27.11.2005 *** GMO - Bird
Flu
By F. William Engdahl
Look to the giant ‘chicken jails’ or chicken factory farms around the world as a more likely source for emerging Bird Flu viruses, not to small peasant chicken farmers, and we might be closer to the truth.
Clouds can have ‘silver
linings’ the adage goes, and Bird Flu seems to be no exception. While much of
the world trembles in panic and fear over an as-yet-non-existent human-to-human
mutation of the Avian Flu or H5N1 virus, and while most worry what to do to
protect themselves and their families, certain people are doing quite nicely in
the situation.
Donald Rumsfeld and other
major stock holders of Gilead Sciences or Roche Inc., the marketers of the
much-hyped Tamiflu (see previous articles, ‘Is Tamiflu another Pentagon Hoax?
;‘Bird Flu: A Corporate Bonanza for the Biotech Industry’) are reaping nice
gains, as sales of the medication are booming thanks to promotion by the Bush
and Blair governments.
Agribusiness companies
stand to reap huge gains in the event that scientists at Cambridge University
and elsewhere are able to replace the entire world chicken population with
genetically-engineered chicks allegedly resistant to H5N1 virus.
Little-noticed
beneficiaries of the current Avian Flu scare, however, are the giant
agribusiness chicken producers based in the United States, who claim ‘their’
chickens are safe. Their sales are booming and all indications are that Avian
Flu, paradoxically, has come like a Godsend to their corporate balance sheets.
Are they also responsible for breeding unsanitary conditions and exporting the
product worldwide causing disease, illness and even deaths?
On October 23, 2005, Dr.
Margaret Chan, Representative of the WHO Director-General for Pandemic
Influenza, the key person responsible for global oversight of the threat from
the H5N1 strain of Bird Flu, told Newsweek magazine, ‘the risk to humans in
Europe, the risk to human health is very low in Europe.’
Chan came to her senior
post at WHO from Hong Kong, where she was responsible for the public health
response to the SARS epidemic in 2003-4. She told Newsweek, ‘our alert is at
Phase III, and that has not changed recently. Phase VI is the highest, when
there's a pandemic…We do not want to see complacency, but we also do not want
to see people getting alarmed. At this point, avian influenza is a bird
disease.’ 1
That statement coming from
the international public official most directly responsible, gives little
ground to justify the mood of panic and the hoarding of dubious medications
such as Tamiflu. Who else gains from the current panic over a potential human
Avian Flu pandemic?
At this point a close look
at the world poultry business is highly enlightening.
Curiously enough, it is not
the huge, unsanitary, overcrowded factory chicken farms of the global
agri-giants which are being scrutinized as a possible incubator or source of
H5N1 or other diseases. Rather, the target is the small chicken farmers in
especially Asia, with at most perhaps 10 to 20 chickens, who stand to lose
big-time in the current Bird Flu hysteria.
The major chicken factories
such as Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms, ConAgra Poultry are making a propaganda
campaign that, unlike in Asia where chickens are free to roam in the open, that
their chickens are ‘safer’ because they are raised in closed facilities. A
closer look inside those facilities is useful.
Over the past three
decades, American agriculture has been transformed so as to be almost
unrecognizable. It is no longer dominated by small, carefully-run family farms
producing some wheat, maybe corn, dairy and perhaps eggs and poultry fed and
raised in a free-running farm area.
Today, thanks to a project
launched in the late 1950’s by two Harvard Business School professors--Ray
Goldberg and John Davis--production of food has become a concentrated,
vertically integrated multinational business, which they named agribusiness.
The criterion is no longer human food safety or quality. It is corporate
profit. Nutrition has become a pure cost-benefit calculation of shareholder
value, just as trading in stocks in a car company might be.
The industrialization of
chicken-raising and slaughtering in the USA, which is known as ‘factory
farming’ is a process whose inner workings are unknown to most people. Better
it remained so some say. Were we to know, we likely would never again eat a
Chicken McNugget or a KFC chicken dinner, both of which are supplied, by the
way, by Tyson.
Today, five giant multinational
agribusiness companies dominate the production and processing of chicken meat
in the United States, and, as things seem to be going, especially were the
world to be looney enough to adopt genetically modified chickens supposedly
resistant to Avian Flu virus, these five companies are about to dominate world
chicken supply.
According to a trade
source, WATT Poultry USA, as of 2003 five companies held overwhelming
domination of the US poultry production, all of them vertically integrated. US
regulators and Congressmen seem to have forgotten the tough laws against
vertical integration in the meatpacking and poultry industry following
widespread scandals and the expose during the 1920’s, The Jungle, by Upton
Sinclair, exposing the health and human abuse inside the Chicago meatpacking
industry.
