Alan Sipress - The Fatal Strain

To a casual visitor, the agricultural changes that have accompanied this era of remarkable growth may not be as visible as the city lights. But as economist Christopher Delgado from the International Food Policy Research Institute and his fellow authors wrote, “The demand-driven Livestock Revolution is one of the largest structural shifts ever to affect food markets in developing countries… .” The revolution is not limited to East Asia. It has been manifest across much of the developing world as rising incomes, rapid population growth, and the broader diet that comes with urbanization combine to stoke demand for animal protein. During the two decades that followed 1980, people in developing countries doubled the average amount of meat they ate. By 1995 the volume of meat produced in developing countries for the first time surpassed that in developed ones.

But this is mostly because of China and Southeast Asia. China alone has accounted for more than half the developing world’s total increase in meat output. A large majority of that has been poultry products and pork, with the production of chicken meat growing fastest. The radical expansion of flocks that began in the 1970s and 1980s continued into the following decades, barely pausing for the East Asian financial crisis. From 1990 through 2005, China’s production of chicken nearly quadrupled, as did that of duck and goose. The amount of pork more than doubled.

Southeast Asia’s record ranks second only to that of China. During the same fifteen-year period, Indonesia more than tripled its production of chicken meat, Vietnam and Malaysia more than doubled theirs, and Thailand, which had registered a breathtaking growth of 10 percent annually in earlier decades, saw its output of chicken slow, increasing a mere 60 percent over this period. Malaysia more than doubled its output of duck and goose while Vietnam more than tripled its pork. To get a sense of the sweep of this revolution, consider the case of the Indonesian egg. In 1970, just as Indonesia’s long-slumbering economy was preparing to embark on a generation of sustained growth, the government statistics agency reported that the annual production of eggs was 59,000 tons. Three decades later, the total was 783,000 tons—a thirteenfold increase.

This transformation has literally put a chicken in every middle-class pot. Many among the urban poor have also secured better diets as meat prices dropped. (Consumers, fortunately, did not face the kind of inflated prices for grain and vegetables due to rising demand for animal feed that some economists had predicted.) But across vast swaths of rural Asia, the record is more mixed. Some small-time farmers have proven unable to compete with new industrial producers and lost their livelihoods. Others, by contrast, have found that livestock, one of the few sectors they could afford to enter, was their ticket out of poverty. For Prathum, the revolution was a bonanza—until the virus discovered the same thing.

Prathum’s wife said the livestock officers stormed into Banglane like marauding communists. “They came by the hundreds in trucks, bringing soldiers and prisoners to kill the chickens. We argued for some time. But they weren’t listening to us,” Samrouy Buaklee recounted. She raised her leathery hands in exasperation and then wiped her deep brown eyes with the checkered scarf around her neck. “It broke my heart. I felt that the chickens were like my children.”

Samrouy had retreated in tears to the house deep in the rice paddies and remained sequestered there, alone, for two days. When she returned, she noticed the silence. It’s always the silence. Over and over, farmers who lost their flocks told me it was the absence of the cackling and cooing they found hardest to bear. The village had gone dark. Farmhouse lights that once flickered on in predawn hours as villagers awoke to tend their flocks remained extinguished. The roads were abandoned. “No one walked around,” her husband recalled. “Everybody sat at home and nobody talked. With the chickens gone, we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.”

After more than half a year, Prathum decided to restock, rebuilding his flock though not his confidence. When I met him, his brown eyes had grown heavy, and bags hung low on broad, sunbaked cheeks. “Even if we’re afraid of the disease returning, what can we do? Nothing. We can’t run away,” he said softly. “It’s my job. If I don’t do chicken farming, what else can I do?”

Prathum left the question hanging. He rose from the wood crate where he’d been resting in the barn and emptied a sack of chicken feed into a wheelbarrow. Emerging into the morning light, he pushed it down a short concrete causeway jutting into the fishpond and trudged past a pair of spirit houses, those colorful, birdhouse-size shrines on pedestals he had once hoped would keep the local spirits content. At the end of the causeway, three open-sided chicken sheds on stilts extended across the green water. Prathum started with one on the left, the hum from hundreds of excited hens rising to greet him. He stepped nimbly along the aging wood planks that ran between the cages, his meaty hands shoveling grain from a bucket into the long feeding trays. The plaid shirt hanging from his stocky frame was soiled and his bare feet were caked with dirt. The planks were stained with droppings, the air rank with a cocktail of feathers, feed, and feces.

As a concession to new government rules, Prathum had draped fishnet along the sides of the two sheds. This was meant to keep out wildfowl, which could be carrying bird flu. But mice had already gnawed holes in the netting, and a few crows and swallows were darting about under the corrugated metal roofs. That was the extent of Prathum’s effort to prevent contamination and stem another outbreak.

The most important line of defense against a human pandemic is not at the hospital or vaccine lab but at the farmyard gate. A single gram of bird feces can contain up to 10 billion virus particles. A speck on a heel or a pant leg or a bucket or a tire can introduce an infection capable of decimating a whole flock.

Health officials have long made clear how to prevent epidemic contagion from spreading among flocks or from farm to market and on to other farms. The first principle is to severely restrict access to poultry flocks. This means keeping chicken sheds off-limits to most visitors. Those raising birds of their own must be categorically banned. The second is strict hygiene. Anyone entering a shed should wash his hands and don sanitized shoes. Poultry workers should change into clean, disinfected clothes and take them off when they leave so they can be washed. Feeding pans and cages should be cleansed daily. Equipment, such as pallets and egg crates, are easily contaminated and should never be shared among farms. Vehicles that have visited other farms could inadvertently be carrying the seeds of disaster and should be kept at a distance. Other animals must be barred from the chicken sheds.

When Prathum’s black dachshund trotted after him into the henhouse and then curled up for a nap beneath the cages, I knew there was trouble.

Nirundorn Aungtragoolsuk, a director of disease control in Thailand’s livestock department, later confirmed as much. He told me the government had adopted strict regulations, including a requirement that poultry workers shower with disinfectant before entering a farm and vehicles be sprayed with disinfectant before arriving on premises, but these applied solely to the large, export-oriented operations. The regulations were not meant for most farms, like Prathum’s. “They have done it their way for a long time and we cannot change it overnight,” Nirundorn said.

It took Prathum half an hour to finish feeding the hens in the three sheds. He returned to the barn, sweat glistening under his thinning hair, and hopped on his Honda motorbike. With a sack of feed in the sidecar, he buzzed up his gravel driveway, across the road, and down a dirt track that paralleled a canal on the far side. His other dog, a white crossbreed, had joined the dachshund, and now the pair gave chase, scampering behind Prathum until he reached two more chicken sheds suspended above another pond. As he resumed his feeding rounds, the dogs followed him inside.