The Biopolitics of Industrial Chicken: Accumulation, Health and Disease in Capitalist Poultry Production

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown again that human and nonhuman lives are always already bound
together within what we call the 'social' (Haraway, 2008). Recognition of this constitutive
relationality has driven recent 'more-than-human' developments across various disciplines including
sociology that have sought to challenge entrenched dualistic categories. This research aims to
contribute to this growing research area through a critical examination of the 'poultry' industry,
biosecurity discourse and zoonoses.
Each year, at least 75 billion birds are killed within the poultry industry (FAOSTAT, 2022). It has been
suggested that intensive rearing/slaughter of poultry contributes to the emergence and evolution of
zoonotic pathogens such as avian influenza, Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. Coli, and antibiotic
resistance. The 'imminent' threat of an Influenza A pandemic and wide-range antimicrobial
resistance mean that these pathogens are dangers to public health. The industry's response to
outbreaks has been to propagate a discourse of biosecurity based on scientific knowledge ('poultry
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science'), with an emphasis on the 'freeness from disease' of industrial operations. This discourse
can be observed within the guides and advertisements of poultry companies/associations and even
reports provided by the FAO (2013). It has been accompanied by a range of biotechnological 'fixes',
including intensive confinement, use of antibiotics, and automated slaughter employed for both
efficiency and putative sanitary gains. Yet biosecurity in poultry science is contested and ambiguous,
a space where differing knowledge claims are struggled over and enacted. This research will trace
this ambiguity in order to explore the ontological-epistemic politics of biosecurity discourse and
associated knowledge-practices in the poultry industry. It will critically examine whether/how the
industry is able to partially enrol or co-opt science, and to what extent and by what means it is able
to influence knowledge-making and gain public support through its self- representations.
Inseparable from this is the capitalist nature of the industry. In conversation with the growing
literature on 'animal capital' (Shukin, 2009), this research will therefore also probe the specific value
of birds to poultry capital and how their appropriation for accumulation is linked to human labour. It
will trace how the practices of the industry incorporate birds into more-than-human circuits of
value, asking how in turn do these practices figure in the biosecurity discourse. Modifying Bennett
et al. (2018)'s provocative points about the global biomass of broiler chickens being a definitive
marker of the 'Anthropocene', I will ask how 'poultry' can instead be problematised as a 'marker
species' of the 'Capitalocene' (Moore, 2016).