The five companies are
Tyson Foods, far the largest in the world; GoldKist Inc; Pilgrim’s Pride;
ConAgra Poultry; and Perdue Farms. Together, the five account for well over 370
million pounds per week of ready-to-cook chicken, some 56% of all ready-to-eat
poultry produced in the USA. That is a level of concentration far in excess of
anything in the 1920’s.
Alone, Tyson Foods
processes 155 million pounds of chicken a week, almost three times its nearest
rival, GoldKist. Tyson is big business, with over $26 billion a year in
revenue. During the latest Bird Flu scare, for the Quarter ending September 30,
Tyson Foods’ earnings rose an eye-popping 49%, and, despite a 10% fall in
chicken sales, its profit in chickens grew a robust 40%. The key, the company
said, was measures it took to ‘boost productivity.’ 2
Boosting productivity for
Tyson and the other chicken giants clearly means one thing: speedup of the
production line, further slashing labor costs, and reducing safety measures in
their slaughtering and packing plants.
The UN Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) released a report in 2004 on the economic impact to date of
Avian or Bird Flu.3 It noted that the main impact of the panic which has grown
globally since around 2003, has been economic loss, not human deaths. ‘The
impact of countries banning both Thai and Chinese poultry exports,’ the FAO
report noted, ‘are leading to higher international poultry prices and
increasing demand for poultry meat from other major suppliers, such as the
United States…’
Increasing Asian demand for
imported chicken products from the United States today, however, has a special
significance. It means three to four giant factory farm operations are opening
a potentially huge new market for chicken products in Asia.
Asia today is home to seven
billion chickens, fully 40% of the world total. US chicken giants like Tyson
Foods, ConAgra and Perdue Farms have literally been drooling at the prospect of
breaking into the vast market in Asia, Japan and China for several years. Bird
Flu is giving them that chance and more.
Japan imports some 70% of
all chicken its population consumes. The Bird Flu scare resulted in a Japanese
ban on chicken imports from Thailand and China. The benefactors have been USA
and Brazil chicken exporters according to the FAO. And that means, above all,
Tyson Foods, Perdue, ConAgra.
One of the better known
radio ads in the United States in recent years had the motto, ‘It takes a tough
man to make a tender chicken…’ It was the popular slogan of the late Frank
Perdue of Perdue Farms, one of the world’s top five giant chicken producers.
The ‘tough man’ part of Perdue Farms is accurate. The company, which boasts of
being fully integrated from ‘egg to supermarket meat case,’ had $2.8 billion in
sales in 2004 and pushes 48 million pounds of chicken parts on the world
consumer weekly, in 40 countries. Perdue, like all its chicken factory
colleagues, has been fined by the US Government for safety and health
violations in its chicken processing plants and for efforts to bust trade union
organizing in its plants.
Tyson Foods, based in Bill
Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, enjoyed intimate ties to the Clinton
Administration during the 1990’s. Some would say too intimate. It was Tyson
General Counsel, James Blair, who set up a sweetheart deal to get Hillary
Clinton an education in sophisticated and highly risky cattle futures, turning
her $1,000 investment into a quick $100,000 windfall. Soon after helping Hillary,
Tyson Foods found a friend in the new Clinton Secretary of Agriculture, Mike
Espy. A US Judge found that Tyson had arranged airplane rides, professional
football tickets and other gifts to Espy. Tyson agreed to pay a $6 million fine
for ‘attempting’ to bribe a Federal official.
Tyson is also adept at
taking over rivals. In 1997, after repeatedly failing in a takeover bid, Tyson
bought rival poultry producer Hudson Foods. And they bought it at a
steeply-discounted price.
Hudson Foods was suddenly
hit with an e coli bacteria scandal. US Government regulators descended on the
company, even sending in a so-called ‘SWAT team’ to shut down operations. Press
carried horror stories about the company. Within hours, the company's stock
value plummeted. Within weeks, rival Tyson Foods bought Hudson Foods. Tyson CEO
Don Tyson’s Arkansas friend Bill Clinton was President of the United States,
theoretically responsible for deployment of such operations as Federal Swat
Teams to shut down companies. Tyson Foods was able to buy Hudson Foods only
after the small company had been brought to its knees, at least in part through
a public health scare and some government brute force. No one ever proved that
Tyson and the Clinton Administration were in cahoots in the Hudson Foods e coli
scare, with its unprecedented Government raid. Yet no one ever proved the
opposite either. Tyson had swallowed another rival, anaconda-style.
