Plague and Profit - The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu - page 45

ministration, grateful for Thaksin's support of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, avoided public
criticism of the cover-up.
CP's stock immediately fell by an eighth, and the ground shook. (“In Thailand,” writes Isabelle
Delforge, “when CP sneezes, the whole business community catches cold—or flu.”) 189 Dhanin Cheara-
vanont, however, was surprisingly upbeat and urged Thais to “turn the crisis into opportunity.” Another
CP executive promised that “changes resulting from the crisis would benefit the Thai chicken industry in
the long term as well as help it recover from the current difficulties.” The plague, in other words, might
rationalize poultry production. But opportunities and benefits for whom? The government quickly un-
veiled a sweeping plan to complete the modernization of the Thai poultry industry by culling small-scale,
open-air flocks and requiring their operators to build new industrial poultry houses; only those farmers
who fully complied with the plan would be eligible for compensation for their dead chickens.
Thailand's agrarian populists, including senator and agricultural economist Chirmsak Pinthong,
promptly denounced the government's plan as another cunning move by Chearavanont to force the small
operators into the extinction or turn them into serfs of CP. * “The government is regulating small chicken
raisers in such a way that it benefits the big conglomerates.” 190 Small holders complained that govern-
ment compensation for their dead chickens was only a fraction of what CP and others were charging them
to restock their flocks. There was also evidence that the poultry cull was being used to strengthen the
corporations. “When the avian flu was detected,” writes Delforge and a Thai colleague, “a red zone was
cleared around the farm and all the poultry in the zone were killed to prevent the spread of the disease.
However, some farmers reported dead chickens but no red zone was declared around their property. They
suspected the authorities of protecting neighboring industrial farms or owners of highly valuable fighting
cocks.” 191
He Changchui, FAO Assistant Director-General and Regional Representative for Asia and the Pacific,
indirectly criticized the giant producers by stressing the role of “high densities of humans and animals .
. . [in] creating new pathways for disease transmission through inappropriate waste disposal, direct con-
tact or through airborne transmission.” He urged a “substantial restructuring” of poultry production along
lines that favored the poor, protected the environment, and compensated the small producers affected
by the outbreak. 192 The Thaksin government, however, uncritically embraced Chearavanont's contention
that avian flu's spread was due to the small producers and their “backward” open-air chicken flocks. CP
claimed that its industrialized, enclosed farming system was virtually impregnable to viral outbreaks and
epidemics.
While it is true that Southeast Asia's traditional backyard chicken flocks offer myriad opportunities
for infectious interchange between different species of poultry and wild birds, the huge chicken factories
(50,000 birds per two-story structure) maximize the accumulation of viral load and subsequent antigenic
drift. Indeed, disease ecologists believe that “a high density of smallholders surrounding intensive or in-
dustrial units” creates “a particularly risky situation.” 193 In an epidemiological sense, the outdoor flocks
are the fuse, and the dense factory populations, the explosive charge. Moreover, as Delforge emphasizes
in one of her exemplary reports, CP's factory farms have themselves been identified as vectors of the
epidemic: “In Vietnam, the current chicken flu outbreak infected a large closed farm owned by CP.” As
Vietnam News reported on 4 February 2004, “The army has been mobilized to kill 117,000 birds on the
biggest farm in Ha Tay province, owned by the Thai Charoen Pokphand Company.” 194
Once the Thais had publicly acknowledged their outbreak, the other major deceivers—Indonesia and
China—were forced to play show-and-tell as well. The scandal of Indonesia's 2 February confession that
the government had been concealing knowledge of an H5N1 outbreak since late August was compounded
by Agriculture Minister Bungaran Saragih's extraordinary explanation that they had withheld information
because “we did not want to cause unnecessary losses through a hasty decision.” 195 The minister also as-