This will be another post about avian flu. I’m doing something I usually don’t do, which is working on this right after waking up. (Close your eyes and imagine the first sip of morning coffee hitting your blood-brain barrier.) (Considerable hours have now elapsed since the morning I wrote that.) I’ve been sitting on this too long, partially due to the general psychological block I’ve developed around writing and partially due to that block’s particular tendency to manifest as debilitating perfectionism. This ain’t a dissertation and considering the fucking slop people churn out daily I figure – it doesn’t have to be dissertation-quality. It just needs to be out there, because unfortunately, in today’s carnivorous world, when you’re not posting your take, someone else out there is. And theirs will be worse.
I have in the past heartily recommended Mike Davis’s 2005 book about avian flu, The Monster At Our Door. I still recommend it, it’s a great and highly informative read, and of course we all love Mike Davis, because he rocks. That being said, this post will be structured around a respectful critique of some aspects of the book. Not because I want to poke holes in his argument for the sake of it, and not because I think I’m so great or whatever, but because I feel like this is an efficient way to communicate the extremely complicated content I want to impart. I’m essentially free-riding on the work Mike Davis already did to structure his book. There is one major axis along which I will critique The Monster At Our Door, which I started thinking about recently when I read an interview in The Sick Times with the great Colin Carlson. Colin cautioned against over-attributing the emergence of pandemics (or of novel pandemic-potential pathogens) to human agency. It’s important to remember (gentle reminder…) that the causal structure of something so complex is, well, complex. Humans are involved, of course, but not in straightforward ways that reduce to simple, more or less deterministic, Freakonomics-type beats. Humans are actors in a planetary ecosystem that we fundamentally do not and cannot control. As Colin says, “We all have this story in our heads of a remote community where people cut down forests and then mysteriously start getting sick.We get things wrong because of this narrative… A pandemic could just happen because we live on a biodiverse planet — we are constantly in contact with animals and pathogens.”
This is something that has bothered me about the Covid discourse for some time, and which I touched on in the first post of this series. This sort of causal over-attribution creates tidy narratives that drive engagement on online content platforms. That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there were literally any sources of legitimate information left. Since there aren’t – as Colin points out – this tends to circumscribe better thinking about adaptation to and mitigation of pandemics that can, do, and will arise. Careful thinking about mitigation gets washed out in the white noise of outrage and anguish. This is what I meant in that first post that you can’t just back the truck up out of capitalism and be fine (contra the Bluesky guy who got insanely mad at me for saying that the United States of America, one country on the vast blue planet, having better “regulations” would likely not have been enough to stop H5N1 – this outbreak, which is not the first – cold). This attitude, and the attendant over-comparison of Covid and H5N1, is leading, among the internat chatterati at least, to a gloomy tone of dour inevitability about a possible H5N1 pandemic that I think is extremely fucked up. H5N1 is already a concrete, present issue that must be dealt with on a planetary scale; this present reality coexists alongside another truth, which is that the nightmare scenario most have in mind, H5N1 going human-to-human, is not inevitable.
The really scary thing is that it is only partially under our control. And there are reasons to be freaked. It is a fucked up time in the US, to understate the problem, and we are not doing the kinds of flu responses that we should be. We’re not collecting the right kinds of data, studies are being suppressed, and so on. But there are farm workers in the country right now for whom H5N1 is not an abstract threat, and media studies professors on Bluesky who love to crow (eh?) about mutual aid could, in fact, be working on local organizing to get PPE to these workers instead of doomposting and engagement-mongering about it. I’ll list some things I think we can do, on an individual basis, to decrease the likelihood of a reassortment event, either at the end of this post or in a subsequent one if this post becomes too long (already looking like a possibility that it will be a separate post, after nearly 1000 words of throat-clearing here).
