Harnessing ethnographic methods to explore the epidemiological significance of livestock trading practices: the case of Chennai's broiler chicken trade

Compared to the practices in production and retailing of broiler chickens, the wholesale broiler trade is less well understood. With the increasing concern about zoonotic diseases with pandemic potential transmissible by poultry, especially high pathogenicity avian influenza, it is important to understand how and through what kinds of business models and practices broilers are moved between production areas and cities. Such understanding can contribute to establish tailored surveillance and mitigation approaches. Ethnographic methods are uniquely positioned for gaining in-depth insights into human practices and the determinants that underpin their persistence and motivate or constrain their change. Ethnography’s potential to contribute to epidemiological risk modelling and dynamic approaches to risk prevention and mitigation, for example through exploring biosecurity practices and the socio-economic factors influencing them, has been underutilised to date. In this study we took an ethnographic approach to research with wholesale live broiler traders in the South Indian city of Chennai, visiting premises and conducting interviews with interlocutors of 13 broiler wholesale enterprises and some related upstream and downstream actors over a period of 18 months in 2021 and 2022. We describe the business relations between wholesale broiler traders and upstream actors in production whom traders source birds from and their downstream wholesale clients such as retailers, caterers and restaurants. We then discuss traders’ business models and associated broiler procurement and distribution practices from a perspective of disease transmission risks. Further, we show how situating current configurations of wholesale broiler trade within its broader historical trajectory and anticipated future from a Chennai-centric perspective constitutes important context towards dynamic approaches to assess evolving disease transmission risks in changing poultry production and distribution networks (PDNs). More broadly, the study thus proposes methodological innovations for epidemiology and One Health research by further embedding ethnography and social sciences into their toolkits.