Agribusiness as a manufacturer of pandemics
Julia Garcia Baucells, Dresden, 11 June 2020 (translated into English with the help of Conor Amphlett)
"The man in society is not an abstract entity: he is born, he develops, he lives, he works, he reproduces, he gets sick and he dies, in strict subjection to the environment that surrounds him, whose different forms originate diverse ways of reacting, facing the agents that produce diseases. This environment-condition is determined by wages, food, housing, clothing, culture and other concrete and acting factors; it guides the analysis of our medical problems and presides over the programme of this Ministry". Salvador Allende, La Realidad Medico-Social Chilena (1939)
The gaps in research into infectious diseases
The successes of vaccines and antibiotics, together with improved hygiene, declining infant mortality rates and increased life expectancy made the West think that pandemics were a thing of the past. However, with COVID-19 running riot, it goes without saying that this was an unfounded illusion. It is true that the incidence of some of the classic deadly diseases has fallen dramatically. Smallpox has been eradicated, polio is almost eradicated - it remains endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan - and leprosy is very rare. However, the more virulent return of some classic diseases such as malaria, cholera, tuberculosis and dengue fever over the past half century has caught us off guard. Added to this is the surprise of the appearance of new infectious diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS, the avian flu, and now... COVID-19. With outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases appearing at the breathtaking pace of one almost every year... Why were public health authorities taken by surprise by the scenario of a global pandemic?
In the 1970s it was thought that infectious diseases were a dying area of research and that the problems of the future would be degenerative diseases, chronic diseases or health problems arising from old age. It was well known that the prevalence of infectious diseases had been declining over the past 150 years. Perhaps it was believed that things would continue to work the way they did. Furthermore, although it is known that mutation and natural selection in microorganisms can threaten our defence against disease, from scientific research, there is often too much confidence that whatever the organism changes, the disease-causing mechanism will always remain the same, decade after decade, and that we will design the newest, strongest and most effective weapons against it. The World Bank and the IMF also claimed (as they still do) that economic development would eliminate poverty and enhance prosperity by making new technologies universally accessible and that, with this, infectious diseases would simply disappear as countries "developed". This is what Richard Levins called the "doctrine of epidemiological transition".
What was so wrong about our epidemiological assumptions? Levins argues that our historical mentality is too limited. Not only because the time window we have in mind covers 100, at most, 200 years, but also because our knowledge in health sciences has a considerable geographical bias. We have overlooked the fact that diseases come and go when there are major changes in social relations, in population density, in the means of production, the land we use, etc. When we change our relationships with the natural world, we also change the epidemiology and the opportunities for infection. Currently, 60-70% of emerging epidemics have their origins in animal species and 2/3 come from wildlife (Robbins, 2012). But doctors have been mainly concerned with the health problems that beset us humans, and relatively little attention has been paid to diseases of wild animals, or plants. As an example, only about 1% of wildlife viruses are known, and wildlife immunology is a science in its infancy - all organisms bring disease with them! While the invasion of one organism may or may not produce symptoms, all organisms face parasites. Invading an organism is a way to escape competition in water or soil, and the more abundant a species is in an environment, the more attractive it is to new parasite invasions. There is a constant co-evolution between parasites and hosts throughout the five kingdoms of organisms, which is not unique to humans.
We have failed to study infections together with society. Organisms (as well as us) respond to the challenges of the environment. We have not looked enough at the environment-agent, we have not asked enough: What makes populations vulnerable? Conventional public health has ignored world history, ecology, social science... The poor and oppressed are much more vulnerable to all health risks. Yet epidemiology deals little or not at all with social class. This is a mistake. Social class is the best indicator of life expectancy, frequency of heart attacks, risk of chronic diseases, accidents at work... and now, of the risk of dying from COVID-19 or of contracting the disease. The context, then, matters.
Agribusiness and new diseases
The coronavirus pandemic has clearly brought to the table the basic problems that the response to this emergency has faced: the shortcomings of our public health systems, weakened by cutbacks and privatization, the crisis in the management of nursing homes, the dismantling of industry that has prevented us from achieving self-sufficiency in basic health care material, or the high exposure to the virus in working class neighborhoods. There are, however, other structural causes that have led us to the current situation and these answer two simple questions: Where do these pathogens come from? And how do they spread?
These pathogens emerge from the interface between the economic and social spheres - deeply rooted in capitalist production - and the natural world which also includes the vast and, for us always infinite, microbiological world. To exemplify this point, it is simpler to speak first about the spread of disease-causing agents and then of its origin. The spread of pathogens can occur through the circuits of global commodities and/or the migrations of workers. Both are part of so-called capitalist geography. Globalization and high industrial production not only help the virus to spread much faster, but also to make its genome mutate much more quickly. Why? Because this allows the virus to be exposed to a very high number of evolutionary pathways in record time, making the best adapted variants outperform the others.