I’ve gone into this long disquisition because it’s germane to the main critique I have of The Monster At Our Door. The book does engage in a bit of this causal over-attribution of the emergence and inevitability of pandemics as a straightforward result of human activity, specifically human commercial activity, organized under capitalism. This isn’t necessarily a weakness of the book as such. For one, huge parts of that story are, in the main, correct. For another, Mike Davis was not writing a book about influenza ecology. He was writing a work of Marxist historiography, and we love him for that. That means he was constructing, from source material available to him at the time, a coherent narrative of history where, as we’d expect from a Marxist historian, a few very broad trends are emphasized. First, that capitalist farming practices have set us up for an apocalyptic pandemic and second, that profit-seeking incentives integrated into every level of political governance have failed and will fail to prevent or appropriately mitigate that pandemic. The fact remains, however, that the book is 20 years out of date at this point. It also completely lacks information about Chinese science or the Chinese experience of avian influenza, except as reported by American and European media. I don’t know how much of this information was even available to Davis back in 2003-2004, but juxtaposing some of Davis’s arguments against those in a more recent ethnographic book from 2020, Lyle Fearnley’s Virulent Zones (a recommendation from Colin, thanks man), enriches the story of avian influenza that Davis is telling. It also complicates that story, and makes the just-so attribution (or blame) of humans-under-capitalism less straightforward.
There are many threads running through the two texts I’m primarily referring to (Davis and Fearnley) that I will want to pick up and work with, probably in a series of posts rather than one big long one – I’m not trying to subject any of you to a 20,000-word email. The thread I’m picking up today is the one that has to do with the so-called “Livestock Revolution,” the dramatic increase in the production and consumption of animal products (meat and dairy) through the 1970s-1990s most particularly in “developing” or “third world” countries. The Livestock Revolution is a Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) term. Perhaps not surprisingly for an idiom of international development, the term itself obscures some of the real processes underlying the massive expansion in the production of animals. China’s Livestock Revolution “coincided with the country’s shift from a planned to a market economy” (Fearnley, 2020, p. 14). The process by which China went from producing 600 million meat chickens in 1970 to 10 billion such chickens in 2017 (Fearnley, 2020) was not a revolution from below as the FAO language suggests, but rather a state-directed process of marketization and associated transformation in the scale and qualitative character of poultry farming. Collective farming was ended in China in 1978; poultry was one of the first commodities “opened for market trade” (Fearnley, 2020, p. 15) as the transition from collective farming to the so-called Household Responsibility System devolved land-use rights as well as production and supply quotas from collective farms to individual households (Fearnley, 2020, p. 76). Poultry farms in China remained small, but most are now vertically integrated into larger supply chains organized by “dragon-head” corporations, “private agribusinesses that are designated by central and local governments for their role in vertically leading farmers into processing and marketing through the formation of integrated supply chains” (Fearnley, 2020, p. 76). Thai chicken mega-conglomerate Charoen Pokphand or CP Group, a major villain of Mike Davis’s book, was one of the first dragon-head enterprises.
This process of marketization, vertical integration, and “industryization” (transforming agricultural production into secondary production of finished goods) (Fearnley, 2020, p. 76) have dramatically changed the scale, density, and character of poultry farming in China and, simultaneously, the ecology of influenza. Davis strongly implies (even outright states) that this is due primarily to the scale and density of corporate-style factory farming. For Davis, the Livestock Revolution itself – the sustained increase in what he calls the “viral ‘food supply’” of humans, poultry, and swine – is the major contributor to regular HPAI outbreaks since the first detection of H5N1 in 1997. Davis devotes considerable space to describing agribusiness operations like those of US giant Tyson. (A representative passage: “The world icon of industrialized poultry and livestock production is Tyson Foods… Tyson, which kills 2.2 billion chickens annually, has become globally synonymous with scaled-up, vertically coordinated production; exploitation of contract growers; visceral antiunionism; rampant industrial injury; downstream environmental dumping; and political corruption,” Davis, 2005, p. 83.)
Davis also emphasizes the adaptation, and the pathogenicity, of these poultry-raising techniques to pig production. (Pigs, for their susceptibility to infection with many types of influenza viruses, are ideal “mixing vessels” as often described in the lay press – this means that they are ideal hosts for reassortment events.) He describes how, since 1993, pork production – though it is not clear if he means internationally, in the United States, or in China – “has been restructured around the Tyson, or ‘poultry model,’ of very large, industrialized units” (Davis, 2005, p. 90). He states in no uncertain terms that “the new swine flu pandemic threat apparently has arisen directly from the increasing scale of hog production” (Davis, 2005, p. 90). Interestingly, the FAO paradigm of “biosecurity” actually runs orthogonally to Davis’s account – greater biosecurity is more intensive, more enclosed, more dense poultry raising. Why is this? What are the risks involved that biosecurity is supposed to mitigate?
