Grocery Update #56: Why The Trump USDA Will Make Avian Flu Even Worse.
How The Trump Administration Doubled Down On The Production Practices That Supercharge Pandemics.
Why The Trump USDA Will Make The Avian Flu Outbreak Even Worse.
By Rob Wallace
Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist, agroecologist, and economic geographer. He is author of essay collections Big Farms Make Big Flu, Dead Epidemiologists, and The Fault in Our SARS.
He has consulted on infectious disease and ecohealth for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also co-founded Pandemic Research for the People and the People's CDC. Please support his work here.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last week, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins offered a five-prong strategy for controlling the present H5N1 outbreak in an effort to "restore stability to the egg market over the next three to six months."
The $1 billion plan Rollins describes offers half what the Biden administration spent in its own inadequate efforts to control the outbreak.
There is an implicit presumption in Rollins's op-ed that the immediate outbreak is the sole cause for the increase in egg prices. Rollins speaks nothing of the food sector's documented greedflation in raising food prices since the start of the COVID pandemic, nor of the secular increase in egg prices since 2000. Nor of the long failure of the egg industry's efforts to self-regulate disease control efforts.
Neither does Secretary Rollins address the model of production that externalizes outbreak losses off company balance sheets and onto contract farmers for poultry directly killed by bird flu and onto the American taxpayer for preventative culling. Such an arrangement permits bird flu to continue to spread without a loss in agribusiness profit.
Nor does Rollins remark on the possibility that rolling back culling will have no impact on helping food birds develop natural resistance when industrial poultry don't reproduce on-site. In isolating breeding to the grandparent level off-shore, the sector has removed natural selection as a free ecosystem service for building resistance to circulating pathogens in real time.
Rollins also offers nary a word about the potential deadly pandemic the H5N1 now circulating represents, as if increasing egg prices are the only danger here.
The present outbreak represents more than a passing emergency. It embodies the bigger health and economic black hole at the heart of the present model of food production. Treating the sustenance upon which we depend for life as if it's only like making widgets is helping destroy our ecology and social relations, together the bedrock of our civilization.
The outbreak is no hiccup. U.S. sourced swine flu H1N1 went pandemic in 2009, swine H3N2v circulated in 2011, and H5N2 hit millions of poultry in 2015. Other livestock influenza, including various new H5Nx since 2022, and expansive outbreaks of Salmonella and Campylobacter also mark the increasing frequency and spatial extent pathogens have undertaken the past two decades.
There are other disease dangers specific to industrial food production, including African swine fever, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Vibrio, Yersinia, and a variety of other novel influenza A variants, including H1N2v, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.
One of the aspects of bird flu few can get their minds wrapped around is the numbers involved. The U.S. raised 9.4 billion broilers in 2023 alone. That'd mean any plan to vaccinate them all on their present throughput schedule would involve vaccinating 1.08 billion birds every six weeks.
Such a scale of intervention could put significant pressure on the virus to evolve resistance, much in the way the H5N1 Fujian strain evolved out from underneath similar vaccination in China in the aughts.
(Photo By Grocery Nerd, Jr.)
Should the feds choose to oversee or contract out a significantly lesser number of vaccinations, we move more into the measles-in-Texas arena, wherein the virus still finds vast epidemiological room to transmit. And that would place us exactly back at the kind of half-ass strategy of the previous administration pursued testing interstate cows and culling infected flocks or those nearby outbreaks, even as the virus can repeatedly jump along with host shipments well beyond spatially proximate areas.
If, on the other hand, the focus is on egg prices and the vaccination campaign is directed at layer chickens alone, the billions of unvaccinated broilers could continue to serve as a large reservoir for repeated spillover into layer barns.
This all assumes the appropriate vaccines can be developed.
Vaccination is certainly a part of any tool chest of possible interventions. And vaccines for the present H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b appear effective. But vaccination is a reactionary intervention, in the sense that inoculations specific to a current variant typically are developed and deployed only upon the infection of thousands if not millions of hosts beforehand. And sometimes that's too late, beyond issues of quality control. U.S. R&D outright failed to develop a vaccine in time for the H5N2 outbreak a decade ago.
Other countries do pursue a control strategy based on vaccination. China and Vietnam, for instance. For cultural reasons, Thailand pursues prevention, culling, and minimizing live bird markets instead. Whichever strategy they choose, these countries dedicate the governance and animal health infrastructure needed to succeed. Setting aside the key question whether growing out the kind of industrial poultry that's driving bird flu evolution should be pursued in the first place, these countries succeed only because they match the scale of biocontrol intervention to the scale of the problem.
Secretary Rollins, in contrast, claims the funding for the USDA program is to be found by DOGE savings carved out of the USDA institution itself and out of departmental programs funded by Congress or approved projects already awarded to farmers, NGOs, agribusiness, and land grant universities.
So the new plan to control bird flu also aims to gut the kind of administration and nonpharmaceutical interventions needed to make a vaccination campaign work. Exactly the kinds of gaps in outreach, infrastructure, and more structural intervention that led to the failure of the COVID vaccine campaign.
The tradeoff represents something analogous to feeding someone hungry by cutting off their arms. People kind of need those arms to serve themselves the next meal.
