Industrial farming practices could be boosting the spread of bird flu.
Avian influenza has been detected in poultry across the country, including in North Carolina, where 3.3 million birds had to be culled because of the disease at one farm alone in January.
Rania Masri, co-director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, said concentrated animal feeding operations used for poultry are a breeding ground for disease.
“CAFOs by design amplify the formation, the mutation and the spread of new viruses,” Masri explained. “Which can very simply and quickly transform into a full-blown epidemic.”
Masri pointed out industrial farms in North Carolina disproportionately affect low income communities and communities of color. Her organization signed a letter with other public interest groups calling for more transparent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The North Carolina Environmental Justice Network is also calling on the state to be more transparent with its data.
Craig Watts, a farmer and director of the contract grower transition program for the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, said diseases like bird flu at large industrial operations can create bottlenecks, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic when farms did not have workers and had to kill their birds.
“While they’re killing those birds in the field, now our shelves are empty,” Watts observed. “If you have smaller, more localized, regional, you might have an issue in, say, North Carolina but maybe it wouldn’t affect Nebraska like a breakdown in the industrial system will.”
Masri believes the control of the industry by a small handful of corporations is bad for democracy.
“The only thing that the industrial farming is good for is the shareholders of these mega-corporations,” Masri contended.
