The bird-flu bonanza

The bird-flu crisis rages on. In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) was pointing a finger at Asia's and Africa's prolific household poultry for spreading avian influenza, and governments were talking about the risk posed by annual bird migrations.

Along with other groups, Grain - an international NGO that promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity - argued that the real culprits were large-scale industrial poultry farms and the global poultry trade, not backyard flocks or wild birds.

Today, this has become common knowledge, even though little is being done to control the industrial source of the problem, and some governments still roll out the wild-bird theory. While a recent outbreak in Moscow of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian flu was traced to a single market in the city, a government veterinary official warned of possible future outbreaks this spring as wild birds begin migrating northward.

Another more sinister dimension of the bird-flu (or avian-flu) crisis also is becoming apparent: pharmaceutical companies are attempting to take advantage of the goodwill shown by governments in creating a global database of flu samples to create highly profitable, captive vaccine markets. Two UN agencies - the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) - are at the center of this process; they are using their international stature, access to governments and control over the flow of donor funds to advance corporate agendas.

The authorities dealing with bird flu finally are acknowledging the role played by the poultry trade in spreading the virus. This is long overdue. The first bird-flu outbreaks in southeast Asia in early 2004 - in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Indonesia - occurred in closed, intensive factory farms. But no investigations were ever made into why the disease broke out on these farms and how it subsequently spread. The same happened in Turkey and Egypt; wild birds and backyard flocks were quickly blamed, while the poultry companies, which supplied markets and "backyard" producers with birds, were exonerated.

It was only in the UK in February 2007 that the myth that large farms are "biosecure" was shattered and the secrecy over the way that bird flu can spread through the transnational poultry industry was partly lifted.

UK government officials at first blamed wild birds for the outbreak on a large factory farm owned by poultry giant Bernard Matthews. Even though there recently had been an outbreak of avian flu in Hungary - where Bernard Matthews also has operations - the company dismissed news media reports of a possible link, saying that its plants were located far from the area infected by the disease. But the company's explanation fell apart when a government inspector found a wrapper on the poultry producer's UK premises proving that meat from a slaughterhouse in an area of Hungary infected by avian flu had been processed at the UK factory-farm just before the outbreak.

There has never been any evidence that backyard poultry are behind any of the bird-flu outbreaks. The only peer-reviewed study to compare the risks between family farms and industrial operations, based on data from the 2004 bird-flu outbreaks in Thailand, found that "backyard flocks are at a significantly lower risk of [bird-flu] infection compared to commercial scale operations of broiler or layer chickens or quail." Yet in the Asian epicenter of the crisis, the message to poultry farmers continues to be: "Get big, really big, or get out."

In 2006, the Vietnamese government, in conjunction with the UN, drew up a 10-year plan to turn its poultry sector "into a modern, large-scale industry in terms of farming, slaughter and consumption," as the minister of agriculture put it. The program began