A good example is avian flu, although it is not the only one. The strains previously isolated from wild bird populations were harmless viral strains that did not have high pathogenicity, but later, when found in hyper-competitive environments, such as the high density of poultry on factory farms, evolved into new transmission vectors that made human infection possible. In these cases, the viral strains that tend to stand out do so because of their virulence, that is, their ability to produce disease. One might think that this is counterproductive, since increasing the probability of killing the host gives you less time to spread. In reality, this is the case with the common flu, which maintains low levels of intensity, favouring the spread among the population. However, in certain environments the opposite logic has an evolutionary advantage. These are: when the host has a short life cycle and when numerous hosts of the same species are in close proximity forming large, high-density populations such as intensive livestock farms or agricultural monocultures.
Having many animals together in crowded conditions - curiously enough, Massentierhaltung is a German word that literally denotes just that and means intensive exploitation of animals - depresses their immune system by removing the immune brakes that would slow down transmission. In addition, high production, which is the basis of industrial production, provides a constant supply of accessible hosts, adding fuel to the fire of evolving virulence. Paradoxically, trying to stop the outbreak of infection through mass slaughter of animals is even more damaging. This is because when infection is widespread in a population, getting rid of a significant group of animals unintentionally results in increased selective pressure, which favours the evolution of hypervirulent strains. Just such a solution was used during the outbreak swine fever late last year, a crisis which saw a quarter of the world's supply of pigs.
Regarding the origin of these pathogens, using the examples of swine fever and avian flu, two relatively recent outbreaks, we see that they are clearly associated with the core of the agro-industrial system. However, establishing this connection in the case of the coronavirus is not so simple. SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have originated in horseshoe bats from a cave in Yunnan (China), 1,600 km from what would later become the first coronavirus epicentre: a semi-legal wet-market in Wuhan (Quammen, 2020; Qiu, 2020). As we can see, there is no direct relationship with a farm. However, the new coronavirus seems to be another of those pathogens that develop in an agroeconomic context. As Rob Wallace argues in his book Big Farms Make Big Flu, economic processes under the yoke of capitalism are complicit in the generation of deadly epidemics through two routes: firstly, the one that comes directly from the heart of agroeconomic production and which corresponds to the previous case of swine fever and bird flu, and secondly, the one that comes from the consequences of the former, i.e., capitalist expansion and extraction in the periphery. This causes changes in the interface between humans and non-humans, causing viruses originating in wild populations to jump and spread through global capital circuits. The ecological devastation we face, whether due to changing base climatic conditions and/or the destruction of pre-capitalist ecosystems, reduces the environmental complexity by which the forest interrupts the chains of transmission. In other words, and taking deforestation as an example, the destruction of forested areas brings humans closer to species with which we have never had contact before, increasing the risk of contagion of many unknown viruses. In addition, this has allowed the trafficking of exotic species or the commercialization of wild foods to become another formalized sector capitalized on by the same sources that promote industrial production. So, as the agricultural industry takes over the last piece of forest, it eventually drives the commercialization of wild goods, making the two sectors fundamentally intertwined.
The movement of population from rural areas to urban slums or the rapid urbanization of rural cities, which act as local markets and intermediary hubs for global agricultural products, makes it possible for pathogens not to be solely confined to the interior of the territory. Thus, contagion can spread rapidly from a bat cave to a large city. What were once local hotspots are now, with the increase in global trade, leaking into global travel and trade networks in record time.
Ebola is a good example of how ecological destruction sows the seeds for the transformation of "wild" viral strains into global pandemics. Current evidence suggests that the origin of the Ebola virus is found in different species of bats in West and Central Africa (Grady, 2019). Ebola is very aggressive outside its reservoir species, i.e. wild mammals acting as intermediate hosts and, by extension, also humans coming into contact with these infected mammals; both regularly contract the virus and suffer from high mortality outbreaks. There have been several deadly Ebola epidemics, the two largest being in West Africa in 2013-2016 and in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 2018 to the present, almost always with a mortality of more than 50%. Various vaccines have been developed by private companies in recent years, but due to slow approval mechanisms, patent issues and a general lack of health infrastructure, vaccines have done little to stop the epidemic. According to Wallace, the timing of the outbreaks was no mere coincidence, as opposed to how they have been presented to us, i.e. as a natural disaster or a random event at best, and at worst, blamed on the "impure" cultural practices of forest communities, with all the racism that this entails. The two major outbreaks mentioned above occurred precisely when the expansion of agricultural industries disrupted local ecosystems, increasingly displacing forest-dwelling peoples into the interior. In Wallace's words, "every Ebola outbreak seems to be related to changes in capital-driven land use". The outbreak in Guinea occurred just after the government decided to open the country to global markets and sold off large tracts of land that were dedicated to the production of palm oil, the raw material for biodiesel. The palm oil industry is well known for its role in deforestation and ecological destruction around the world (Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand, Colombia, New Guinea, Ivory Coast, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala), as its monocultures devastate the rich ecological complexity that helps stop the transmission chains, as well as attracting bat species that serve as a natural reservoir for the virus, keeping them away from human contact.
