The Triangle of Doom - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 35

Like the Green Revolution before it, the Livestock Revolution has favored corporate producers rather
than peasants and family farmers. As a recent UN report emphasizes, “large-scale, industrial production
accounts already for roughly 80 percent of the total production increase in livestock products in Asia since
1990. In the future, most production, especially of pigs and poultry, is expected not to come from tradi-
tional production systems that have characterized the region for centuries, but from industrial, large-scale
production.” 136
The world icon of industrialized poultry and livestock production is giant Tyson Foods, which, like
Wal-Mart, grew up in hardscrabble Arkansas. Tyson, which kills 2.2 billion chickens annually, has be-
come globally synonymous with scaled-up, vertically coordinated production; exploitation of contract
growers; visceral antiunionism; rampant industrial injury; downstream environmental dumping; and polit-
ical corruption. The global dominance of behemoths like Tyson has forced local farmers to either in-
tegrate with large-scale chicken- and pork-processing firms or perish. “These firms,” write Donald Stull
and Michael Broadway, “owned not only the broilers they supplied to contract growers, but the eggs that
hatched the birds, the feed that went into them, and the plants that processed and then sold them to grocery
stores.” 137 Whether in the Ozarks, Holland, or Thailand, entire farming districts have been converted to
the warehousing of poultry, with farmers serving as little more than chicken custodians. At the same time,
livestock has been disintegrated from agriculture; thus creating a new geography where grain and feed
production is spatially separate from the raising of chickens and pigs. 138
The result has been extraordinary population concentrations of poultry. A crucial requirement of the
modern chicken industry, for example, is “production density,” the compact location of broiler farms
around a large processing plant. 139 As a result, there are now regions in North America, Brazil, western
Europe, and South Asia with chicken populations in the hundreds of millions—in western Arkansas and