Plague and Profit - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 41

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Plague and Profit
At the center of the meltdown in Asia's vast poultry industry is a 61-year-old multi-
billionaire called Dhanin Chearavanont. 163
Jasper Becker
All of today's tens of billions of highly engineered factory chickens are descended from red jungle fowl
that still roam wild in forest regions of Thailand and Vietnam. Using mitochondrial DNA analysis, Japan-
ese researchers in 1994 demonstrated that chickens were domesticated in the area of present-day Thailand
more than 8,000 years ago. 164 The chicken, along with the pig and the buffalo, subsequently became the
basis of agrarian culture throughout Southeast Asia. Chickens are likewise the bottom line of Asia's largest
and most powerful agricultural-export conglomerate, Bangkok-based Charoen Pokphand. CP, as it is uni-
versally known, figures centrally in the story of H5N1's terrifying return in the winter of 2003-4 and the
unprecedented HPAI epidemic that threatens to become a global human and ecological cataclysm.
Founded by the immigrant Chia brothers from Guangdong, CP was a rice-seed distributor in Bangkok's
Chinatown until Chia Ek Chow, the youngest of four sons, took over the business in 1964. In the face
of growing intolerance toward the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia, he changed his name to
Dhanin Chearavanont and reoriented the company to chicken breeding and broiler farming. Impressed by
the success of U.S. companies in transforming poultry raising into a streamlined industrial process more
closely resembling chemical manufacture than traditional agriculture, Chearavanont formed two successive
strategic partnerships with American companies and quickly became Asia's leading apostle of Tyson-style
intensive farming and vertical integration. In 1973 Chearavanont opened Thailand's first modern poultry
slaughterhouse and began exporting to Japan. CP's major competitors, the Bangkok Livestock Trading
Company and Saha Farms, were forced to keep pace with Chearavanont's innovations, which included or-
ganizing networks of contract farms and building modern export processing plants.
By the mid-1990s, Thailand (which had adopted CP's corporate slogan, “Kitchen of the World,”) had
the most corporatized livestock industry in Asia. CP and a handful of other vertically-integrated exporters
controlled 80 percent of production, with chicken farming concentrated in a dense, polluted belt 60 to 150
kilometers outside Bangkok. 165 With 100,000 employees across Asia, CP boasts that its agro-industrial
empire is “fully integrated horizontally and vertically. Operations take in animal feed production, breeders,
farming systems, meat processing, food production and its very successful value-added products.” CP also
has promoted the spectacular rise of Western-style fast foods in Asia through the sourcing, or in the case of
China, the direct ownership of myriad Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. 166
For Chearavanont and other “integrators,” economies of scale in a booming export environment have
produced fabulous profits, but for CP's 10,000 contract farmers, as well as for hundreds of thousands of
backyard poultry producers, the situation is radically different. As journalist Isabelle Delforge points out:
“With contract farming, large companies control the whole production process: they lend money to the