Epidemics and the socio-economic context
When human beings change their relationship with the environment around them, it is like opening a Pandora's box of pathogens. It is not surprising that imperialism and capitalist industrialization have been closely followed by the shadow of their plagues. We will now briefly examine the outbreak of rinderpest during the 1890s in Africa, the biggest of imperialism's epidemiological holocausts, and the so-called Spanish flu or influenza of 1918-1919, the first capitalist plague on the proletariat.
The late 19th century saw the rise of imperialism exemplified by the colonization of Africa. The rinderpest of the 1890s was brought from Europe to East Africa by the Italians, who were then trying to compete with other world powers by colonizing the Horn of Africa with a series of failed military campaigns. While the military campaigns were a disaster, the Italians left their mark, with the plague they brought with them spreading through the indigenous cattle population, eventually reaching South Africa, where it killed 80-90% of the cattle, and having a devastating effect on the agricultural economy. The plague caused an unprecedented famine in the predominantly pastoralist societies of sub-Saharan Africa. The famine and loss of livestock was followed by the invasion of the savannah by thorny shrubs, which created an ideal habitat for the tsetse fly, which carries the sleeping sickness and prevents livestock from grazing. This prevented the repopulation of the region after the famine and allowed an incremental spread of the European colonial powers on the continent.
The 1918-1919 flu, the world's deadliest pandemic so far, killed an estimated 50-100 million people, doubling the death toll of World War I. It was one of the first outbreaks of H1N1 flu and is linked to the more recent outbreaks of swine flu and avian flu. It was long thought to be much more virulent than other flu strains because of the high number of mortalities it caused. But later epidemiological research - sometimes time gives us back our sanity in looking at the past - showed that the 1918-1919 flu may not have been as virulent as later epidemics that did little to wreak havoc on the population. Its high mortality was probably due to widespread malnutrition, urban overcrowding and unhealthy living conditions in the affected areas, both in the trenches and in the cities, which not only encouraged the spread of the flu virus but also the cultivation of bacterial superinfections. In fact, the flu outbreak in the spring of 1918 was barely fatal compared to that of August 1918. This second outbreak spread from France to all of Europe, the United States and the world. In other words, while the very high mortality rate is presented as one of the inevitable consequences of the virus, it is virtually unquestionable that social conditions played a major role in driving the pandemic. Meanwhile, the rapid spread of the virus was made possible by international trade and world war.
We have seen that these epidemics, in addition to provoking periodic agricultural crises and helping capitalism to expand beyond its borders, have also hit the proletariat in their industrial centers. It is worth noting that there is nothing cultural about the fact that so many recent epidemics seem to be emerging from China - these are just racist interpretations! This is nothing new, especially for the United States and Europe. When the latter were hubs of global industrial production and mass employment, the results were very similar: the death of livestock in the fields was met by poor sanitary practices and widespread pollution in the proletarian settlements of the cities. Suddenly, the liberal-progressive elite, concerned about the conditions under which their own food was produced, set about reforming the working-class areas. This outrage over "uncleanness", with all the overtones of aporophobia and racism that it entails, is what many people are revealing in their reactions to the coronavirus epidemic... They forget that workers have little control over the conditions in which they work. The unsanitary conditions that leak out of the factory through the processing and distribution chain are only a tiny part of it. Environmental pollution is the daily bread of most workers and those who live in nearby proletarian settlements, which undermines the health of many people, favoring the spread of many of the plagues that accompany capitalism.
The virus is not, then, an exogenous element to the capitalist system, although this idea is repeated in the press ad nauseam. Public health crises are not random events or natural disasters. The case of the coronavirus is not much different from that of the 1918-1919 flu in that both have been able to spread rapidly through the population due to the degradation of basic health care. Compared to the current situation, this degradation has taken place in the midst of an economic growth brought about by massive cities and shiny non-stop factories. But the truth is that spending on public goods such as public health and education is extremely low in many parts of the world. This mix of neglect and privatization of the health care system has been accompanied by rapid urbanization, increased industrial production, degradation of our food quality, and growing aggressiveness in destroying the environment.
