Agribusiness kills

Capitalist agriculture and Covid-19: A deadly combination

A socialist biologist explains the tight links between new viruses, industrial food production, and the profitability of multinational corporations.

Covid-19 appears as round yellow objects in this electron microscope image.

The new coronavirus is keeping the world in a state of shock. But instead of fighting the structural causes of the pandemic, the government is focusing on emergency measures.

Yaak Pabst for the German socialist magazine Marx21 spoke to evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review Press, 2016) about the dangers of Covid-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases. Marx21 released the interview in advance of its scheduled March 30 publication date.


Marx21: How dangerous is the new coronavirus?

Rob Wallace: It depends on where you are in the timing of your local outbreak of Covid-19: early, peak level, late? How good is your region’s public health response? What are your demographics? How old are you? Are you immunologically compromised? What is your underlying health? To ask an undiagnosable possibility, do your immuogenetics, the genetics underlying your immune response, line up with the virus or not?

So all this fuss about the virus is just scare tactics?

No, certainly not. At the population level, Covid-19 was clocking in at between 2 and 4% case fatality ratio or CFR at the start of the outbreak in Wuhan. Outside Wuhan, the CFR appears to drop off to more like 1% and even less, but also appears to spike in spots here and there, including in places in Italy and the United States.. Its range doesn’t seem much in comparison to, say, SARS at 10%, the influenza of1918 5-20%, “avian influenza” H5N1 60%, or at some points Ebola 90%. But it certainly exceeds seasonal influenza’s 0.1% CFR. The danger isn’t just a matter of the death rate, however. We have to grapple with what’s called penetrance or community attack rate: how much of the global population is penetrated by the outbreak.

Can you be more specific?

The global travel network is at record connectivity. With no vaccines or specific antivirals for coronaviruses, nor at this point any herd immunity to the virus, even a strain at only 1% mortality can present a considerable danger. With an incubation period of up to two weeks and increasing evidence of some transmission before sickness–before we know people are infected–few places would likely be free of infection. If, say, Covid-19 registers 1% fatality in the course of infecting four billion people, that’s 40 million dead. A small proportion of a large number can still be a large number.

These are frightening numbers for an ostensibly less than virulent pathogen…

Definitely and we are only at the beginning of the outbreak. It’s important to understand that many new infections change over the course of epidemics. Infectivity, virulence, or both may attenuate. On the other hand, other outbreaks ramp up in virulence. The first wave of the influenza pandemic in the spring of 1918 was a relatively mild infection. It was the second and third waves that winter and into 1919 that killed millions.

But pandemic skeptics argue that far fewer patients have been infected and killed by the coronavirus than by the typical seasonal flu. What do you think about that?

I would be the first to celebrate if this outbreak proves a dud. But these efforts to dismiss Covid-19 as a possible danger by citing other deadly diseases, especially influenza, is a rhetorical device to spin concern about the coronavirus as badly placed.

So the comparison with seasonal flu is limping …

It makes little sense to compare two pathogens on different parts of their epicurves. Yes, seasonal influenza infects many millions worldwide each other, killing, by WHO estimates, up to 650,000 people a year. Covid-19, however, is only starting its epidemiological journey. And unlike influenza, we have neither vaccine, nor herd immunity to slow infection and protect the most vulnerable populations.

Even if the comparison is misleading, both diseases belong to viruses, even to a specific group, the RNA viruses. Both can cause disease. Both affect the mouth and throat area and sometimes also the lungs. Both are quite contagious.

Those are superficial similarities that miss a critical part in comparing two pathogens. We know a lot about influenza’s dynamics. We know very little about Covid-19’s. They’re steeped in unknowns. Indeed, there is much about Covid-19 that is even unknowable until the outbreak plays out fully. At the same time, it is important to understand that it isn’t a matter of Covid-19 versus influenza. It’s Covid-19 and influenza. The emergence of multiple infections capable of going pandemic, attacking populations in combos, should be the front and center worry.

You have been researching epidemics and their causes for several years. In your book Big Farms Make Big Flu you attempt to draw these connections between industrial farming practices, organic farming and viral epidemiology. What are your insights?

