Infection, compensation, containment and justice: biosecurity and value in the 2017 avian flu outbreak in Cape Town, South Africa

• In Event: Not Global Health (?): Theorizing Biomedical Governance from the South

Abstract

In late 2017, a highly-pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) outbreak swept across southern Africa, devastating in particular the poultry industry in the Western Cape and affecting supplies and prices of eggs and meat in the city of Cape Town. More than three million birds died or were culled nationally, and state vet services in the Western Cape struggled to contain the outbreak, as chicken died more quickly than could be culled. Wild populations of swift terns have emerged as a possible vector that continues to threaten the poultry industry, but more significantly, state vet services are beginning to understand the vital articulations between medium-sized layer operations (largely white-owned) and informal (township) economies of disposing of laying hens when they become unprofitable. In the translation of industrial laying poultry into imileqwa (tough, wiry, tasty, rural chickens at the heart of Black African urban consumption of protein) that came into sharp focus in the slippage around what constituted “culling” lies a complex economy of containment and compensation. The handling of the outbreak has amplified intense public debates about claims to justice, state provision, and redistribution in the context of a crisis of a deepening drought that might devastate the city in 2018/2019. Poultry farmers reluctant to cull wanted compensation from the state; state vets wanted to limit the re-sale of chickens into informal markets in order to limit potential zoonotic infection; informal re-sellers suddenly lost all revenue, the price of eggs shot up, and the search for imileqwa suddenly went (inter)national. In this paper, we present a thick ethnographic account of the state response to the outbreak, tracing the course of the outbreak and the technologies deployed by veterinarians, health officials, politicians, and ordinary citizens, in order to consider how ideas about enforcement, containment, compensation, and value are mediated and translated across forms of life and death.

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In contrast to the biosecurity complex much described elsewhere (Keck 2015, Lakoff, etc), our case illustrates how the biopolitics of bird flu in this postcolonial urban setting elicits ambivalent concerns about security and readiness, the value of life and the place of animals in the city. Examining how pathogens, species, and populations come together across unstable lines of transmission, infection, and consumption, we argue that informal economies and local institutional arrangements are important factors that shape local technologies of biosecurity and preparedness.

Authors

• Thomas Cousins, University of Oxford

• Michelle Pentecost, Kings College London