The Fatal Strain Page 17

  The Asian financial crisis of 1997 temporarily knocked the wind out of this fabulous progress. But the region’s economies rebounded, albeit some faster than others. Incomes and ambitions resumed their ascent. Malaysia, always one of the region’s best performers, pressed ahead with the completion of its Petronas Twin Towers in downtown Kuala Lumpur and boasted they were the tallest buildings on the planet. (As measured to the tips of their spires, a controversial standard, they were.) The towers were a pair of exclamation marks rising above Asia’s transformed landscape.

  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 cana
l 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.

  A few moments later, as he emerged to fetch more feed, a silver Isuzu pickup coated with dirt pulled up right at the entrance to the sheds. It was the neighbors. The husband, Monchai, had bad teeth, and his wife, Boonsveb, had big hair. But they also had three times as many chickens as Prathum. They had culled the whole lot when the flu erupted and replaced them all. They told Prathum they had an uneasy feeling about another outbreak and wanted to compare notes. The talk turned to the question of whether they should erect modern, all enclosed, climate-controlled sheds.

  “Of course that would be better,” the wife said. “It would keep out disease. But it’s expensive.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem,” Prathum agreed. “Who can afford it?”

  “You certainly can’t afford it,” the husband quipped, needling Prathum. “You can’t even afford enough staff. You have to do the farming yourself.”

  As if on cue, Prathum refilled his bucket and vanished deep into the chicken shed again. The husband, wearing cracked, dirty sandals, accompanied him inside. The dogs took up the rear as hundreds of red-crested heads poked out of the cages, viewing the procession.

  Shortly after the neighbors left, another Isuzu pickup, this one red, rumbled down Prathum’s gravel driveway, pulling up in a cloud of dust just outside the barn. The cab door opened. Out got Nikon Inmaee, an egg vendor with a narrow face and short, wavy hair. Prathum had collected the eggs in the hours just after dawn, and now they were waiting, packed into plastic trays stacked ten high amid dirt and dead grass on the barn’s concrete floor.

  Prathum helped Nikon gingerly hoist the trays into the truck bed. Three days a week, Prathum’s eggs were ferried to Bangkok, but this batch was headed for a closer market, about fifteen miles away. While Prathum calculated the tab on a small pad, Nikon returned to the back of his truck and began pulling out a separate set of empty trays. He deposited dozens of them in the barn for use later in the week. They were still soiled from the market. It was like addicts swapping dirty needles.

  There was a time in the United States when chicken was a luxury, an indulgence for those weary of more affordable dishes like lobster and steak. Chicken was precious because it was relatively rare. In the ninteenth century, raising poultry was little more than a hobby for farmers’ wives, and in 1880, when the U.S. Census started counting chickens, they numbered only 102 million nationwide. By 2006, that number were butchered nearly every four days.

  This American revolution would have been impossible but for a series of advances in animal husbandry, starting with the debut of commercially sold chicks in the late nineteenth century. Next came the development of artificial hatcheries, which lowered prices and brought chickens to selling weight faster. Companies specializing in feed emerged. Vitamin D was introduced to fight rickets. Broilers and later layers were shifted indoors, where temperature, lighting, and diet could be precisely calibrated, and then the birds were raised off the ground and confined to tiers of wire cages, where care and feeding was even easier. But the watershed was the introduction in 1971 of a vaccine for a poultry plague called Marek’s disease, which was killing 60 percent of the birds. Chicken prices plummeted, further fueling American demand already on the rise for familiar reasons: population growth, increasing income, and urbanization.

  In the United States, where chicken was fast replacing beef as the animal protein of choice, safety measures to prevent disease followed quickly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture launched an aggressive campaign to educate farmers about biosecurity. Many family farms were swallowed by integrated agriculture companies, which insisted on stricter practices to protect their operations. In Europe, which was experiencing a similar chicken boom, many farmers had turned to banks for financing and inked contracts with feed mills. Both demanded measures to safeguard their investments.

  Asia, for the most part, has yet to follow suit. So today, birds in China and Southeast Asia are amassed in once unimaginable densities, often weakened by their stressful confinement and exposed to the whims and wrath of viruses like influenza. The tremendous amounts of feed, water, and human traffic required to maintain these flocks offer a generous avenue to infection. In the unnatural setting of intensive agriculture, chickens are more vulnerable to contagion because they are pressed together and housed atop one another’s droppings, which are a main way, if not the main way, birds transmit the virus. A year after bird flu’s arrival in Thailand, a study found that Thai commercial farms were at a significantly higher risk of infection than the small, informal flocks of several dozen poultry that villagers have raised in their yards for centuries.

