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February 09, 2007

bird flu and globalisation

I'm sitting here shivering with a big box of tissues, so issues around (bird) flu are looming larger in my mind at the moment. Bird flu (the H5N1 strain) has been found in turkeys in Suffolk in the UK, and it's starting to look like this may have came into the UK when processed turkey was transported from Hungary.

Intensive farming has been presented as relatively 'safe' in terms of bird flu - based on the logic that birds farmed this way will be permanently locked inside and therefore won't be able to come into contact with wild birds. However, in this case it looks like (poor) practices associated with the intensive farming and then long-distance transport of food may have itself worked to spread bird flu.

A tempting 'theoretical' response to this is to recall Virilio's account of how - when faced with complex problems - politicians are now tempted to reach for a techical solution; however, these 'solutions' will themselves only multiply the possibilities for accidents. A more mundane response is to note that the problems associated with paying staff poor wages to raise and process animals in lousy conditions may itself - unsurprisingly - increase the possibility of things going wrong.

Although the production of 'cheap' meat might seem to be a brilliant technical solution to a range of problems - from providing affordable nutrition to preventing contamination or infection of animals - this 'solution' may well turn out to be extremely expensive in the longer term.

Posted by jon_mendel at February 9, 2007 05:14 PM

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