Speech at Pandemic Action, London School of Economics

3 November 2006 - I’m very grateful to Pandemic Action for organising this very timely meeting, and for inviting me to speak.

I’m going to talk about the third P of the title, Poultry. And I want to outline some of the very real concerns that I have, which are shared by an increasing number of experts who know a lot more about poultry viruses than I do, that current government and indeed international agency thinking and assumptions about the cause and transmission of avian flu could be fundamentally flawed.

And I would acknowledge at the outset the debt that I owe to experts at the RSPB and at the NGO GRAIN, from whose scientific work many of my own conclusions have been drawn.

But first I want you to cast your minds back to early April this year, when you might recall that the newspapers were full of the stories of the Cellardyke swan which was found in Scotland , and which tested positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

For a few days, the nation was gripped in horror, fully believing that if we didn’t get every last chicken, hen and budgie indoors, then the virus could mutate into a human flu pandemic, and any minute death could visited on any one of us.

Our TV screens were full of reminders of the outbreaks which have already occurred in other parts of the world, with blanket coverage of men in white suits and masks chasing chickens round the farmyards of poor, rural villages in Asia or Africa, and bundling them into plastic bags ready for destruction.

The government’s own Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor David King, struck terror into the hearts of many farmers when he went on air to say that the days of organic and free-range poultry could be numbered. Everywhere the message was the same: wild birds, free-range and backyard poultry are the problem.

The official view is that H5N1 has evolved through the interaction of outdoor free-range and backyard flocks with wild birds, which then act as a vector for the strain by spreading it as they migrate.

But while this message is doubtless music to the ears of the intensive poultry producers, who would have been delighted that, for once, it isn’t the terrible conditions in their own intensive farms which are under the spotlight, there is growing evidence that this “official” view is at best mistaken, and at worst, the result of deliberate misinformation by the giants of the global poultry industry.  

1. Evolution of LPAI to HPAI - And so the case that I want to make tonight is that the virus is spread not just by the movement of wild birds, but also by the systematic air miles notched up by live poultry and poultry products.

So what are the grounds for this view?

Well, first, bird flu is endemic in wild birds in much of the world - and always has been - without leaping the species barrier and causing people any harm. Highly pathogenic strains are very rare in wild birds. One (H5N3) was first detected in South Africa more than 40 years ago, but it wasn’t until 1997 that the current highly pathogenic strain of H5N1, capable of infecting people, emerged.

No bird species has been shown to survive and sustain and spread the virus. Instead, the vast majority of wild birds confirmed to have been infected with H5N1 were dead. When a low pathogenic avian flu infects highly susceptible poultry species such as chickens and turkeys, only mild symptoms are induced in general.

However, in conditions where there are several cycles of infection, a series of mutations can occur resulting in a highly pathogenic form. Thus, according to research from bird conservation organisations, the highly pathogenic strains of bird flu develop in poultry, most likely in poultry exposed to milder strains that live naturally in wild bird populations.

Within crowded chicken factory farms, the mild virus evolves rapidly towards more dangerous and highly transmissible forms, capable of jumping species and spreading back into wild birds, which are defenceless against the new strain.

In this sense, H5N1 is a poultry virus killing wild bird, not the other way round. And indeed, indoor poultry farms provide the perfect conditions for such an evolution: they are warm, crowded, nutrient-rich environments, heavy with "viral load".

Significantly, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) itself notes that “Outbreaks of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza originating from low pathogenic viruses carried from wild birds, have occurred relatively frequently in domestic poultry in the last decade.”

And indeed an FAO table lists 28 highly pathogenic avian flu outbreaks from 1959 to 2004, with 17 of these occurring from 1994 to 2004 inclusive, and ALL of them were first recorded in poultry.

While it is true that traditional backyard chicken flocks provide many opportunities for infection to be spread between poultry and wild birds, it’s the huge chicken factories with up to 50,000 birds per 2-story structure that maximise the accumulation of viral load and subsequent drift.

Indeed, disease ecologists believe that “a high density of smallholders surrounding intensive or industrial units” creates “a particularly risky situation”.

And there are a surprising number of 2-way links between the backyard and intensive poultry sectors through inputs like day-old chicks and feed, markets and veterinary services. The FAO has admitted that the poultry trade spread H5N1 within Turkey, and highlighted the common practice of commercial poultry farms selling huge quantities of low-value birds to poor farmers.

The highly pathogenic bird flu is thus provided with the opportunity to pass from the industrial sector into the small-scale backyard sector. As Professor Mike Davis succinctly puts it, “In an epidemiological sense, the outdoor flocks are the fuse, and the dense factory populations, the explosive charge.” 