Rollins proposes half-a-billion dollars for implementing "gold standard" biosecurity, promising to cover 75 percent of the costs for each farm.
There are 168,048 farms (2022) selling poultry and eggs, hosting 384 million layer chickens (2023), ranging, in the larger in-line operations, from 50,000 birds to 6 million. While some operations may have already instituted "gold standard" biosecurity, $500 million for 168,048 farms means a whole $2,975 per farm.
Will the funding cover the stated objective?
There are two additional administrative problems. In making this an opt-in program, farmers must choose to participate, with the administrative overhead and 25 percent additional costs to cover. Only the largest operations are likely able to cover these, placing additional pressure on continuing farm consolidation.
Pathogens have been weaponized this way before. Disease ecologist Luis Chaves previously showed illness to farmers can force smallholders to sell off their farms to larger landowners.
In spite of Rollins's assurances to the contrary, "gold standard" is more a term of art centered on wishful thinking however well-intended than documented epizoology. Back in the 2015 outbreak, farmers were counseled for months on the necessity and means of biosecurity and still couldn't keep the H5N2 from spreading.
Why? The virus had evolved beyond the model of production developed. In the course of industrializing poultry production, agribusiness domestic and abroad had industrialized the pathogens that circulate among flocks and herds.
The highly pathogenic avian influenza evolve greater deadliness and infectiousness the more birds are stuffed together, the less genetic diversity they share, the faster their turnaround, and the greater the stress that depresses immune function. All food for the deadlier flu strains.
“All-in/all-out” production, an attempt to control outbreaks by growing out cohorts in batches, may introduce transmission optima at the level of the barn or farm. The practice may select for a population infection threshold per barn that lines up with finishing times the industry sets for its herds or flocks. That is, successful strains evolve life histories that kill farm animals grown out and near slaughter, when stock are most valuable to farmers.
We've long known H5Nx spreads on fomites on the wind. The sector is moving toward vacuum-packing barns with negative or positive pressure and filters on air going in, out, or both. Perimeter fencing, rodent-proofing, machinery dedicated by barn, incinerating or composting dead animals, separate lunchrooms, and other efforts at biosecurity. And still the pathogens spread.
Farms that require stringent biosecurity are typically spatially clustered in specific parts of U.S. states out of firm-internal economies of scale and local land use regulation, producing super-epidemiologies that extend beyond any one farm’s capacity to control an outbreak, with decided impacts upon human spillover and pathogen fitness. Many millions of susceptible birds to infect just down the road.
That means the proper scale of intervention isn't just one farm or another, but requires the kind of regional planning U.S. public health and animal health have come to abandon as a matter of anti-state principle, turning health into the "you do you" individualism of—in the case of farms—hosing down trucks, showering, and wearing protective gear.
Viruses can refuse to cooperate along temporal dimensions as well. Some epizoological dynamics are so irregular and unpredictable that the possibility of eradication is eliminated whatever disease control efforts are developed.
Infectious disease, pollution, and farmworker abuse are part and parcel of the sector's diseconomies of scale that no adjustments to the modes of production can weed out. The relations of production that drive this damage are kept in place as the profits involve serve as the system's prime directive. Depending, however, on who holds the locus of control—farmers or the multinational input suppliers and end buyers.
The additional $400 million in financial relief Rollins promises farmers whose flocks are struck by bird flu, alongside promising faster approval to restart operations after an outbreak, offers the ironic possibility of worsening the outbreak.
Instead of covering farmer bills and mortgages in the equivalent of sheltering-in-place until the outbreak passes, Rollins's USDA aims to cover farmers only enough to get them back into production to keep meat and eggs on the market cheap. Epidemiologically, however, farmers would only be resetting another set of susceptible pins for the viral bowling bowl still bouncing about country lanes.
Rollins likewise promises to reverse California's minimum space requirements for poultry in an effort to bring down the price of eggs. Such efforts would increase the very chicken densities that help spread the bird flu she claims is driving egg prices.
In the end, if, despite over 300 million layers, the U.S. finds itself down to importing millions of eggs from Turkey and other countries as Rollins promises, the price of eggs isn't the only indictment of the system.
Yes, pursue biosecurity barn-by-barn. Adopt culling, vaccination, or both, but at the scale of the problem as other countries do and without the dithering that undercuts any strategy we choose. Place public health officials in the driver's seat over agribusiness leadership on the outbreak. The first objective should be to stop the outbreak, not externalize its costs in favor of the sector's uninterrupted profiteering.
Adopt the kind of legislation Nebraska is considering to protect the health and finances of contract farmers, farmworkers, and meatpackers who often serve as the conduit of infection from food animals to the general population.
Bigger picture, as part of a larger program, we need to reintroduce agrobiodiversity to act as a series of immune firebreaks against the evolution and spread of these deadly pathogens. To that effort, we need to return much of the control over what to grow and how back to farmers and farming communities rather than solely in the hands of out-of-state input suppliers and end buyers.
Yet we can see a different end game in the USDA's plans for bird flu. The crisis of an outbreak is being deployed as a gambit in disaster capitalism. The aim appears more to position bird flu to help counterattack efforts to fix the model of production that brought about the disaster in the first place. The objective here is to cash out at the end of the American cycle of accumulation, whether or not the country called the United States of America keeps going.
peace.