We might view it as self-serving capitalist distortion. Vertically-integrated intensive livestock production is what is profitable, so that’s what the FAO will endorse. Indeed, Fearnley (2020) describes biosecurity development as overlapping with narratives of economic development (i.e. marketization): “each new developmental stage is not only an economic transformation but also a reduction of biological risk” and “the typology implies that increases in farm scale and industrial integration will inherently bring improvements to biosecurity” (p. 72). However, this isn’t the full story. The biosecurity paradigm, flawed as it is, also represents growing scientific consensus (certainly growing since the time of Davis’s book) on the crucial role of wild birds in the shifting ecology of avian flu. Low-pathogenicity avian influenza (LPAI) is endemic to many kinds of domestic waterfowl, where it replicates in the lower digestive tract without causing illness; mutation and reassortment can lead strains of LPAI to suddenly turn into their high-pathogenicity counterparts (HPAI). China’s particular transition to a market-oriented, vertically-integrated form of poultry raising reshaped the surface area and also the quality of this critical interface between wild and domestic birds in areas of poultry cultivation.
Davis skips straight from the description of intensive farming practices sampled above to a discussion of the 2003 outbreak of H7N7 avian influenza in the Netherlands’ Gelder Valley. Its place in the narrative is interesting because the actual story of the outbreak as Davis describes it is more in line with Fearnley’s analysis, and less with Davis’s overall thesis (highly intensive factory farming being highly pathogenic in and of itself). Davis writes: “Many of the [Dutch] farms also keep pet flocks of ducks and swans. With its intimate juxtaposition of wetlands, wild birds, poultry, and high urban density, as well as its hub-like role in the EU’s global commerce, the Netherlands recapitulates many of the distinctive features of the Pearl River Delta; the March epidemic, in fact, was later traced back to a farm where free-range chickens were in contact with wild waterfowl in an adjacent canal” (Davis, 2005, pp. 84-85, emphasis mine.) The 2003 Dutch avian flu outbreak arose from free-range chickens having contact with wild birds. Fearnley describes, as Davis suggests, a very similar ecology in the “pandemic epicenter” around Poyang Lake.
Here, changes in the Chinese system of land tenure, associated abolition of limits on the number of chickens or ducks a single household can raise, and the opening of market trade in poultry and eggs has resulted in a dense clustering of poultry-raising operations along and around the waterway. Fearnley (2020) describes, at length, how many farmers keep both enclosed commercial flocks for the market and free-grazing “sideline” flocks of ducks for household purposes. He also describes, in detail, practices of maintaining flocks of fully wild birds such as swan geese, which bring a particular kind of market value (this is a really interesting part of the book, but I won’t get into it further here). As Davis also notes in The Monster At Our Door, in the system of vertical integration characteristic of the “dragon-heads” like CP Group or Wen Foodstuffs, contract farmers – that is, individual households – bear all the risks related to raising commercial livestock. This includes the risk of total loss of livelihood in the case of an HPAI outbreak where a household’s commercial flock has to be culled. The practice of maintaining free-grazing “sideline” flocks is thus a form of insurance against what Fearnley (2020) calls the “vital risks” involved in raising living creatures as commodities. Free-grazing ducks are not biosecure; as the ideal interface between the wild birds and enclosed commercial birds, they are actually accelerators of avian flu outbreaks. Fearnley (2020) cites research showing that the spatial distribution of H5N1 outbreaks closely correlates to the spatial distribution of “traditional free-grazing duck husbandry” (p. 67). The result is what he calls a positive feedback loop – the practice of maintaining sideline and/or wild flocks close to enclosed commercial flocks (along with certain feeding practices) increases the risk of a livelihood-disrupting HPAI outbreak, which further incentivizes the raising of non-commercial sideline poultry.
