In modern disaster management theory, when any large system experiences a major shock or failure, you assess the risk, activate an ordered emergency response, and manage the after-effects. In the world of real people hit directly by the real shock, you look for someone to blame.
For ordinary Mexicans this week, who faced the shutdown of their country by swine flu and an unknown number of deaths, it was a culprit that was needed.
The Fred Goodwin of the epidemic was easy to identify in their eyes. Just five miles from the town of La Gloria, which appears to be the epicentre of the flu outbreak, is a giant industrial pig complex jointly owned by the world's largest pig processor, Smithfield Foods.
Smithfield is adamant that the swine flu is not of its making and has no connection to its factory farms in Mexico or in any of the countries where it has established its powerful presence. By the end of the week, the company had, like a besieged banker, gone into shutdown mode and declined to give interviews, but it issued a statement: "We have found no evidence of the presence of influenza virus in any of our pig herds or any of our employees at any of our worldwide operations. All our herds are tested regularly for disease including influenza. We routinely administer flu vaccines to protect them and conduct monthly tests to examine the presence and identity of different flu strains."
When a young boy from La Gloria who had been ill in March became the earliest confirmed case of the current swine flu outbreak, following new tests by the US Centre for Disease Control (CDC) on previously cleared samples from Mexico, Smithfield said it too was re-examining its herds. It was confident that it could reassure people who have been "bombarded by unfounded opinions, non-scientific statements and unrestrained internet rumour and speculation" that it was not the source. It declined to answer the Guardian's detailed questions on its tests. The results were not due till this weekend. Like the rest of the world watching a pandemic unfold as though in a slow-motion car crash, Smithfield could do little but wait to see how hard or soft the landing would be.
Smithfield's predicament has not been helped by the fact that, like Sir Fred, it has made itself somewhat conspicuous with its habits. It operates on a grand scale. The volume of its pig waste is extravagant. But just as RBS did not alone cause the financial crisis but merely conformed to the latest banking type, so it is the very nature of today's globalised meat industry that is at the heart of this emerging swine flu pandemic. The factory unit near La Gloria fattens nearly a million pigs a year. Globally Smithfield slaughtered 26 million pigs in 2006, generating sales of $11.4bn (£7.6bn) and profits of $421m. It already controls over a quarter of the total US processed pork market and it has expanded by acquisition in Europe. Like the banking sector, the global food system has seen the emergence of unprecedentedly large players that are dominant at every stage of production from pig breeding to bacon slicing.
The modern food system has a sophistication and global interdependence to match the financial system, too. It looks too big to fail. But like that sector, it is also extraordinarily fragile and vulnerable to shock. Many of the shocks are likely to be of its own making.
Smithfield's intensive factories of densely packed hogs, like those of the rest of the large-scale industry, produce vast lagoons of foul-smelling discharges. In many of the areas where it has sited its factory farms or slaughtering and processing complexes, activists and locals have campaigned against it, accusing it of environmental pollution, labour rights abuses and in some places operating without proper permits. The people of La Gloria have had long run-ins with the company's nearby subsidiary Granjas Carroll. When 60% of the town's population became ill in March with flu-like symptoms, they quickly blamed the pigs.
Swine flu is currently being passed from human to human, and it is possible that this particular strain of swine flu was created without ever seeing a pig directly, as UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) experts on animal health point out. The FAO has, however, dispatched a surveillance mission to help the Mexicans check their pig herds.
But the focus on Smithfield is not surprising given its history. It won notoriety a decade ago when two of its US subsidiaries were given the largest ever environmental fines by the government's Environmental Protection Agency, having to pay $12.6m for illegally discharging pollutants from its operations in to the Pagan river in Virginia. It had committed more than 5,000 violations of permit levels for discharging faecal coli forms, phosphorus, ammonia, cyanide and oil from its pig factories over more than five years, destroying fish stocks and polluting water tables. Even more troublingly, it was also found guilty of falsifying documents and destroying records.
And as expert labs continued their forensic work through the week, the ancestry of this latest strain of flu and its connection with modern intensive pig farming in general if not with any farm in particular was established.
By Wednesday night the reason why scientists had pressed the full flu alert button even though only a few hundred cases outside Mexico, almost all mild at that point, had appeared, also became clearer. At CDC the head of virology had completed the genetic fingerprinting of the swine flu and was able to say that it has arisen from a strain first identified on industrial pig units in North Carolina in the late 1990s. It is no coincidence that this threat to global human health should have emerged from that particular state, as Michael Greger, director of public health at the US Humane Society and leading author on the history of bird and animal flu explains: "North Carolina has the densest pig population in North America and boasts more than twice as many corporate swine mega-factories as any other state. With massive concentrations of farm animals within which to mutate, these new swine flu viruses in North America seem to be on an evolutionary fast track, jumping and reassorting between species at an unprecedented rate."
