental purposes don't get sick,
the study's authors contend that the findings "demonstrate that H5N1 viruses
can be transmitted over long distances by migratory birds."
Even so, the researchers conceded that the global poultry trade, much of
which is illicit, plays a far larger role in spreading the virus. The
Nigerian government traced its outbreak to the illegal importation of
day-old chicks. Illegal trading in fighting cocks brought the virus from
Thailand to Malaysia in fall 2005. And it is probable that H5N1 first spread
from Qinghai to Russia and Kazakhstan last summer through the sale of
contaminated poultry.
But an increasingly hysterical world targets migratory birds. In early
February, a flock of geese, too cold and tired to fly, rested on the frozen
waters of the Danube Delta in Romania. A group of 15 men set upon them,
tossed some into the air, tore off others' heads and used still-living birds
as soccer balls. They said they did this because they feared the bird flu
would enter their village through the geese. Many conservationists worry
that what happened in Romania is a foreshadowing of the mass destruction of
wild birds.
Meanwhile, deadly H5N1 is washing up on the shores of Europe. Brown says the
commercial poultry industry, which caused the catastrophe in the first
place, stands to benefit most. The conglomerates will more and more dominate
the poultry-rearing business. Some experts insist that will be better for
us. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota, for
instance, contends that the "single greatest risk to the amplification of
the H5N1 virus, should it arrive in the U.S. through migratory birds, will
be in free-range birds ⦠often sold as a healthier food, which is a great
ruse on the American public."
The truly great ruse is that industrial poultry farms are the best way to
produce chickens â that Perdue Farms and Tyson Foods and Charoen Pokphand
are keeping the world safe from backyard poultry and migratory birds. But
what's going to be on our tables isn't the biggest problem. The real tragedy
is what's happened in Asia to people who can't afford cheap, industrial
chicken. And the real victims of industrially produced, lethal H5N1 have
been wild birds, an ancient way of life and the poor of the Earth, for whom
a backyard flock has always represented a measure of autonomy and a bulwark
against starvation.
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