From Brussels to Brasília, policymakers have long championed poultry as a “transition meat” — a pragmatic alternative to climate-intensive beef. Chicken is lower-emission, relatively affordable, scalable across global markets and often promoted as a leaner, lower-fat option compared with pork or beef. In political shorthand: the least-worst option.
But as a fresh wave of highly pathogenic avian influenza, also known as bird flu, sweeps across continents — killing hundreds of millions of birds, infecting some mammal species and prompting sweeping lockdowns — the virus is edging closer to spilling over into humans. That is putting the poultry playbook under stress.
In the U.S., more than 90 million birds have been culled over the past year. In Poland, the hardest-hit EU country, over 11.5 million were culled in the first months of 2025 to stop the disease from spreading.
Behind those numbers lie deeper dilemmas: ethical shortcuts, epidemiological risk and a protein system optimized for speed, not resilience.
Brussels clamps down on the coop
The European Commission moved in early April to expand protection zones and tighten biosecurity rules in Poland, which alone accounted for some 80 of the EU’s 200 confirmed outbreaks of highly pathogenic bird flu this year. The Commission had warned that Poland’s initial response posed a risk to biosecurity in the EU’s borderless internal market and threatened measures that would have effectively shut down all exports from the country.
Under pressure from Warsaw, Brussels stepped back from its toughest proposals, but not without conditions: The Commission asked the Polish authorities to present an “action plan” to contain the virus, which it agreed to monitor closely.