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.

Who is to blame?

I said industrial agriculture, but there’s a larger scope to it. 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.

For which diseases is this the case?

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.

What is the role of multinational companies in this process?

Planet Earth is largely Planet Farm at this point, in both biomass and land used. Agribusiness is aiming to corner the food market. The near-entirety of the neoliberal project is organized around supporting efforts by companies based in the in the more advanced industrialised countries to steal the land and resources of weaker countries. As a result, many of those new pathogens previously held in check by long-evolved forest ecologies are being sprung free, threatening the whole world.

What effects do the production methods of agribusinesses have on this?

The capital-led agriculture that replaces more natural ecologies offers the exact means by which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.

How so?

Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence. In other words, agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk.

What!?

These companies can just externalize the costs of their epidemiologically dangerous operations on everyone else. From the animals themselves to consumers, farmworkers, local environments, and governments across jurisdictions. The damages are so extensive that if we were to return those costs onto company balance sheets, agribusiness as we know it would be ended forever. No company could support the costs of the damage it imposes.

In many media it is claimed that the starting point of the coronavirus was an “exotic food market”« in Wuhan. Is this description true?

Yes and no. There are spatial clues in favor of the notion. Contact tracing linked infections back to the Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan, where wild animals were sold. Environmental sampling does appear to pinpoint the west end of the market where wild animals were held.

But how far back and how widely should we investigate? When exactly did the emergency really begin? The focus on the market misses the origins of wild agriculture out in the hinterlands and its increasing capitalization. Globally, and in China, wild food is becoming more formalized as an economic sector. But its relationship with industrial agriculture extends beyond merely sharing the same moneybags. As industrial production–hog, poultry, and the like–expand into primary forest, it places pressure on wild food operators to dredge further into the forest for source populations, increasing the interface with, and spillover of, new pathogens, including Covid-19.

Covid-19 is not the first virus to develop in China that the government tried to cover it up.

Yes, but this is no Chinese exceptionalism, however. The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 (2009) and H5N2 outbreaks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has now declared a »health emergency of international concern«. Is this step correct?

Yes. The danger of such a pathogen is that health authorities do not have a handle on the statistical risk distribution. We have no idea how the pathogen may respond. We went from an outbreak in a market to infections splattered across the world in a matter of weeks. The pathogen could just burn out. That would be great. But we don’t know. Better preparation would better the odds of undercutting the pathogen’s escape velocity.

The WHO’s declaration is also part of what I call pandemic theater. International organizations have died in the face of inaction. The League of Nations comes to mind. The UN group of organizations is always worried about its relevance, power, and funding. But such actionism can also converge on the actual preparation and prevention the world needs to disrupt Covid-19’s chains of transmission.

The neoliberal restructuring of the health care system has worsened both the research and the general care of patients, for example in hospitals. What difference could a better funded healthcare system make to fight the virus?

There’s the terrible but telling story of the Miami medical device company employee who upon returning from China with flu-like symptoms did the righteous thing by his family and community and demanded a local hospital test him for Covid-19. He worried that his minimal Obamacare option wouldn’t cover the tests. He was right. He was suddenly on the hook for US$3270.

An American demand might be an emergency order be passed that stipulates that during a pandemic outbreak, all outstanding medical bills related to testing for infection and for treatment following a positive test would be paid for by the federal government. We want to encourage people to seek help, after all, rather than hide away—and infect others—because they can’t afford treatment. The obvious solution is a national health service—fully staffed and equipped to handle such community-wide emergencies—so that such a ridiculous problem as discouraging community cooperation would never arise.

As soon as the virus is discovered in one country, governments everywhere react with authoritarian and punitive measures, such as a compulsory quarantine of entire areas of land and cities. Are such drastic measures justified?

Using an outbreak to beta-test the latest in autocratic control post-outbreak is disaster capitalism gone off the rails. In terms of public health, I would err on the side of trust and compassion, which are important epidemiological variables. Without either, jurisdictions lose their populations‘ support.