Tyson Foods today has
re-branded itself and now boasts of being ‘the world’s largest protein
producer,’ a pitch designed to let it benefit from the current
‘high-protein/low carbohydrate’ Dr. Atkins diet fad. Benefit it has, as US
chicken consumption is up 24% since 1995. But that evidently isn’t enough for
the executives at Tyson Foods. They have their eyes on the vast China and Asian
market for chickens as we will later see. 4
The following is the
company’s own description of its activities from a 1998 filing, indicating the
process Tyson Foods uses to produce 155 million pounds a week of processed
chicken:
‘The Company's integrated
poultry processes include genetic research, breeding, hatching, rearing,
ingredient procurement, feed milling, veterinary and other technical services,
and related transportation and delivery services. The Company contracts with
independent growers to maintain the Company's flocks of breeder chicks which,
when grown, lay the eggs which the Company transfers to its hatcheries and
hatch into broiler chicks. Newly hatched broiler chicks are vaccinated and then
delivered to independent contract growers who care for and feed the broiler
chicks until they reach processing weight… the Company provides growers with
feed, vitamins and medication for the broilers, if needed, as well as
supervisory and technical services. The broilers are then transported by the
Company to its nearby processing plants. The Company processed approximately
6.4 billion pounds of consumer poultry during fiscal 1998…
‘The Company's facilities
for processing poultry and for housing live poultry and swine are subject to a
variety of federal, state and local laws relating to the protection of the
environment, including provisions relating to the discharge of materials into
the environment, and to the health and safety of its employees… The cost of
compliance with such laws and regulations has not had a material adverse effect
upon the Company's capital expenditures, earnings or competitive position and
it is not anticipated to…As of October 3, 1998, the Company employed
approximately 70,500 persons. The Company believes that its relations with its
workforce are good.’
The above company
declaration is useful in light of the documented reality of life at Tyson Foods
today.
The conditions of chicken
breeding and slaughter documented inside the giant factory chicken farms of
Tyson, Perdue, ConAgra, contrary to their company propaganda, are anything but
reassuring to human health. A recent study of working conditions in US meat and
poultry slaughterhouses concluded:
‘Health and safety laws and
regulations fail to address critical hazards in the meat and poultry industry.
Laws and agencies that are supposed to protect workers’ freedom of association
are instead manipulated by employers to frustrate worker organizing. Federal laws
and policies on immigrant workers are a mass of contradictions and incentives
to violate their rights. In sum, the United States is failing to meet its
obligations under international human rights standards to protect the human
rights of meat and poultry industry workers.’5
A Government Accountability
Office (GAO) report to the US Senate, ‘Safety in the Meat and Poultry
Industry,’ in January 2005, concluded that US meat and poultry processing
plants had ‘one of the highest rates of injury and illness of any industry.’
They cited exposure to ‘dangerous chemicals, blood, fecal matter, exacerbated
by poor ventilation and often extreme temperatures.’ Workers typically face
hazardous conditions, loud noise, must work in narrow confines with sharp tools
and dangerous machinery.
In the United States,
approximately 8.5 billion ‘broiler’ chickens are killed for food in the US each
year. That works out to 23 million chickens every day. According to a recent
report by VivaUSA, a non-profit organization investigating conditions in US
factory farms, ‘Thanks to genetic selection, feed, and being prevented from
moving or getting any exercise on factory farms, chickens now grow to be much
larger and to grow more quickly than ever before.’ Broilers today need an
average of 6 weeks before slaughter compared with 12 weeks in the 1940’s. And
that slaughtered chick has been produced at a high cost.
The use of growth boosters
has created major health problems in the huge factory farm concentrations.
Because of hormone and vaccine injections to speed growth, muscle growth
outstrips bone development and the chickens typically have leg and skeletal
disorders that significantly affect their ability to walk. Unable to walk, they
must sit in poor-quality litter, creating breast blisters or hock burns.
According to one report, ‘The dermatitis seen in such birds is painful in
itself but the effects of inability to walk are much more severe.’
Chicken organs are unable
to keep up with their hyper growth rates, causing hearts or lungs to fail or
malfunction, and creation of excess fluids in their bodies or death. Under
special exemptions in US law, chickens are excluded from the protections of the
federal Animal Welfare Act. The federal government sets no rules or standards
for how these animals should be housed, fed, or treated on farms. 6
The GAO study also
confirmed a dramatic change in the US meat and poultry industry since the
Reagan Administration first opened the doors to union-busting and vertical
integration and concentration in the industry by de facto ignoring enforcement
of anti-trust and industrial safety laws such as the Occupational Safety and
Health Act of 1970 (OSHA). In 1980 meat and poultry packing was highly
unionized, and well-paid work, with the accompanying union defence of working
and safety conditions. The industry was 46% unionized.
