Viral Economies

Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam

Natalie Porter

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226649139
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last decade, infectious disease outbreaks have heightened fears of a catastrophic pandemic passing from animals to humans. From Ebola and bird flu to swine flu and MERS, zoonotic viruses are killing animals and wreaking havoc on the people living near them. Given this clear correlation between animals and viral infection, why are animals largely invisible in social science accounts of pandemics, and why do they remain marginal in critiques of global public health?In Viral Economies, Natalie Porter draws from long-term research on bird flu in Vietnam to chart the pathways of scientists, NGO workers, state veterinarians, and poultry farmers as they define and address pandemic risks. Porter argues that as global health programs expand their purview to include life and livestock, they weigh the interests of public health against those of commercial agriculture, rural tradition, and scientific innovation. Porter challenges human-centered analyses of pandemics and shows how dynamic and often dangerous human-animal relations take on global significance as poultry and their pathogens travel through global livestock economies and transnational health networks. Viral Economies urges readers to think critically about the ideas, relationships, and practices that produce our everyday commodities, and that shape how we determine the value of life—both human and nonhuman.

1

Experimental Entrepreneurs

“[Small commercial flocks] are a feature of urbanizing societies or economies that are beginning to grow. . . . There is a general consensus that stricter biosecurity is needed for these flocks but it needs to be implemented in a way that helps the more entrepreneurial farmers to adopt new measures, using incremental steps rather than sudden changes. . . . If increased productivity could be demonstrated, this could become the incentive to apply biosecurity” (Honhold et al. 2008, 33–35).

This statement comes from a report by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which details options for implementing biosecurity procedures to protect human and nonhuman animals from harmful agents. Based on field studies of poultry production in Africa, Europe, and Asia, the report finds that biosecurity entails significant financial investments, and will therefore be most successful if taken up by risk-taking, entrepreneurial producers. What’s more, these imagined entrepreneurs are more likely to be motivated by increased productivity than by disease vulnerability, which means that biosecurity proponents should try to show a correlation between pathogen control and poultry output. This short excerpt clearly encapsulates how bird flu programmers align the interests of global public health with those of commercial livestock production. For the FAO, a key champion of One Health, the cultivation of flu-free poultry goes hand in hand with its commercialization.

I begin this story of bird flu governance with an examination of two biosecure farms, the first involving ducks and the second involving chickens. Each of these farms entails experimental modifications to poultry biology and ecologies, which in turn restructure how poultry interact with each other, farmers, and consumers. In what follows, I detail the novel exchanges between people, poultry, and pathogens that surface on biosecure farms, and consider the implications of these exchanges for the different actors involved. I contend that biosecurity experiments mark an emergent mode of health programming, which unites biological and commercial objectives, and envisions a future of livestock farming characterized by outbreak reduction and enhanced production. I further argue that by bridging health and commerce, biosecurity experiments mark a shift in how health workers understand and value health subjects. Namely, biosecurity proponents promote fowl more in terms of market viability than biological vulnerability, and they treat farmers more like enterprising entrepreneurs than susceptible smallholders. Among the results of biosecurity experiments, then, are new valuations that determine who will be biologically and economically secure.

Agriculture and environmental specialists began using the term “biosecurity” in the 1990s in response to foot-and-mouth disease outbreaks in the United Kingdom and related fears of bioterror. The term gained force in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the subsequent release of anthrax to government and media outlets. Since then, biosecurity has become a highly charged concept spanning the domains of public health, agriculture, and national security. It conjures an image of global bio-communicability, in which danger lurks within and across all kinds of boundaries (Sharp and Chen 2014). Bruce Braun puts it nicely when he says that biosecurity conceives of a human body “embedded in a chaotic and unpredictable molecular world, a body understood in terms of a genetic economy of exchange and circulation, haunted by the specter of newly emerging or still indefinable risks” (Braun 2007, 14).

Biosecurity is all about coping with exchange and circulation. But in the context of livestock economies, biosecurity is less about blocking biological exchanges than it is about promoting “good” biological exchanges (Hinchliffe, Enticott, and Bingham 2008). Livestock is livestock precisely because it is meant to enter into networks of exchange relations and market transactions. It must move. Strategies to securitize livestock pathogens must therefore occur alongside a broader effort to traffic in their carriers (Donaldson 2008; Enticott 2008). This is not an easy task, because risky interspecies exchanges often overlap with economically productive ones. On poultry farms in particular, biosecurity emerges in what Allen and Lavau (2015) call a relational economy of disease, in which measures to enhance productivity (such as increasing flock densities or using antibiotics) create an evolving landscape of harmful agents and commercial processes. Put simply, in livestock economies, good economic exchanges can also foster dangerous biological ones.

