The Monster Enters by Mike Davis

Author:Mike Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

CHAPTER 6:

PLAGUE AND PROFIT

At the center of the meltdown in Asia’s vast poultry industry is a 61-year-old multi-billionaire called Dhanin Chearavanont.1

Jasper Becker

All of today’s tens of billions of highly engineered factory chickens are descended from red jungle fowl that still roam wild in forest regions of Thailand and Vietnam. Using mitochondrial DNA analysis, Japanese researchers in 1994 demonstrated that chickens were domesticated in the area of present-day Thailand more than 8,000 years ago.2 The chicken, along with the pig and the buffalo, subsequently became the basis of agrarian culture throughout Southeast Asia. Chickens are likewise the bottom line of Asia’s largest and most powerful agricultural-export conglomerate, Bangkok-based Charoen Pokphand. CP, as it is universally known, figures centrally in the story of H5N1’s terrifying return in the winter of 2003–4 and the unprecedented HPAI epidemic that threatens to become a global human and ecological cataclysm.

Founded by the immigrant Chia brothers from Guangdong, CP was a rice-seed distributor in Bangkok’s Chinatown until Chia Ek Chow, the youngest of four sons, took over the business in 1964. In the face of growing intolerance toward the Chinese diaspora throughout Southeast Asia, he changed his name to Dhanin Chearavanont and reoriented the company to chicken breeding and broiler farming. Impressed by the success of U.S. companies in transforming poultry raising into a streamlined industrial process more closely resembling chemical manufacture than traditional agriculture, Chearavanont formed two successive strategic partnerships with American companies and quickly became Asia’s leading apostle of Tyson-style intensive farming and vertical integration.

By the mid-1990s, Thailand (which had adopted CP’s corporate slogan, “Kitchen of the World,”) had the most corporatized livestock industry in Asia. CP and a handful of other vertically integrated exporters controlled 80 percent of production, with chicken farming concentrated in a dense, polluted belt 60 to 150 kilometers outside Bangkok.3 With 100,000 employees across Asia, CP boasts that its agro-industrial empire is “fully integrated horizontally and vertically. Operations take in animal feed production, breeders, farming systems, meat processing, food production and its very successful value-added products.”4

For Chearavanont and other “integrators,” economies of scale in a booming export environment have produced fabulous profits, but for CP’s 10,000 contract farmers, as well as for hundreds of thousands of backyard poultry producers, the situation is radically different. As journalist Isabelle Delforge points out: “With contract farming, large companies control the whole production process: they lend money to the farmers, they sell them chicks, feed and medicine, and they have the right to buy the whole production. But usually the company is not committed to buy the chickens if the demand is low. Contract farmers bear all the risks related to production and become extremely dependent on demand from the world market. They become factory workers in their own field.”5 For the majority of Thai farmers, the Livestock Revolution has meant soaring indebtedness, loss of independence, and the continued migration of their daughters to Bangkok’s sweatshops and brothels.

While Thailand’s chickens (and later, pigs and prawns) have made Chearavanont a billionaire and, according to business

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