Plague and Profit - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 42

farmers, they sell them chicks, feed and medicine, and they have the right to buy the whole production.
But usually the company is not committed to buy the chickens if the demand is low. Contract farmers bear
all the risks related to production and become extremely dependent on demand from the world market.
They become factory workers in their own field.” Companies like CP, an organic farmer told Delforge,
“destroy small farmers with false promises.” 167 For the majority of Thai farmers, the Livestock Revolu-
tion has meant soaring indebtedness, loss of independence, and the continued migration of their daughters
to Bangkok's sweatshops and brothels.
While Thailand's chickens (and later, pigs and prawns) have made Chearavanont a billionaire and,
according to business magazines, one of the twenty most powerful businessmen in Asia, his central am-
bition has always been to honor his father's dream of bringing the Livestock Revolution—in the form of
large-scale agro-industrial capitalism—back to China. Thanks to astute politicking and powerful Guang-
dong connections, CP was literally the first multinational investor to step foot inside Deng Xiaoping's
“Open Door” in 1979 (CP's foreign business license in Shenzhen was number 001). CP, by itself or in
alliances with other capital groups, has subsequently invested billions in the PRC. In addition to holding a
diversified portfolio of hotels, shopping malls, fast-food franchises (including Kentucky Fried Chicken),
telecommunications, and restaurants, it has built more than one hundred feed mills and poultry-processing
plants throughout China in an attempt to forestall both foreign competitors (Tyson Foods, above all) and
local upstarts in the world's most dynamic market for chicken products. 168 (During the 1990s, as global
poultry output surpassed that of beef, China doubled its share of total world consumption—from less than
8 percent to more than 17 percent—and displaced the United States as the largest consumer.) 169
CP's explosive growth in Thailand and China, as well as its expanding operations in eighteen other
countries, has required massive amounts of political grease. In 1996, for example, Chearavanont made
an illegal $250,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee in the United States which back-
fired, causing bad publicity for both CP and the Clinton administration when fundraiser John Huang was
indicted. The right-wing American Spectator pointed to CP's alliance with a leading Chinese weapon
maker and implied that it was one of the “front companies for communist China” that had been “buying
up (and spying on) the United States.” But the magazine neglected to mention that a few months earli-
er, Neil Bush, George W.'s brother, had formed a joint venture company with Chearavanont. 170 Indeed,
as Dan Moldea and David Corn would later detail in the Nation, both the Bush family and the Carlyle
Group—the private investment fund used by the family and other leading Republicans to turn insider
access into gold—have long-standing and intimate business relations with CP. Former president George
H.W. Bush, for example, was reportedly paid $250,000 by CP to lobby Asian and American leaders on its
behalf. 171
Chearavanont also acquired equity in the Thai state in 2001 with the appointment of his son-
in-law Wattana Muangsuk as Deputy Commerce Minister. The cell-phone billionaire Thaksin Sh-
inawatra—Siam's answer to Italy's Silvio Berlusconi—won the presidency that year with a lurid populist
campaign. Thaksin's political party is called Thai Rak Thai, or “Thai Loves Thai,” and he promised
debt relief, cheap medical care, and a tough crack-down on drug dealers (2,500 of whom, indeed, were
promptly murdered by police death squads). In reality, explains economist Pasuk Phongpaichit, “His as-
cendency signifies a new consolation of big business and politics. Whereas the business people who have
dominated Thai politics since parliament became significant in the 1980s used to be mostly provincial
figures of only moderate wealth, Thaksin's government is controlled by the biggest Bangkok business
groups to have survived the 1997 crisis.” 172 On the eve of the plague, in other words, Thailand was gov-
erned by a crony coalition of the telecommunications and livestock industries.
The return of avian influenza was shrouded in rumor, denial, and conspiracy during the fall of 2003.
The epidemic actually began much earlier (Indonesia later conceded that H5N1 had been detected in