Maddening Media Misinformation on Biotech and Industrial Agriculture (Part 3 of 5)

ACSH
By Thomas R. DeGregori
August 16, 2007

Here’s Part 3 of a 5-part article series by Tom DeGregori focusing on the affects media misinformation has on both biotech agriculture and industrial agriculture.

Let me offer a concrete example of structural media bias, on avian influenza.

Not long after the avian influenza outbreak in Asia began to hit the news, the ideological activists were hitting the media with op-ed pieces and stories seeking to define the issue and its causes. In the United Kingdom, the activists have a coterie of journalists doing their bidding. All that is necessary is to keep them informed of the party line.

Wendy Orent was one of the first to seek to enlighten the public, with an op-ed piece that appeared in the Los Angeles Times and a number of other newspapers around the country including the Houston Chronicle (March 19, 2006). Her piece carried the title “Blame Big Chicken Farms for Bird Flu Threat” with the subtitle “Lethal virus is a product of the industrial poultry trade.” From the title alone, which is borne out by the article, one could surmise that there will be nothing equivocal or nuanced about it. The faithful were now fed the gospel truth. As a daily reader of the Chronicle, I cannot recall another point of view being offered either before or since, though obviously I could have missed one or two. It is possible that for many readers of the Chronicle and other papers where it was published, Orent’s piece was the only statement as to the nature and causes of bird flu.

Let us deconstruct Orent’s article. She begins by seemingly lamenting the idea that “chicken has never been cheaper.” These “industrial farming methods…may also have created the lethal strain of bird flu virus, H5N1, that threatens to set off a global pandemic.” The use of the term “may” is quickly overridden with language that does not allow for any doubt. In fact, one wonders why she even used it in the first place because Orent’s article leaves no doubt as to the “industrial” origins of avian influenza. Citing a Canadian flu virologist, Orent claims that the “lethal bird flu is entirely manmade, first evolving in commercially produced poultry in Italy in 1878.” Manmade sounds a bit sinister — almost but not quite like various conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS being a virus created at Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD that somehow got out. In the case of avian influenza, the manmade creative force was purportedly corporate greed.

Humans Will Have Human-Related Diseases

Orent does not seem to understand that in some sense all diseases that affect humans are a function of the way that we live and therefore in some vague sense “manmade.” When we were hunters and gatherers, humans got any number of diseases from the animals that we killed and ate. As humans developed agriculture and animal-rearing, some of the diseases that we got from animals became endemic to the settled community. As communities became larger and trade took place over ever-larger areas, new diseases transferable from humans to humans jumped from the animals that we kept and become global, with most remaining with us until recently. Orent, the author of Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease should know that. The term man-made is simply meaningless, since no matter how humans have lived, we have had disease. “Manmade” is introduced to prejudice the reader into accepting Orent’s argument and not to inform.

With six billion people on this planet, over half of them living in urban areas and a fivefold or more increase in per capita chicken production over the last half century, there was inevitably going to be a vastly increased density of chicken production. Just as circa-10,000 years ago, people starting to live in urban agglomerations created new disease threats, the increased density of chicken production has created new disease problems both for the birds and for the humans who reside near them or trade with them. With its ability to use various biosecurity protocols, much-maligned industrial chicken production would appear to be a way of adapting to the new disease reality.

I did a search for Earl Brown, Orent’s Canadian virologist and found the following quote. “The first report of a highly pathogenic bird flu was in 1878 in Italy.” I found a number of entries for Brown and in none of them was it indicated that it was “commercially produced poultry” in Italy. I am willing to apologize in advance to Orent if she can find a Brown quote that fits her citation. However, even if she could find such a quote, commercial production in Italy in 1878 is not going to be anything remotely like the “industrial” chicken to which she attributes blame. I also did a search for avian influenza/Scotland/1959 and found recent newspaper accounts referring to the 1959 outbreak in the “flocks” around Aberdeen. I found nothing about “industrial” chicken production in the area then or now, though there might be some now as it is a widespread method of raising poultry.