2. Trade routes, not migratory bird routes - Further evidence comes to light when we realise that, significantly, the spread of H5N1 has followed human trade routes, not migratory bird routes, according to a growing number of experts.

The respected medical journal The Lancet , for example, reports that " the geographic spread of the disease does not correlate with migratory routes and seasons. The pattern of outbreaks follows major road and rail routes, not flyways ."

It seems increasingly likely, then, that we are unwittingly facilitating the spread of H5N1 around the world by creating a perfect vector: the international trade in live poultry products. We certainly trade a lot of poultry products, both live birds, day old chicks and hatching eggs, and their "waste" - the fecal matter and feathers processed and sold on as fish farm fertiliser or animal feed, both within and beyond the EU.

In Eastern Europe , for example, huge numbers of live chickens are imported. According to official FAO figures for 2004, Romania alone accounted for over 16 million live birds, Russia and Ukraine for almost 12 million each, and Turkey for nearly 2 million. Much of this trade takes the form of yet another bizarre great food swap, with millions of live birds passing each other as countries trade back and forth between themselves.

Britain exports almost 10 million kg of poultry and eggs to Ireland every year, for example - and in the same year we import some 6.5 million. We "swap" 1.1 million kg of live birds for 1.9 million kg from France .

And we don’t confine the bizarre trade to EU countries: until a recent ban was imposed in response to the latest human deaths from bird flu, EU imports of poultry products from Brazil and Thailand were significant and rising. And though the relatively small number of cases and lack of information mean that no links have been established in the EU (yet), the evidence from Cambodia , Nigeria and China is that new outbreaks of bird flu have coincided with the import of live poultry products, rather than the arrival of wild birds .

Of course wild birds play a role in spreading the virus: as they come into contact with poultry, some species pass on the milder, endemic form, of the virus - and after it has mutated into its highly pathogenic form they catch it back and spread it to other nearby flocks.

But, as the NGO Bird Life International put it, wild birds are primarily victims rather then vectors of H5N1. 

3. Factory Farms are viral farms - So the case I’m making is that the spread of industrialised chicken production and the growth of global and regional trade networks have created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

Let me say a few more words about the global trade in poultry feed, another factor in the spread of avian flu, and one which is dominated by the poultry giants.

One of the standard ingredients in industrial chicken feed, and most industrial animal feed, is so-called “poultry litter” – in other words, faecal matter, feathers, bedding etc. Chicken meat, under the label “animal by-product meal”, also goes into industrial chicken feed. Equally alarming, and insufficiently researched, are the effects of the widespread practice of using poultry manure (chicken, duck, and other poultry faces) in agriculture and aquaculture as fertiliser, and in untreated form as food for pigs and fish.

Birds infected with the H5N1 virus excrete virus particles in their faeces, where it can survive for up to 35 days. So the practice of putting untreated faeces from infected birds into fish ponds and on to fields provides a potential new source of infection. This was recognised as early as 1988, yet there has been very little investigation into the risks of this practice for spreading influenza viruses.

Finally, just to give you an idea of the scale of the growth of the poultry industry in Asia , which has been the “epicentre” of the pandemic, let me quickly give you a few figures.

In Thailand , Indonesia and Vietnam , poultry production has soured 8-fold in 20 years. China, too, has seen poultry production rise, trebling to 9 million tons a year, with most growth accounted for by new intensive farms. Guangdong province, one of the 3 largest poultry producers, is now home to more than 700 million chickens.

This extraordinary concentration of poultry is cheek by jowl with high human population densities and large numbers of pigs and wild birds. Battery chickens are sometimes even kept directly above pig pens, depositing their waste right into the pigs’ food troughs – a fact of considerable concern, since some believe that pigs could act as “mixing vessels’ for avian strains, and thus play a key role in any mutation of the virus.

The trade in poultry and poultry products isn’t, unfortunately, limited to legal international trade routes. An increasing amount of illegal importation goes on right across the world.

For example, although the Vietnamese Prime Minister has issued a ban on the import and transportation of poultry from other countries in order to control the spread of bird flu, smugglers have managed to set up an elaborate system to get chickens from China across the border unchecked.

Europe is also experiencing increased food smuggling from China. Last October, Italian customs police confiscated 3000 chickens, 36,000 duck eggs and 260 frozen ducks illegally imported from China. This huge haul of poultry and other foodstuffs was intercepted at the northern Italian port of Genoa . The month before, 5 tonnes of meat, including poultry, was seized in Florence and Livorno, both in Tuscany , during spot checks on Chinese shops and warehouses. Around the same time in Northern Ireland , an illegal consignment of chicken shipped from China was intercepted, which led to raids on a meat wholesaler where the authorities found evidence of other illegally relabelled meat.

