Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the complexities of care within Vietnam’s broiler chicken industry. Drawing on understandings of care within feminist studies and economic anthropology, it examines the complexities of care and its malleability within industrial animal agriculture.

Presentation long abstract

Focusing on Northern Vietnam, this paper explores the complexities of care within Vietnam’s broiler chicken industry. Drawing on understandings of care within feminist studies and economic anthropology, the paper starts by examining the diverse ways in which considerations of care are relevant to this industry. We discuss the role of state and corporate interventions to strategically expand and change modes of production, including through classification of farming systems, control of breeds, feeding systems and medication/vaccination regimes. These changes complicate the spaces and forms of care that are enabled and depleted in broiler chicken farming. Chickens continue their cultural and social role within social relations of care, where the differentiation of ‘industrial’ chickens (gà công nghiệp) from the more highly prized ‘local’ chickens (gà ta) is significant. Yet industrialisation also enlists and supports certain forms of interspecies care within capitalist logics (e.g. optimal feed/growth regimes, mechanisation of slaughter), while deprioritising others (e.g. the freedom of chickens to bathe in dust or to roam outside in the interests of disease control). Chicken farming thus complicates and shapes care relations in specific ways. Through chickens, we see both the complexities of care within industrial animal agriculture, and its malleability within capitalist modes of production.