Nothing Learned

Bird flu isn’t a new phenomenon. Yet hardly any consequences resulted from previous experiences. There’s only reaction.

There’s a rule for farmers in America: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! Such wisdom is quoted by managers when they talk about risks, whether explaining why all raw materials aren’t ordered from the same supplier or why all of one’s savings aren’t invested in Lehman shares. But Americans have almost literally gone against their own proverb: Nearly all their eggs come from the same basket. And their birds too.

There are huge egg factories, especially in the Midwest, whose dimensions can be hard to imagine in densely populated Germany. More than 5 million laying hens live in individual establishments. It’s similar to the slaughterhouses of the chicken and turkey industries. Now America is being charged for the over-industrialization of agriculture, with bird flu as the bill.

Even those in the supermarket who don’t purchase with morals in mind want better conditions for animals.

It’s not entirely clear how bird flu can spread so quickly. They apparently transport the birds from farm to farm. What is certain is that they encounter large-scale operations wherein they have devastating consequences. Smaller, private poultry farmers have so far rarely been affected by the virus. Although large corporations are subject to strict hygiene guidelines, they have more workers, equipment and ventilation fans, which may bring the virus to the quasi-sterile hutches. If the brood has more space, the animals wouldn’t be stuck so close to one another. If they live outside, then the sun can kill the flu virus. And even if the birds get sick, 20 will die instead of 5 million.

All animals in a plant must be slaughtered if one is infected. The Center Fresh Group in Iowa has found that only two of 26 hutches had sick birds, but they still had to kill all 5.5 million chickens. The poultry industry has incidentally found a euphemism by which they refer to mass-asphyxiation by carbon dioxide: depopulation. The costs are borne by the taxpayer, who pays for special cleaning and carcass removal.

Bird flu isn’t a new phenomenon. It has raged especially in Asia, where millions of animals were slaughtered. Nothing has been learned from it. In 2005, the United Nations called for governments, local authorities and international organizations to do more against factory farms that would provide ideal conditions for the spread and mutation of viruses. “We are wasting valuable time pointing fingers at wild birds when we should be focusing on dealing with the root causes of this epidemic spread,” said one of the special veterinarians of the U.N. task force, William Karesh. He unequivocally blamed “farming methods which crowd huge numbers of animals into small spaces.”

The United States, which claims to have the most stringent regulatory programs for bird flu, only reacts to the disease and does not do enough to prevent it with a partial de-industrialization of agriculture. This “partial” is important because, of course, the world population cannot be fed with backyard chickens. Industrial agriculture and supermarkets are needed to sell food at affordable prices. The standards that are applied are up to the consumers – even in Europe.

The consumer has less power than idealists would believe. One can be sure to not buy eggs from caged hens as well as to buy organic meat. But in the U.S. especially, it is far from a mass movement. Maybe it’s time to stop expecting so much from the individual. The majority of industrial eggs aren’t directly sent to consumers, but are rather scrambled into a liquid that disappears into food where one wouldn’t expect, for example, in ice cream.

California has just changed the rules for keeping chickens. If nine or more chickens live in a cage, each individual is kept in an area of just 750 square centimeters – less than the area of an LP record. The standard in the American egg industry is only 432 square centimeters. Behind the change in the law is a referendum that protested the egg industry. It’s a good start, which shows that people want better conditions for livestock, even if they don’t shop at the supermarket with the highest morals in mind. Cages must be larger and the livestock supply smaller. And with that, there must be laws to ensure that not all of one’s eggs are in one basket.