Romanticizing the Old Days

Orent continues with a romantic litany about “people living with backyard flocks of poultry since the dawn of civilization,” an idea repeated in various forms by many writers who, like Orent, blame the ills of avian influenza on “industrial” production. Since the dawn of poultry raising, humans have often seen their flocks devastated by disease, but the romantic litany of true believers denies this. They also refuse to recognize that influenza has regularly jumped from small Asian pig or poultry operations to humans and then spread around the world, often with a high toll in human life. Maybe the writers cannot remember these facts, but newspaper editors who accept their op-ed pieces ought to remember them or at least engage in bit of fact-checking. The ability to write such patent nonsense is clearly a function of knowing nothing or next to nothing about how people in the past produced food or the problems of food production that poor people in Asia have had and in some cases continue to have.

Whatever Orent’s views really are on cheap chicken, most of her fellow ideologues who also blame the “industrial chicken trade” very clearly believe that the extraordinary growth in chicken production and consumption in Asia was driven by corporate greed and did considerable harm and very little if any good. The anti-technology activists have two separate arguments — that (a) the twentieth century’s Green Revolution and related changes in overall food production did not increase food supply, but (b) if it did, it was — as in the case of chickens — not a good thing. As someone who has been going to Asia for the last thirty years or more and who has been involved in food production, I can say that I have seen the increased output in the fields, the statistics on the output, the food availability in the market, and, more dramatically, the very noticeable and very gratifying improvement in heath and nutrition in populations throughout Asia. When in the field, I have worked with small farmers in Asia and the rest of the Third World.

The Sins of Modernity Are Making Us Healthier

Certainly, Orent knows that the modern world against which she and her fellow activists rant has been steadily reducing both the morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases to low levels unprecedented in human history. How about the “manmade” extraordinary gains in human health and life expectancy over the last half century in Asia and in the rest of the world? It is no accident that the rise of modern industry was accompanied by declining infant and child mortality and increasing life expectancies. The knowledge, science, and technology that drove the creation of modern industry also drove the improvements in nutrition and the cures for so many diseases. We have also been growing taller from generation to generation, which is a marvelous indicator of improvements in human health and wellbeing. At an even six foot tall, I towered over everyone that I worked with in Asia when I first started going there over thirty years ago. Today when I go there, I find myself looking up to young men and women. The extraordinary increase in Asia in the per capita consumption of chicken and eggs, as well as beef, pork, milk and a variety of vegetables, is visually obvious in the health and height of the population. Globalization and the “industrial” production of many of these commodities so demonized by the activists can take much of the credit for these changes.

The paragraph following Orent’s “historical” narrative on avian influenza’s origins in Italy in 1878 and in Scotland in 1959 begins with a sentence that implies that throughout human history, humans have raised chickens in small backyard flocks without losses from disease. Too bad that Orent and like-minded ideologues have never worked with small farmers who had to be helped to deal with animal and plant losses, which has been the lot of farmers since Orent’s proverbial “dawn of civilization.” From the idyllic image of flocks of healthy chickens, we immediately leap to define the villain. “It wasn’t until poultry production became modernized, and birds were raised in much larger numbers and concentrations, that a virulent bird flu evolved.” This claim is followed with the standard explanation of how disease mutates and takes over large-scale chicken production.

“Industrial poultry-raising” are the first words in the next paragraph, since the demon has now been identified. This is followed with numbers indicating the eightfold growth in “chicken production in Southeast Asia…in thirty years to about 2.7 million tons,” as if this was some horrible happening. With the blame for avian influenza squarely placed on “industrial poultry-raising,” Orent has to explain why it is that the cases where bird flu has infected humans have been in small farms where people live in close proximity to their birds, or in live poultry markets. Orent has an explanation: “Virulent bird flu has left the factories and moved into the farmyards of the poor, where it has had devastating effects.”

Every responsible agency, such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., advising on the threat of avian influenza, expresses concerns about the dangers of live poultry markets. Through a contrary obsession with “industrial chicken production,” Orent and others are shifting the focus away from the most important areas for possible prevention.

(More to come on these topics tomorrow. See the prior entries in the series here and here. Go to Part 4 here.)

Thomas R. DeGregori is a Professor of Economics at the University of Houston and a member of the Founders Circle of the American Council on Science and Health. His homepage is: http://www.uh.edu/~trdegreg

Source: ACSH.