A decade later, by 1990,
that rate had plunged to 21%, and today is far lower. The wages plunged in
parallel, as did the composition of workers in the plants.
Today, according to the
GAO, more than 38% of production line workers in the meat and poultry
processing industry are foreign born. The GAO gives no data on what percent are
illegal immigrants. The largest percent of workers are male, and 42% are
Hispanic, and another 20% are black. But far from being a model of fairness in
racial minority hiring, the high rate of black and Hispanic workers are
precisely because companies find it easiest with the high unemployment rates
among those population groups to impose working conditions most workers would
refuse.
Encouraged by the Bush
Administration’s benign neglect of anti-trust laws and health and safety
controls, the meat processing industry has shut down countless unionized plants
across the country, reopening new plants often in the same area, typically
manned with immigrant, non-union labor at drastically lower wage levels.
Human Rights Watch, an NGO
concerned with violations of worker rights, reported on conditions in Tyson
Foods’ Arkansas chicken processing plants:
‘The northwest corner of Arkansas
is the center of the poultry industry in Arkansas, the state’s largest private
sector employer. The beautiful green hills and valleys belie the environmental
degradation of area watersheds polluted by a tsunami of waste from one billion
defecating chickens raised and slaughtered each year in Arkansas.
‘Dozens of poultry
processing plants are spread among the shopping centers, modest homes and
residential apartments of Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale, Fayetteville, Forth
Smith and other towns off Interstate I-540 in Northwest Arkansas. The smell of
dead chickens permeates the atmosphere. Poultry plants are mostly nondescript,
windowless facilities set back from the grid of roads and highways in the area.
‘In the past decade,
immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America have supplanted many rural
white and African-American workers in Northwest Arkansas poultry plants, a
demographic phenomenon characterizing the poultry industry nationwide. Between
1990 and 2000, the foreign-born population of the two largest counties in the
area increased more than 600 percent. Nearly all the increase was related to
poultry industry employment. In Rogers and Springdale, centers of the poultry
processing industry in the area, immigrants are more than 20 percent of the
population.
‘Tyson runs sixty poultry
processing plants engaged in slaughtering, dressing, cutting, packaging,
de-boning and further processing fifty million chickens per week.’ 7
According to Earthsave
International, some 30% of US chicken is tainted with Salmonella and fully 62%
with the equally virulent Campylobacter. Time magazine termed raw chicken, ‘one
of the most dangerous items in the American home.’ In 1997 contaminated chicken
killed at least 1,000 in the United States and poisoned and made sick 80
million others, orders of magnitude more deadly than Avian Flu, but unreported
in the media. Tyson, Perdue and the other agribusiness chicken giants have
created scientific breeding grounds for disease and pathogens.
Tyson’s ‘corporate
citizenship’ leaves something to be desired. The company, like Perdue Farms and
the other industry giants, has systematically worked to bust existing unions
and drive out any workers who protested dangerous working conditions. In 1993,
the National Labor Relations Board found Tyson Foods guilty of unlawfully
directing and controlling a union expulsion at its Dardanelle, Arkansas plant.
The company interrogated workers about their union sympathies and illegally
promised wage increases, bonuses, and other benefits if workers voted to get
rid of the union.
In 1995, Tyson was found
guilty of illegally eliminating a union in one acquired company, Holly Farms.
Tyson management coercively interrogated workers about their union sympathies,
threatened to arrest workers exercising their lawful rights, threatened union
supporters with firing if they remained loyal to the union, and fired fifty-one
workers for supporting the union. Tyson Foods CEO, John Tyson, who calls
himself a ‘devout Christian,’ talks about creating a ‘faith-friendly company.’
Instead of union members working, he prefers to have what the company calls
its, ‘relationship with Team Members (sic) as we operate without a union.’
One Tyson worker described
the internal situation:
‘Tyson always gets rid of
workers who protest or who speak up for others. When they jumped from
thirty-two chickens a minute to forty-two, a lot of people protested. The
company came right out and asked who the leaders were. Then they fired them.
They told us, ‘If you don’t like it, there’s the door. There’s another eight
hundred applicants waiting to take your job.’ They are the biggest company so
what they do goes for the rest.’
The factory chicken farms
of Tyson and Perdue and company are also huge consumers of corn and soybeans.