Because biosecurity intervenes in overlapping and sometimes incompatible health and economic sectors, its efficacy is difficult to define and measure. At the time of my fieldwork (and up until today), it remains unclear if biosecurity measures actually prevent bird flu. The report I opened with states:

To date, there has been little work completed on the role of improved biosecurity in slowing down the spread of HPAI or on how sustainable biosecurity measures are likely to be. There has been little involvement of those who will have to implement biosecurity to assess which, if any, measures are practical and sustainable, or whether enhanced biosecurity is likely to be adopted. There are few examples of best practices or results of trials. These are all key areas that need to be addressed (Honhold et al. 2008, 10).

Bird flu programmers in Vietnam were concerned about the uncertainty surrounding biosecurity, and in 2009 the FAO and the Vietnamese Department of Animal Health launched a working group to create a list of good practices biosecurity guidelines to try, or experiment with, in affected communities. An FAO advisor told me that the guidelines would address inconsistent information about biosecurity and provide a standard set of practices that could be adapted to farms of different sizes and with different poultry breeds. To get started on the guidelines, the FAO office in Hanoi invited the lead author of the above biosecurity report to convene a workshop to discuss key biosecurity principles and how they might be tested in the Vietnamese context. He arrived in the capital just a few months after publishing the report, and his visit comprised part of a global pilgrimage to introduce his findings to affected nations.

The author, a veterinary specialist, began the workshop by focusing attention on the ever-present pathogenic potential of the “human-animal interface.” He stated that anthropogenic changes to animal ecosystems are the primary drivers of pathogen emergence and proliferation. “The disease is mostly spread by the action of man [sic], moving either infected birds or contaminated materials.” Biosecurity, he explained, addresses the risky interspecies interface by taking the public health principle of social distancing and applying it across species. This means enclosing uninfected poultry through barriers that limit contact with outside agents; cleaning tools and objects that come into contact with poultry and poultry products; and disinfecting production areas before bringing new flocks onto the farm. Together, these measures restrict pathogen circulation by reducing poultry’s proximities to other potentially infectious animals and materials, both human and nonhuman.

Importantly, the measures that the consultant introduced in Hanoi were not meant to be unique to Vietnam, but rather constituted a first step in an ongoing agenda for global livestock securitization. Developed by the FAO in collaboration with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), the global biosecurity agenda recommends compartmentalizing infection-free poultry within a standardized transnational governance system, and then zoning those birds into regions far removed from birds whose health status is unknown (World Organization for Animal Health 2015). On this view, biosecurity is both a biological and commercial endeavor, one that limits global trade to epidemiologically circumscribed species varieties or what the OIE calls “disease free” poultry subpopulations.

Experimental Life

Biosecurity is global in scope but locally adaptive; it’s a principal intervention for bird flu, but its capacity to stem infection is unclear; and it seeks to bridge health and economic objectives, even though they are often at odds with one another. In all of these ways, biosecurity exemplifies the experimental ethos of bird flu governance. In Vietnam, on-the-farm biosecurity interventions test unproven ways of governing people-poultry-pathogen relations in order to gather information about their feasibility down the road. In doing so, they draw together different actors (vets, public health workers, farmers, and fowl), each with their own unique ways of addressing harmful biological agents. These experiments happen in situ: they modify existing exchanges between people and poultry as a means to investigate future options for securitizing and commoditizing life.

Addressing pathogens and productivity in equal measure, biosecurity experiments take a multipronged approach that includes biologically designing birds to increase their immunity, and socially situating them in new exchange relations with humans. To capture the poultry varieties and the people-poultry relations that surface on biosecure farms, I also take a multipronged approach, and elaborate a distinction between life forms and forms of life. Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich defines life forms as “embodied bits of vitality called organisms, variously apprehended as ranged into species,” and forms of life as “cultural, social, symbolic, and pragmatic ways of thinking and acting that organize human communities” (2009, 6). Put simply, a life form is a living organism and a form of life is a way of living. Though distinct, I suggest that life forms and forms of life mutually constitute each other, and I am interested in how they do so in bird flu experiments; in this case on biosecure farms.

