science that should attend to human behaviour and its regulation. But an alternative social science approach involves broadening the analysis and questioning the extent to which control can be re- asserted by regulators and retailers. Taking our cue from sociologist Charles Perrow,


we’ve suggested that bugs like Campylobacter don’t so much use failures to breach the systems that deliver chicken to the table, rather they breed within that system. In turn, food poisoning should be regarded as a ‘normal’ accident that is characteristic of ‘just-in-time’ production. Cheap chickens require a tightly coupled


system that involves breeding and setting out genetically similar birds in densely stocked, high-volume sheds, the rapid throughput of birds (chickens are finished in half the time compared to only a few decades back), animal bodies that are (in the words of one industry vet) ‘one hand clap’ from diarrhoea, and casual labour that moves from farm to farm to thin and then empty poultry houses at break-neck speed. Viewed in this way, the efforts at disease control that retailers and processors talked to us about look rather optimistic. In short, it doesn’t take much in this system to tip the balance in favour of a bacteria that is already common in the guts of birds and that can, in stressful and high pressure conditions, spread to the muscles and the tissues that people commonly eat. There are limits to the ways in which


further hygiene, control and biosecurity can be implemented in a food system that is so tightly coupled and delicately balanced. Contracts between retailers, processors and growers already specify a great deal about the process. As one processor told us, the major retailers already know more about their suppliers and the farms they source from


than any other player in the chain. The problem may not be knowledge and surveillance or the further specification of contract, it may be that the very economics of aiming for mass sales at low margin and the ‘contracted’ or foreshortened lives of chickens conspires to make life less not more safe. As the anthropologist Sarah Dry has noted,


the tendency in dealing with emerging infectious diseases is to adopt a ‘fast-twitch’ or acute approach to a situation that many agree has plenty of ‘slow- twitch’ or chronic causes. And this tendency may be part of the problem. Campylobacter is not unique in this sense – the focus on contamination sets up and offers as a solution an inside/outside dichotomy that is common to a suite of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases that affect people, environments and both wild and domestic animals. Keep the disease outside the system and all


will be well might be the mantra of biosecurity, but it may be the systems themselves that require diagnoses and treatment. Indeed, as we have detailed in this work, and in a forthcoming book, Pathological Lives, it is not so much the ability to exclude microbes or their vectors from food and farming systems that is key, but it is the terms on which life is produced and the ways in which the inevitable entanglements between hosts, microbes and environments are handled that require critical analysis. n


i


Steve Hinchliffe, Professor of Geography in the College of Life and Environmental Social Sciences, University of Exeter Email stephen.hinchliffe@exeter.ac.uk Telephone 01392 725400 Web www.biosecurity-borderlands.org ESRC Grant Number RES-062-23-1882


Biosecurity Borderlands: Making biosecurity work in a complex landscape


SOCIETY NOW AUTUMN 2014 23


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