A sense of solidarity and common respect is a critical part of eliciting the cooperation we need to survive such threats together. Self-quarantines with the proper support–check-ins by trained neighborhood brigades, food supply trucks going door-to-door, work release and unemployment insurance–can elicit that kind of cooperation, that we are all in this together.

As you may know, in Germany with the AfD we have a de facto Nazi party with 94 seats in parliament. The hard Nazi Right and other groups in association with AfD politicians use the Corona-Crisis for their agitation. They spread (false) reports about the virus and demand more authoritarian measures from the government: Restrict flights and entry stops for migrants, border closures and forced quarantine…

Travel bans and border closures are demands with which the radical right wants to to racialize what are now global diseases. This is, of course, nonsense. At this point, given the virus is already on its way to spreading everywhere, the sensible thing to do is to work on developing the kind of public health resilience in which it doesn’t matter who shows up with an infection, we have the means to treat and cure them. Of course, stop stealing people’s land abroad and driving the exoduses in the first place, and we can keep the pathogens from emerging in the first place.

What would be sustainable changes?

In order to reduce the emergence of new virus outbreaks, food production has to change radically. Farmer autonomy and a strong public sector can curb environmental ratchets and runaway infections. Introduce varieties of stock and crops—and strategic rewilding—at both the farm and regional levels. Permit food animals to reproduce on-site to pass on tested immunities. Connect just production with just circulation. Subsidize price supports and consumer purchasing programs supporting agroecological production. Defend these experiments from both the compulsions that neoliberal economics impose upon individuals and communities alike and the threat of capital-led State repression.

What should socialists call for in the face of the increasing dynamics of disease outbreaks?

Agribusiness as a mode of social reproduction must be ended for good if only as a matter of public health. Highly capitalized production of food depends on practices that endanger the entirety of humanity, in this case helping unleash a new deadly pandemic.

We should demand food systems be socialized in such a way that pathogens this dangerous are kept from emerging in the first place. That will require reintegrating food production into the needs of rural communities first. That will require agroecological practices that protect the environment and farmers as they grow our food. Big picture, we must heal the metabolic rifts separating our ecologies from our economies. In short, we have a planet to win.

Thank you very much for the interview.

12 Comments

  • Oops … he forgot to look at what is actually possible.

    He says … “Introduce varieties of stock and crops—and strategic rewilding—at both the farm and regional levels. Permit food animals to reproduce on-site to pass on tested immunities. Connect just production with just circulation.”

    The only way to rewild, with seven and a half billion or more human animals on the planet, would be for us to stop eating animals completely. Intensive animal agriculture is a problem, absolutely. But we would need at least one more planet if we were to allow all of the animals who are currently being raised in farm factories to be raised free range. We would have to cut down pretty much every tree on the planet to do that.

    I am absolutely not defending Farm factories in any way. But I’m looking at the realistic issue oh, and the only way to look at it realistically is to understand that we don’t have enough land do it the other way.

    That leaves us with plant-based food which takes up a fraction of the amount of land and water as animal agriculture , free-range or otherwise, and means that we may survive as a planet, since animal agriculture creates more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the world’s transportation, per the UN. If you think that free-range is the answer, you should read Grazed and Confused , out of Oxford and other universities. The solution is straightforward. Stop using animals, wild or domestic.

  • Excellent read ! Frightening facts that world governments choose to ignore.

    But this article is too difficult to understand for the average reader, hence its effect reduced. The author could produce a 2nd version or revise the original one to make it more accessible to readers.

  • some mistake. It’s Huanan wholesale sea food market,not Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan.

  • Quickly as I’m on a deadline today:

    1) Thank you all for your thoughtful responses.

    2) I am not a fan of the lab-leak theory. Full-genome phylogenies show SARS-2, the Covid-19 virus, closely related to coronaviruses isolated from wild bats sampled in the field.

    3) In the context of Covid-19, I describe the albeit preliminary economic geographies that appear to connect an increasingly capitalized wild food sector and industrial agriculture here: https://mronline.org/2020/01/29/notes-on-a-novel-coronavirus/

    4) You can read of the work our group has conducted on the direct relationships among changes in agroforestry, the introduction of a more agribusiness-driven model in West Africa, and the emergence of the 2013-2015 Ebola outbreak here as a start https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26581892.

