To what degree are food security and profit, the two goals of animal identification, amenable? The USDA just released their implementation plan (PDF) for the National Animal Identification System (NAIS), a "a cooperative State-Federal-industry partnership to standardize and expand animal identification programs and practices to all livestock species and poultry", and USDA secretary Mike Johanns just held a press conference about it. Straight from the horse's mouth...:

As many are aware, [NAIS] will also help the U.S. livestock industry to remain competitive. Traceability is being used as a marketing tool by several countries. For example, Australia is aggressively marketing animal traceability to gain a competitive advantage over us. We know how important the export market is to livestock producers, and we want to retain our competitiveness in the international arena.

BTW, don't you love use of cowboy graphics to market this stuff?

So claims a poultry extension agent at Purdue, who cites the dangers of cockfighting,"multiple species", and Asians who "sleep closely" with their fowl as reasons why the American vertically integrated, closed-off industrial system is safer.

B.S., says Mike Davis, who recently on Democracy Now argued that the threat of Avian Flu is greatly increased by both the power of industrial poultry agribusiness and the new ecology of industrial poultry farming. What we have seen, he says, is the

"generalization around the world of the American model of poultry production, the Tyson model. Tyson is the giant poultry producer, one of the most exploitative corporations in the United States with just an appalling record of working conditions. Tyson kills several billion chickens a year. It's created huge conurbations of chickens, unprecedented concentrations of chickens.

Now this model has spread to East Asia. China has become the biggest consumer of poultry in the world, and the leading company involved in China is a Thai-based firm called C.P., which has used the Tyson model, a vertical integration of concentrating poultry in enormous warehouses. And it was directly involved in the Thai government's cover-up of the initial outbreak of avian flu in Thailand last year. The industrialization of poultry, above all, has sped up the evolution of influenza. It's changed the nature of disease by changing its ecology."

There's a new report by Devlin Kuyek and GRAIN about the bird flu crisis. For all you executives, here's the Executive Summary:

Backyard or free-range poultry are not fuelling the current wave of bird flu outbreaks stalking large parts of the world. The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu is essentially a problem of industrial poultry practices. Its epicentre is the factory farms of China and Southeast Asia and -- while wild birds can carry the disease, at least for short distances -- its main vector is the highly self-regulated transnational poultry industry, which sends the products and waste of its farms around the world through a multitude of channels. Yet small poultry farmers and the poultry biodiversity and local food security that they sustain are suffering badly from the fall-out. To make matters worse, governments and international agencies, following mistaken assumptions about how the disease spreads and amplifies, are pursuing measures to force poultry indoors and further industrialise the poultry sector. In practice, this means the end of the small-scale poultry farming that provides food and livelihoods to hundreds of millions of families across the world. This paper presents a fresh perspective on the bird flu story that challenges current assumptions and puts the focus back where it should be: on the transnational poultry industry.