Here's the article on bird flu I've been "waiting for" (excerpt):
Look to the giant 'chicken jails' or chicken factory farms around the world as a more likely source for emerging Bird Flu viruses, not to small peasant chicken farmers, and we might be closer to the truthSomething that doesn't seem to be mentioned by most people looking to free animals from cruel conditions is that there are additional strong reasons to tear down the factory farming system that might make it even easier to spur the mainstream into supporting an abolition of that system.
One of these is the massive vertical integration of agribusiness and their quest for global domination of the food supply. And it's not just genetically-modified animals we have to worry about. Wholly separate from health concerns, genetic tampering of any items in the food supply leads to further control by multinational companies, and further squeezes out local farmers throughout the world. It's a dangerous trend that is nearly beyond reversal. More:
Today, thanks to a project launched in the late 1950’s by two Harvard Business School professors--Ray Goldberg and John Davis--production of food has become a concentrated, vertically integrated multinational business, which they named agribusiness. The criterion is no longer human food safety or quality. It is corporate profit. Nutrition has become a pure cost-benefit calculation of shareholder value, just as trading in stocks in a car company might be.The article goes much deeper into the horrors of the industry and discusses how it may successfully exploit birdflu to further globalize their operations, particularly in Asia. A must read.
The industrialization of chicken-raising and slaughtering in the USA, which is known as ‘factory farming’ is a process whose inner workings are unknown to most people. Better it remained so some say. Were we to know, we likely would never again eat a Chicken McNugget or a KFC chicken dinner, both of which are supplied, by the way, by Tyson.
Today, five giant multinational agribusiness companies dominate the production and processing of chicken meat in the United States, and, as things seem to be going, especially were the world to be looney enough to adopt genetically modified chickens supposedly resistant to Avian Flu virus, these five companies are about to dominate world chicken supply.
Categories: agribusiness | chicken | avian flu | gmo | globalization