This is already a bit more complicated than Davis’s straightforward tale of greedy agribusiness, though greedy agribusiness is indeed a major factor. Another major factor, one that Davis does not touch on, is the role of veterinary expertise and veterinary practice. (The one mention of veterinary practice in The Monster At Our Door (2005) is in relation to the 2003 Dutch outbreak of H7N7, which “proved how crucial veterinary surveillance has become for anticipating human outbreaks” [p. 89].) The Chinese experts that Fearnley (2020) cites and interviews tell a different story. For them, the same market reforms that created the boom in livestock production also disrupted and disorganized the Mao-era system of rural veterinary practice. As Fearnley (2020) writes: “Beginning in the late 1970s, the initiation of administrative and market reforms to the collective economy transformed this veterinary system in two ways, a reconfiguration that Zheng and colleagues gloss with the phrase ‘heavy on husbandry, light on epidemic prevention.’26 On the one hand, economic reforms stimulated massive growth in livestock production, and on the other, administrative reforms led to the withdrawal of state funding for epizootic disease control” (p. 164). Specifically, these reforms resulted in the withdrawal of state funding for the communal Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Stations (AHVS) and, eventually (and via the scientific and technical policy reforms of the early 2000s) in what Fearnley (2020) describes as “stratification” in veterinary expertise. Some veterinarians were retrained as state-authorized and higher-status “official” vets; most, however, were left to fend for themselves in the private market, shifting to a fee-for-service model and an emphasis on “technical support for livestock production” rather than outbreak monitoring and epidemic prevention (Fearnley, 2020, pp. 165-166).
Let’s stop here and bring us back up to the present. The intensity of poultry or other livestock production is certainly one aspect of the infinitely complex ecology of influenza. But, as the foregoing hopefully shows, it is not the only one. I haven’t described this in detail, but these complex ecologies (comprising livestock, wildlife, social practices, legal and administrative structures, and so on) do differ greatly between, say, the United States and China. I have read somewhere that the recommendations for avian influenza outbreak prevention tend in different directions for the two countries – greater “biosecurity” and more intensification for Chinese farms, de-intensification for American ones, but I don’t remember where I read this to cite it and again, this ain’t a dissertation – so just take it as a broad indicator of differences in ecology. These differences in ecology mean that the shape of any outbreak and the risks that any outbreak poses (risks of a reassortment event, for example) will also be different. Mike Davis couldn’t know about the recent history of the current avian flu epizootic from 2021-present – wild birds brought it here to North America, and since then there have been at least two documented spillover events from wild birds to cattle, one recent. Big ag is terrible, it’s true. It’s also true that 20 years have elapsed since Davis’s writing. There is a danger that a generalized longue durée historiographical approach can obscure the particularities that matter so much to mitigation now.
For example, wild birds brought avian flu here and it spilled over to cattle. Why does it keep spreading among cattle, even reinfecting some herds that have been marked as “recovered”? Well, as Caserta et al. (2024) documented, bovine H5N1 infections demonstrate a pronounced tropism (something like a preference) for mammary, i.e. milk-producing, tissue. These authors hypothesized that shared milking machines might be a crucial mechanism for spreading the virus between cows, in addition to frequent interstate transfer of infected cows which has been demonstrated to seed new outbreaks in different locations. We can’t back the truck up out of capitalism, out of the last 30 (or 50, or 100) years of agricultural practice in the United States or China. We may not have much luck de-intensifying the archipelago of factory farms in the United States, or preventing wild birds from recirculating H5N1 around the world. Much as I would like to abolish the value form and zap the incentive structure of capitalism out of every social and technical formation, this is unlikely to happen on any kind of time scale that keeps pace with the constant and rapid evolution of the current outbreak. But it is completely within the realm of possibility, if we equip ourselves with a bit of knowledge and focus on current conditions, to change milking practice to arrest chains of transmission or to implement outbreak protocols for interstate transfers of animals. Both of these things would, in my view, make a difference.
References
Caserta, L. C., Frye, E. A., Butt, S. L., Laverack, M., Nooruzzaman, M., Covaleda, L. M., ... & Diel, D. G. (2024). Spillover of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus to dairy cattle. Nature, 634(8034), 669-676.
Davis, M. (2006). The monster at our door: The global threat of avian flu. Macmillan.
Fearnley, L. (2020). Virulent zones: animal disease and global health at China's pandemic epicenter. Duke University Press.