Not in Our Backyard

The newspapers have just reported that avian flu was diagnosed in an eighteenmonth- old boy in Bangkok. My husband and I live with our one-year-old daughter in Doi Tao district, in the southern part of Chiang Mai province in northern Thailand, and we have about 200 free-range, nativebreed chickens in our backyard. It’s hard to read the news some days without being concerned for our little Lauren.

Years ago, when my husband, Chalit, got his first paycheque from his first job, the first thing he did was buy a hen. We still have her, even though she doesn’t lay eggs anymore (Chalit says he can’t bring himself to eat her). There’s hardly a family in our village that doesn’t have a rooster and three or four hens running around with their chicks alongside. The birds forage indiscriminately during the day; an outsider would never know which chickens belong to which house, but we all know our own, and at feeding time the chickens always return to the right place.

Our district was unaffected by the first two waves of the avian flu epidemic and has so far escaped the third, despite the fact that the mainly black, lean birds are ubiquitous here. According to government statistics, there were more than 63 million native-breed chickens in the country in 2003, or roughly one per person. In addition, 190 million more plump, improvedbreed chickens are owned by commercial operations, but there aren’t many of those in our district.

Official statistics also show that backyard chickens are the main vector for the h5n1 virus, the appearance of which resulted in the deaths from flu or culling of 62 million birds, plus twelve human fatalities, in 2004. With this in mind, the Thai government is working to get rural farmers to build “bio-secure” barns for raising their chickens, using both the carrot (in the form of construction loans) and the stick (following last year’s cull, only farmers who agreed to adopt a closed-farm system of chicken-raising were given money to buy chicks). Now, in the midst of the third wave of the epidemic — which arrived here in July 2005, just as the government was preparing to pronounce the country free of bird flu — the minister of agriculture and co-operatives has set June 2006, the start of the rainy season, as the deadline for most backyard chickens to be housed.

Presumably, then, the morning will come when the headman of our village announces over the loudspeaker that everyone who raises chickens (so, everyone) is to report to the community hall to hear someone from the Department of Livestock Development explain the new requirements for chicken enclosures. That will likely be the beginning of the end for free-range chickens in our village.

Changes like this have occurred before. Thirty years ago, water buffalo were nearly as common as chickens, but they’ve almost disappeared, replaced by tractors. Some people miss the buffalo, but they were standing in the way of progress. Perhaps when everyone in our village lives in a concrete house and buys their food from shops, backyard chickens too will have outlived their usefulness. At the moment, however, they are still a key component of our livelihood, and their loss will be significant.

The government claims that it wishes to preserve the right of villagers to raise their own chickens. But the cost of a biosecure barn will prove too much for most people. Certainly, those with only three or four hens won’t earn enough from them to pay back a loan. Even housing chickens in an inexpensive structure will make raising them prohibitively expensive; since they can’t forage, we’ll have to buy concentrated feed for them. We’ll also be losing their services as eaters of insect pests and weeds.

The loss will be not only financial but cultural. People here plant and harvest to the sounds of the squawking, slaughtering, and stewing of chickens. If we lived in Canada, my husband might have the guys over for beer and hot dogs. Here, it’s chicken and whisky. (Bonus: they do all their own cooking and sometimes even clean up after themselves.) Whenever a new house goes up, men traditionally do the construction while women slaughter and prepare chickens. It would be poor hospitality to buy the meat of improved breeds, which is considered inferior. The birds are also used in local religious ceremonies. While nominally Buddhist, most rural Thais are essentially animist. In our village, the guardian spirits require one chicken per year from each household — more if an illness has occurred.

If the government were truly acting in the best interests of the nation, we could perhaps stomach the loss of our chickens. But as people like Arun Waikham, a leader in Thailand’s alternative agriculture movement, argue, this isn’t entirely about the avian flu. “The government is overreacting in the name of public health to protect the interests of big agribusiness corporations,” Waikham says.

Thailand was the fourth-largest poultry exporter in the world in 2003, bringing in $1.2 billion (US). News of the first wave of bird flu hit in January 2004 amid accusations — later substantiated — that the government had withheld important information for two months in order to protect the industry. Since that time, critics note, large, closed farms have become powerful gestation grounds for the disease — once avian flu enters a barn, mortality rates are almost always high because confined chickens have weaker immune systems than free-range ones. Seen in this light, the government’s preference for bio-secure chicken farming looks like just one more policy designed to industrialize and commodify everything, to draw everyone under the sway of the gdp.