The alienation of capital plays in favor of pathogens
In the nuclei of agro-industrial production, the ideal conditions for the production of virulent pathogens and their subsequent transmission continue to flourish. Some of them have already been mentioned, such as the use of genetic monocultures (animals and plants with almost identical genomes) or the massive overcrowding of animals. In addition, often the age of slaughter of some animals, such as poultry, is very low, allowing the selection of pathogens capable of surviving the most robust immune systems. Another malpractice in the production lines is the decrease of the reproduction of industrial cattle on-site, making natural selection unable to offer protection against diseases in real time. This knowledge is not new to the scientific community; on the contrary, the idea of species evolution has long been well embedded in the history of science.
At this point, one should ask: How can one take the risk, on a sustained basis, of selecting a pathogen that could kill millions of people? Well, the private command of production is totally focused on profit: agribusiness outsources the costs of its dangerous epidemiological operations to consumers, farm workers, local environments, governments, public health systems, etc. The damage is so extensive that if the responsible companies had to pay for it, agrobusiness would be gone forever - no company could bear the costs of the damage it imposes! While the pathogens are produced and seep out under the door of the farm or the food factory and head straight for the public, agrobusiness is propped up thanks to government cooperation. Our current political structure allows multinational agribusinesses to privatize profits while externalizing and socializing costs caused by the lack of biosecurity, something that they are not willing to pay for.
We should propose the re-internalization of agribusiness expenses. It is the only way to avoid a truly massive and deadly pandemic in the near future. On the other hand, at present, labour costs are very low, there is high mechanisation and the price of agricultural inputs (seeds, fertilisers, insecticides, herbicides, etc.) is very high. Therefore, the costs of inputs could be drastically reduced, while more investment in labor is promoted, that is, more people working in the field. In short, instead of growing only maize and soybeans, encourage the introduction of more crops such as oats or alfalfa in order to reintegrate the animals that lived in the fields until 1960-1980, encourage the use of more nitrogen-fixing crops and reduce the use of chemical fertilizers, restart crop rotations... The good news is that only the elimination of inputs would mean the death of the agroindustry as we know it, which is imperative in order to re-introduce humanity back into the cycles of land regeneration and reconnect ecologies with our economies. The bad news is that the agribusiness lobby will fight as hard as it can to prevent this from happening.
Until now, governments, most medical agencies and the media have focused on each new emergency separately and in complete isolation from the political-social, economic, or environmental context. Also, although to a lesser extent, the scientific community has all too often committed the same error. A pandemic arising from the capitalist mode of production, and in which the State is expected to bring us back to the "normality" we were used to before the disaster, offers an opportunity for inequality and for the richest to stuff their pockets even more. Only through the search for the origin and causal relations that are responsible for emerging epidemics is it possible to forge a truly effective response, one that shows solidarity and, moreover, will protect us in the future.
References
Levins, Richard. (2000). Is Capitalism a Disease? The Crisis in U.S. Public Health. Monthly review (New York, N.Y. : 1949). 52. 8-33. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-052-04-2000-08_2]
Robbins, Jim. (2012). The Ecology of Disease. The New York Times.[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-ecology-of-disease.html [publicado online el 14 de julio de 2020].
Wallace, Robert G. (2016). Big Farms Make Big Flu.
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David Quammen es el autor de “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic.”
Grady, Denise. (2019). Deadly Ebola Virus Is Found in Liberian Bat, Researchers Say. The New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/health/ebola-bat-liberia-epidemic.html].
Mack, Roy. (1970). The great African cattle plague epidemic of the 1890’s. Trop Anim Health Prod. 2. 210-219.
El País. El Madrid perdido donde habitaban las epidemias y la muerte. Hace más de un siglo, el Ayuntamiento mandó desinfectar los barrios pobres para contener los contagios; comprobaron que más de 60.000 personas vivían en casas insalubres [https://elpais.com/politica/2020/05/09/sepa_usted/1589041901_118206.html].
InfoLibre. La fortuna de los 23 españoles más ricos crece un 16% desde el 18 de marzo. [https://www.infolibre.es/noticias/economia/2020/05/30/la_fortuna_los_espanoles_mas_ricos_c rece_durante_los_dos_meses_pandemia_107257_1011.html]
Julia Garcia Baucells
PhD student (Vienna BioCenter PhD Program)
Max Perutz Labs
University of Vienna
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