'Just-in-Time' Disease: Biosecurity, Corporate Power and Modern Factory Farming

The ever-growing consumer appetite for chicken has been accompanied by the ever-increasing industrialization of poultry production. In the UK, market power is concentrated in a handful of retailers who exercise arm’s length control over poultry processors, who manage every stage of the supply chain to ensure ‘just-in-time’ production. Protecting the profit from factory-farmed meat requires protecting it (and consumers) from foodborne disease risk. For the poultry industry, this risk is generally perceived as disease incursion from outside the confined environment of the farm. For their critics, the risk is internal to such agro-ecological systems, which provide prime conditions for the amplification and spread of disease, whilst intensifying the birds’ vulnerability. In this paper, we contend that such ecologies of production are part of a relational economy of disease, in which disease is an indeterminate outcome of commercial and regulatory pressures, folded into a mutable world of pathogens, animal and human bodies.