Life forms and forms of life are both ripe for experimentation. Stefan Helmreich and Sophia Roosth show that life form signals possibilities for how life might take shape. Life form conjures dual notions: of a bounded being capable of self-organization and self-regulation; and of an elastic being constantly adjusting to material circumstances (2016, 19, 24). Over time, scientists have imagined myriad ways that life can form in different settings and in response to different catalysts, and there is a long history of fashioning organisms according to evolving views about their capacity to affect, and be affected by, environments (Biesel and Boete 2013; Creager 2001; Davies 2011, 2012, 2013; Kohler 1994; Leonelli and Ankeny 2013; Ankeny et al. 2014; Lezaun and Porter 2015 Nading 2014a, 2014b; Nelson 2013, 2018; Rader 2004).

For anthropologists, sociocultural ideas and practices play a decisive role in the forms that life takes, and many have used forms of life to capture this dynamic. First developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, a form of life is a social agreement or convention that guides how individuals perceive and respond to the worlds around them. Veena Das defines a form of life as a complicated agreement—an entanglement of rules, customs, habits, examples, and practices that defines a person’s belonging in a culture as well as their ability to express themselves in that culture (1998, 176). Importantly, forms of life guide thought and action, but they are not entirely pre-determined or determining. “One might say that life has a pulsating, dynamic quality and that the question of what it is to have agreement in a form of life is not a matter settled once and for all, but has to be secured by the work done every day” (Cavell, in Das 2016, 170). Forms of life, in other words, are flexible, and this is particularly true in times of uncertainty. Michael Fischer uses emergent forms of life to describe everyday renegotiations that occur in the face of new problems. Using pandemics as one example, he suggests that such problems prompt affected communities to establish new relations of production and consumption and adopt new modes of thinking and feeling (Fischer 2005, 55; see also Zhan 2005). This work is messy. In emergent forms of life, different voices intersect and collide, objects and facts compete for authority, and new rules of play come into being.

Just like life forms, forms of life point to possibilities and problem solving; and just like life forms, they are open to tinkering and transformation. Experimentation. I want to bring these concepts together to explore how new life forms come into being alongside new forms of life on experimental, biosecure farms. This means pushing forms of life past the human communities they’re most often associated with (Hartigan 2015), and considering the unsettled agreements that surface among humans and nonhumans facing pandemic flu together.1 It also means asking how biosecure chickens and ducks habituate to poultry producing arrangements, while at the same time expressing capacious vitalities (Helmreich and Roosth 2016, 21) that are capable of transforming those arrangements along the way.

Model Ducks

I begin with the model ducks I encountered on biosecure farms in Đồng Tháp province in the Mekong Delta. These ducks comprised part of an integrated fish-duck farm, which sought to convert free-range duck production into an enclosed and more secure farming system. The traditional mode of duck production in the Mekong Delta consists of ducks moving from rice paddy to rice paddy, feeding on snails, insects, and crabs at various stages of rice maturation. As they do so, they till the fields and excrete vital nutrients that help the rice grow. Though they save money and labor, the introduction of mechanized cultivation and faster growing, pest-resistant rice varieties has put free-range ducks’ long-term survival into question. As early as the 1970s, state agricultural experts in Vietnam began investigating ways to redirect the productive potential of free-range ducks, and engaged in research and experiments to integrate duck and fish production. This work was suspended during the Second Indochina War, but has gained more attention in the last few decades and is now a key focus of bird flu programs promoted by the state in collaboration with the FAO and other partners.

Though there are local variations, the basic structure of these farms includes a fully enclosed duck coop built at a predefined distance from a bordered pond containing various kinds of fish. The ducks spend the night in the coops, but during daylight hours they are let into the pond where they scavenge for plankton and any other edibles assembling around the ducks. Just as they would in rice paddies, biosecure ducks excrete manure that enriches pond water and provides nutrients to fish. Farmers provide the ducks with a daily ration of certified commercial feed, but the idea is that grazing ducks require less sustenance and thereby allow farmers to save money. Model ducks don’t just promise to cut costs; they are also supposed to increase income. This is because their avian labor forms the foundation for producing fish, a secondary livestock product that is often more lucrative than ducks.