Of course, such interceptions leave open the question of how much is still getting through undetected? And the only way such a question can begin to be answered will be through a massive increase in surveillance and border controls.

Clearly we need more research in order to understand better what role the trade in industrially produced poultry has in the spread of the virus. But in the meantime we must adopt a precautionary approach based on relocalising the poultry sector, stopping the great poultry swap and introducing transitional measures to make sure that farmers and those in the developing world don’t suffer as a result. 

4. Impact on farmers in the South - And right now, it is precisely small producers in poorer countries who are suffering from a completely misguided response to outbreaks of avian flu . International agencies like the FAO must stop supporting an export-oriented corporate model of poultry production that threatens to ruin small farmers across the developing world.

Their approach is summed up by Louise Fresco, Assistant Director-General of the FAO, who recently said "the backyard chicken is the big problem and the fight against bird flu must be waged in the backyard of the world’s poor." An increasing body of research suggests that this analysis could not be more wrong, nor more damaging for small-scale producers.

As Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, an NGO working to protect biological diversity explains: " Backyard farming is not an idle pastime for landowners. It is the crux of food security and farming income for hundreds of millions of rural poor in Asia and elsewhere, providing a third of the protein intake for the average rural household. Nearly all rural households in Asia keep at least a few chickens for meat, eggs and even fertiliser, and they are often the only livestock that poor farmers can afford. The birds are thus critical to their diversified farming methods, just as the genetic diversity of poultry on small farms is critical to the long-term survival of poultry farming in general."

In other words, instead of putting the blame for the spread of avian flu on backyard poultry-keepers and migratory birds, international agencies should urgently recognise that diverse small-scale poultry farming is part of the solution, not the problem.

In the short term, the priority must be to prevent the disease spreading to poultry farms by culling any domestic flocks that become infected and vaccinating those nearby.

But in the longer term, we must seek to close the international trade in wild birds and re-localise our poultry industry - a move that would admittedly require a fundamental revision of the WTO and EU rules - but that’s exactly where I think all of this analysis is leading.  

5. Towards a relocalisation of our food systems - And that process of relocalisation won’t happen by wishful thinking. It needs serious political support and significant policy changes.

The bottom line is that the politics of food production are at least as important to the future of the world as the politics of war or the politics of business – and that we ignore that at our peril Some of the changes we need are already very clear: Internalising the environmental costs of our current food system, ensuring - in the words of Lester Brown – that “prices tell the ecological truth”.

Nowhere is this more important than internalising the environmental costs of transport, since it is artificially cheap fuel which enables so much unnecessary international trade in food (I’m reminded of World Bank economist turned ecologist Herman Daly, who was commenting on vast exchanges of precisely the same food products between the same countries – biscuits and cookies – and commented - wouldn’t it be easier simply to exchange recipes).

- New competition laws to restrict the concentration and market power of the major food corporations and retailers, and to guarantee fair prices to farmers

- An end to export subsidies which leads to dumping cheap food in developing country markets.           

- Provision of dedicated funds for tackling avian flu to some of the world’s poorest countries to reduce people’s vulnerability to the spread of the disease.

- An immediate ban on the export of live animals

- A move away from the traditional “biosecurity” approach of building more and more expensive and complex systems for keeping flu out of factory farms that are increasingly susceptible to the disease and prone to spreading it) towards methods for managing disease based on diverse, healthy production systems.

- Lower stocking densities, and a switch to a system of organic farming instead of industrialised farming, aided by grants and compensation to ensure as rapid a transition as possible away from factory farming.

- Changes to the rules of the Common Agricultural Policy, the EU’s Single Market, and to the World Trade Organisation, so that governments can make increased self-reliance – rather than free-market reliance – a central aim of national and local food economies.

This is admittedly a very ambitious agenda – but as the evidence increases that our current industrialised food system is not only bad for small farmers, for animals and for the environment, but could also be increasing the chances of a deadly avian flu pandemic among us all – we must hope that it will spur greater political will to make action on these issues a priority. The costs of such a transition should be weighed up against the potential cost of an avian flu epidemic.

Higher prices will require some compensation for consumers on lower incomes, perhaps through the benefits system. But it is high time that it was generally recognised that in the case of all factory farming, cheap is very, very nasty, and in the case of poultry, it could one day prove fatal to millions of us.               

ENDS