Livestock production, agrobusiness, travel, Corona

Marxist biologist Rob Wallace, founder of Structural One Health (which addresses the health regimes humans share with wildlife and livestock through the lens of global political economy) renders – vividly and frighteningly – the broader context of the coronavirus crisis. Wallace focuses on contemporary global capitalism’s land grabbing, deforestation, industrial agriculture, livestock production and the inevitability of epidemics such as that of Covid-19. The following quotes are from a March 11, 2020 interview on the Climate & Capitalism website (another helpful interview with Wallace can be found on the Uneven Earth website): “The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure – or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary. […] When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other. […] Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots. […] There are no capital-free pathogens at this point. Even the most remote are affected, if distally. Ebola, Zika, the coronaviruses, yellow fever again, a variety of avian influenzas, and African swine fever in hog are among the many pathogens making their way out of the most remote hinterlands into peri-urban loops, regional capitals, and ultimately onto the global travel network. From fruit bats in the Congo to killing Miami sunbathers in a few weeks‘ time.” TH