  It’s not only the risks of infection on large farms that are greater. So are the consequences. The lack of genetic diversity in many commercial flocks means that a virus that infects one bird can likely infect them all, offering abundant opportunities for microbes to reproduce. The chances for the virus to mutate as it skips from bird to bird are multiplied many times over. “Once an influenza virus invades a commercial poultry farm,” scientists warned, “it has an optimum number of susceptible poultry for rapid viral evolution.”

  But researchers have also found there’s something even more perilous than a country of dense commercial chicken farms. That’s one like Thailand, a country in transition, where commercial farms operate in the midst of extensive traditional flocks. These small holdings represent a vital link in the chain of infection. For the flu virus to migrate from its natural reservoir in waterfowl, it needs an initial toehold in domestic poultry. Asia’s traditional backyard farms, with their freely grazing birds and even fewer safeguards, offer just this opening. They are like kindling wood around the larger commercial farms. And the larger commercial farms, which have mostly sprung up near their markets, are concentrated around another vulnerable population: the unprecedented accumulation of humanity in the metropolises of East Asia.

  As Jan Slingenbergh of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and his fellow researchers write, “Agricultural practices have become the dominant factor determining the conditions in which zoonotic pathogens evolve, spread and eventually enter the human population.” More pointedly, the FAO said in 2008 that the rapid development of Asia’s poultry industry without due regard for animal health created a “virtual time bomb” that “exploded” with the outbreak of H5N1.

  Sangwan Klinhom was a Thai country singer in the parts around Suphan Buri. His resonant tenor earned him a following, but little money. The tips couldn’t even pay the rent. “If you’re a singer, you’re very poor,” he explained. “Some die without a coffin.” So he eventually abandoned the circuit of farmyard weddings and cheap beer joints for the roving life of a duck herder.

  When I encountered him in the shade of a coconut tree, Sangwan was rolling a homemade cigarette fashioned from a palm frond. He would occasionally glance up to check on his flock, nearly a thousand khaki Campbell ducks pecking and scavenging in the mucky waters of a rice paddy several miles north of Banglane village. Despite the intense midday heat, he wore a heavy brown knit cap with a blue pompom to keep the sun off his head. His brow was deeply furrowed, his jowls weathered. Beneath thick, graying eyebrows, his deep-set eyes were bloodshot from sun and stress. Once again, he was singing a plaintive tune.

  The practice of grazing ducks in rice fields, which initially developed in southern China, had long since spread to the wetlands of Southeast Asia. Herders like Sangwan followed the rice harvest, trucking their flocks from province to province in pickups and feeding the ducks for free on residual grains, insects, and snails in the muddy water. “The ducks give you anything you want,” he told me. “If you want something, you wait a bit and you get it. I didn’t even have a house before.” But now this barefoot nomad and countless others like him were being pres
sed by Thai officials to renounce their wandering ways and shut their flocks up in closed shelters. Ducks had been fingered as silent killers.

  Researchers had discovered that ducks were spreading the novel flu strain like never before while no longer displaying any symptoms of their own. Wild waterfowl had long been recognized as a natural host for flu viruses, carrying the infection without getting sick. As the pathogen grew more virulent, it initially turned on the cousins of these wild birds, domesticated ducks, and caused widespread die-offs. For a while, this helped tip public health officials to proliferating poultry outbreaks that could endanger people. But in 2004, the virus abruptly changed its modus operandi a second time. Infected ducks once again showed no symptoms, according to an international team of scientists based at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. But now these infected birds spread the virus in larger amounts and for longer periods, in some cases a week longer than before. The virus also survived for more time in the surrounding water than it ever had. The duck had become “the Trojan horse” for Asian flu viruses, the researchers warned darkly.

  When investigators in Thailand tested flocks of free-range ducks, nearly half proved to be infected with flu despite few signs of illness. Scientists warned that traditional duck farming posed a tremendous risk not only in Thailand’s central plains but also in the Mekong River delta of southern Vietnam and the Red River delta of northern Vietnam.