In 1999 Tyson alone consumed 6.5 million tons of corn and 2.8 million tons of
soybeans. Today, almost all of the corn and soybeans are genetically modified
Monsanto crops, a factor whose long-term consequences on human consumption have
not been independently tested. Tyson apparently is unconcerned about that as
well.
The concentration of so
many animals in centralized, mechanized growing areas or chicken jails across
America has led to huge waste and pollution problems. One smaller company, Foster
Farms of California recently pled guilty of Clean Water Act violations for
illegally discharging 11 million gallons of water polluted with decomposed
chicken manure into the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge.
Perdue Farms, the US’ fifth
largest poultry producer, recently added a major chicken ‘factory farm’
operation in China.
China is also the dream
destination of Tyson Foods, far and away the largest producer of factory
chicken meat in the world today. Well back in April 1997, Tyson Foods entered
an agreement with Kerry Holding Limited, a Hong Kong-based subsidiary of the
Kuok Group, to investigate the practicality of locating agribusiness 10 poultry
complexes throughout China, each designed to process half a million birds per
week, or a total of 5 million chickens each week.
Today, Tyson CEO, Greg Lee,
sees China as one of the most promising growth areas for its chicken
agribusiness, curious given the negative publicity about Bird Flu cases in
China. Lee recently told US media that ‘US poultry housing and growing
conditions are different from Asia and are more likely to protect animals from
disease…’ In March 2005 John Tyson told a Food Summit in Chicago that Tyson saw
its investments in China as laying the ‘foundation for profits in coming
years.’
Given the practices of
Tyson, Perdue, ConAgra and the other US chicken factory agribusiness giants,
the governments of China, and the rest of the world ought to look long and hard
before allowing them license to build their chicken factory farms in China.
The WHO recently described
the conditions which are the origin of Bird Flu. In an interview with a China
media in early 2004, before the present Washington alarm over Bird Flu pandemic
dangers, the Geneva health organization described the conditions under which
the Bird Flu virus would spread. The WHO said H5N1 was ‘largely transmitted
through bird droppings and uncooked meat.’
When a contaminated chicken
makes an excrement the H5N1 strain of avian influenza circulates in the air and
is carried by the wind, according to the WHO findings. ‘Piled one on top of the
other in cramped cages, the birds easily pass the disease on with their dirty
droppings,’ the WHO said, noting that chicken breeders also risked inhaling the
bug and got infected easier.
On the other hand, it was
virtually impossible to catch bird flu by eating cooked meat that is infected,
said WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib. ‘The cooking kills the virus,’ Chaib said,
citing WHO experts. 8
Chickens piled on top of
one another in cramped cages filled with dirty bird feces and poor ventilation
is an accurate description of the documented conditions of the factory chicken
farms of Tyson Foods, Perdue Farms and other US chicken agribusiness giants.
Dr Walter Sontag, an
Austrian zoologist who has studied the development of the H5N1 virus, and who
concluded that the alarm about Bird Flu pandemic is vastly exaggerated, says,
‘A high density (of birds) in a small space with defined food and water
availability, and in addition, poor hygiene conditions promote an explosive
spread of pathogenic germ cells.’ Sontag goes on to point out that
‘free-walking’ chickens, in contrast to the ‘jailed’ factory farm birds,
‘almost without exception keep a great distance from humans.’ 9
It would be important to
know whether any of the cases of Avian Flu documented in China in recent years
could be traced either to imports of US chickens from giant producers such as
Tyson Foods or to domestic chicken factory farms of those companies in China or
elsewhere in Asia. It is at least clear that a lot more explanation from
responsible governments and health officials is due on the true origins and
threats of Avian Flu.
Footnotes:
1 Nordland, Rod, Newsweek,
Interview with Dr Margaret Chan WHO, Oct. 23, 2005
2 WATT Poultry USA, WATT
Poultry USA’s Rankings, January 2003.
3 FAO Fact Sheet : Market
Impact of Avian Flu in Asia, Rome, 2004.
4 Cummings, David, Overseas
Investments byU.S. Meat Corporations, Centers for Epidemiology and Animal
Health, July 2000, www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/ceah/cei/.
5 Human Rights Watch,
Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants.
www.hrw.org, January 2005.
6 VivaUSA, Chicken/Broiler Industry Media Briefing,
www.vivausa.org.
7 Human Rights Watch, op.
cit.
8 World Health
Organization, Bird droppings prime origin of bird flu , January 17, 2004.
9 Sontag, Dr Walter, Der Fluch der Vögel, in Wiener Zeitung.