It’s easy to see how this system would attract biosecurity proponents keen to reach entrepreneurial farmers. Applying biosecurity principles to integrated fish-duck farms entails creating physical barriers and effecting social distancing measures to prevent the introduction and circulation of harmful agents. Biosecure fish-duck farms use space as well as netting, concrete, and other materials to protect duck coops and fish ponds from unwanted contact with outside agents. They also use as standardized feeding, health care, and cleaning practices that limit the interactions that ducks can have with farmers, fish, and each other.

In principle, these biosecurity measures seem straightforward. But these are real world experiments that gain their own life on the ground. A few months after I began my fieldwork in Đồng Tháp, the provincial veterinarian responsible for helping me carry out my research, Hạnh, invited me to join her on a visit to a few model duck farms. The farms were being piloted by a multinational NGO based in Ho Chi Minh City in collaboration with Đồng Tháp’s provincial and district-level veterinary departments. Hạnh explained that each month the NGO sent over representatives to check in on the progress of the farms and that she was responsible for escorting the visitors to the sites. She seemed miffed that she would have to spend all day with the representatives, which surprised me because Hạnh usually tackled her daily responsibilities with alacrity.

We began the day in a briefing session at the Provincial People’s Committee Office, where I met Hiền, Mỹ, and Thaí. Hiền and Mỹ had come from the multinational NGO’s headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City. Hiền was the project manager for the farm models and Mỹ was working in a supportive role. Both had training in the social sciences and international development. It was their third time in the province. Thái was a state-employed veterinarian in the district where the models were being piloted. He was the one responsible for making sure that the daily operations of the farms were up to spec. As the group began going over the schedule for the site visits, Thái shared some bad news. He informed us that of the eleven households initially participating in the biosecure-farming program, seven had pulled out. The problem, he explained, was that the variety of duck introduced on the biosecure farms was not suitable for this environment. Unlike the hybrid duck common to the area, apparently this variety struggled to survive in the southern climate and failed to fetch the market price promised by the NGO.

“People here don’t want to invest in biosecurity because the profit isn’t assured.”

“Yeah,” Hạnh added, “Just because the model worked in An Giang [province] doesn’t mean it will here. Plus, the contract for this program is too long. Even we [vets] don’t read all the guidelines. How can we expect the farmers to?”

Hiền shot back, “You need to interpret it for them. . . . You have to educate them! And tell them that only those with resources should farm poultry. Ultimately this is a project to prevent bird flu, not to promote economics.”

Hiền’s attempt to mark a distinction between bird flu prevention and commercial gain seemed ironic to me. My observations of other bird flu interventions as well as biosecurity strategizing sessions in Hanoi had all revealed a concerted effort on behalf of bird flu programmers to align virus control with increased productivity and profit. Indeed, all of the bird flu programs I observed conceived of farmers as rational economic actors pursuing higher profits and better livelihoods. But as I was to learn on this day, economic and health interests sometimes failed to link up in practice.

As the briefing went on, I learned that the model ducks were disease-free poultry populations raised on farms that had taken the FAO’s biosecurity principles and adapted them to the Mekong Delta ecology. Hiền showed me an image of the principles in action. It depicted the farm’s key features: a coop, yard, and pond. The pond was separated from the coop by at least six meters in order to deter waterborne microbial transfer (ideally any pathogen will perish in the time it takes to cover the distance). Three walls, a fence, and a roof enclosed the coop, the feeding troughs near the pond were also contained, and each farm component was separated from the other through a strategic placement of fences. Further, the entire system was distanced from the household, roads, and neighbors that were labeled, but too far away to appear in the picture. Social distancing materialized in this idealized image as a series of species separations, with spatial and structural barriers preventing poultry from coming into contact with other animals (including humans) outside of the biosecure space.

The farms I visited with Hạnh were laid out in a similar fashion. The duck flocks, a hundred or two hundred in number, waded at the edge of small, shallow ponds about ten meters square, dug about twenty meters from the household. Nylon fencing surrounded their enclosures, reaching up a few feet all around and down a few feet to the bottom of the ponds. The pond edges nearest the coops were cemented like a swimming pool and acted as a staging area where ducks could enter the water from their coops. The coops themselves were enclosed with aluminum roofs that opened on one end to the staging areas. The ponds were large enough for the ducks to kick their feet several times before wading into one another, though the animals I saw at each farm were either in their coops or clustered together at the edge of the ponds away from the open water. I was told that twice a day farmers scattered pre-measured commercial feed around the body of water for the ducks to feed on. At night, the birds slept in their coops.

Each week the ducks and their farmers received an unannounced visit from Thái (and any o...