Novel human disease is the toxic debt of today's industrial livestock farming. The influenza virus has eight genetic segments. If two different types of flu infect the same cell at the same time, the genes from both viruses mix, swapping segments to form totally new hybrids. In Mexico as in many poorer countries, industrial pig and poultry farms are increasingly sited close to crowded urban populations, making simultaneous infection by different flu strains more likely.
The 1918 flu pandemic was an H1N1 strain and was a kind of bird flu new to humans so they had no immunity to it. It killed at least 50 million people as it raged around the world in less than a year. The 1918 H1N1 strain passed from humans to pigs, and became the dominant form of flu among pigs, albeit one that evolved into a fairly mild strain.
But then in 1998 there was an explosive new outbreak of swine flu in a factory farm in North Carolina that made thousands of pigs ill. The virus had evolved into a triple hybrid that had never been seen before, containing gene segments from bird, human and swine flu. It had found the ideal breeding ground. Pigs, whose immune systems were suppressed by the stress of crowding and fast feeding, and kept confined indoors, were perfect disease incubators for flu whose preferred method of transmission is virus-infected aerosol droplets, expelled by the million in the hog's famous barking cough. Thanks to the modern practice of transporting live animals, the new virus spread rapidly through pig herds around the country.
Six of the eight genetic segments of today's swine flu outbreak isolated by CDC experts can be traced back to the triple hybrid from North Carolina.
Factory animal farming has developed as a giant ecological credit bubble. It has delivered enormous growth in global meat production over the last three decades. Consumers have happily bought its cheap products just as they gobbled up the freely-offered loans of the financial boom without asking too closely how such consumption could be sustained or what the eventual consequences might be. Swine flu should make us question that complacency.
Jan Slingenbergh, a senior animal health officer at the FAO believes the precise final evolution of the current virus may never be found. "We don't know, but what is most likely is that a human was infected by a common flu virus and at the same time with a second virus which had elements probably from pigs and they mixed to form a new virus. The last bit of human mixing probably took place around mid-March in Mexico." Slingenbergh is sceptical that a link will be found to the Granjas Carroll factory.
The current virus may now progress as a mild strain and die down or it may mutate and evolve further to become more virulent. The reason experts have invested so much effort in preparing for a flu pandemic and are taking this one so seriously, is that these rapidly evolving strains that mix bird, pig and human forms could throw up a particularly deadly variety. Health experts have warned for years about the danger of intensive livestock farming creating new and rampant human disease.
If these new viruses are the toxic debt of the food system, the genetically improved pig is its highly engineered and artificial derivative. Pumped up like a bodybuilder, dependent on antibiotics and vaccines to keep it going, it has disproportionately large back legs to meet a market that likes hams more than shoulder of pork; it has tiny ears and no tail to limit the scars from the aggressive behaviour distressed conditions produce; and it is bred without hair for ease of slaughter. When herds of 5,000 of these genetically identical modern animals catch flu, it rips through them.
Large-scale producers pride themselves on their economic efficiency, but if the true costs of such polluting and disease-harbouring methods were internalised rather than externalised as environmental debts, they would be anything but good value. The cost of the flu pandemic will be unquantifiably large, but it is not the industry that will pay. Instead, the damage will affect the poorest disproportionately. It is ordinary Mexicans who are most affected now, just as the sub-prime mortgage crisis has made those at the bottom of the ladder homeless.
Where the next shocks to the food system will come from is unpredictable. As well as outbreaks of disease, climate change may produce a sudden dislocation in supplies. A coincidence of drought in two or more grain producing countries could, for example, lead to price spikes and shortages. An energy crisis could expose how dependent our food system has become on an uninterrupted flow of oil and transport - earlier this year, after just two days of snow, there were worries that London might not be able to maintain its food supplies, according to Rosie Boycott, chairman of the mayor's London Food board.
Official government figures show that there has been a steady erosion of any slack in the system. In the UK, stocks of all food are typically down to 11 days of supply. The UK now carries just eight days' worth of stocks of frozen foods, and 10 days of perishable goods. Globally, grain stocks are down to 50 days.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University and a member of the government's Sustainable Development Commission, warns that the whole British food network has become taut. "In that last 30-40 years there has been enormous investment in what is called efficiency," he says. "That means there is no spare. The food system is like a fully stretched rubber band. If it breaks, there would be a sharp rebound. I don't think a systemic failure is imminent but it is very vulnerable to shocks. They could be technical shocks, ecological shocks or human disease shocks. We don't have a sustainable UK agriculture base at the moment and we need one."
But instead of addressing these wider issues, the response to the flu pandemic in terms of food production is "carry on as normal". Urged to spend our way out of ecological recession, we are exhorted to keep eating pork products. Keen to protect the economic interests of its meat industry, the US government took to calling this swine flu "H1N1 flu" a couple of days ago, in order not to put people off their chops. The World Health Organisation, which depends on the US for a large part of its budget and has been bullied by it before, has now followed suit, rebranding the flu influenza A (H1N1). But simply saying "as you were" is no more an adequate response to the cause of this current crisis than it is to the banking collapse. If we carry on as before, the pigs may yet have their revenge. And if not the pigs, the chickens.