    5) Michael is correct. Agriculture isn’t the only driver here. I focused on it in relation to Covid-19 to help readers trace out a relational geography that connects capital centers abroad with the domestic development that leads to the emergence of an infection. We shouldn’t just blame local indigenous and smallholder practices as is now the expedient go-to explanation deployed even by ecohealth practitioners.

    6) That said, Lyme does have its agricultural inputs, as the Kilpatrick gang describe in passing: “In the twentieth century, habitat alteration, including agriculturalization and reforestation, probably led to increased ungulate abundance and altered small mammal communities [20,141,142]. Altered species interactions among predators such as wolves, coyotes and foxes [143], may have allowed deer and rodent populations to increase substantially, and reduction or elimination of species that might compete with rodents (and deer) for food (e.g. passenger pigeons eating acorns) may also have increased the abundance of important hosts for ticks and B. burgdorferi [11].”

    7) As does hantavirus: “This report highlights the importance of considering HPS in farm workers and in other occupations with risk for rodent exposure either at the workplace or in housing provided by the employer (5,6). Nationally, 23% of reported HPS cases with a reported occupation were working in agriculture (Dr. Annabelle de St. Maurice, CDC, personal communication, 2016). The lack of a vaccine or specific treatment for HPS underscores the importance of focusing on behavioral and environmental risk reduction to prevent SNV infections, including for at-risk occupations, such as farming.”

    8) Many of these interactions can be quite complex. Even an urban pathogen like Zika has its rural connections, extending into processes as diffuse as mosquito introgression, reciprocal activation with more obviously sylvatic/rural pathogens, and expanding periurban circuits, connecting the deepest forests with international cities.

    9) But there’s room for all of us to talk through these possibilities. It’s not a competition, right? We’re all trying to converge on some shared realizations. And I appreciate your contributions here.

    Cheers,
    Rob

  • Excellent interview, a lot of insightful points made.

    What does the author think about the research and testing of SARS-like bat novel coronaviruses in the Institute of Virology in Wuhan? Experiments which were discontinued in other countries such as the U.S. The Institute is close to the Seafood Market, and a possible lab-leak may have occurred? Another case of research-for-profit conducted at the potential risk for humanity. Even if this is not related to Covid-19.

    Sources:
    https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
    https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787

  • Wallace’s focus is way too narrow: agribusiness and food production are part of a far wider panorama of ecological disruption. And, while many recent outbreaks cannot be associated with food production, just about every modern emergent pathogen is associated with various levels of ecological disruption characteristic of our epoch. This is not really controversial: the entire field of epidemiology is, in fact, predicated on basic ecological and evolutionary principles.

    Take Wallace’s examples of ebola and zika. Both are results of well known ecological processes that link loss of biodiversity, community simplification and habitat fragmentation to outbreaks of pathogens of various kinds. Agribusiness was a major – but not the only – agent in these cases. As Wallace notes, agribusiness promoted deforestation and introduction of monocultured cash crops, particularly oil palm. These processes eliminated various controls on fruit bat populations (predators, competitors), provided preferred habitats and food sources for the bat (the palm fruit, in this case) and brought human populations into closer, more intimate contact with the infected bats.

    But, agribusinesses and the food industry had nothing to do with the emergence of Lyme disease or Hantavirus. These had more to do with the destruction or fragmentation of forest or desert ecosystems, which we could largely lay at the doorstep of the real estate industry and the overall pattern of market-driven mass suburban development. Climate change, another instance of ecological disruption, has become another factor in such pathogen emergence and spread. Other boundary transgressions, such as disruption of the phosphorus cycle have favored yet other outbreaks, such as marine dinoflagellates and certain virulent Cholera strains.

    And we can include the proliferation of many antibiotic-resistant stains of bacteria as one more instance of ecological disruption, in this case of the microbiota. Not only has market-driven profligacy in antibiotic use selected for resistant strains, but it has shaped microbial communities, favoring horizontal gene transfer of resistance genes and eliminated microbial competitors and predators of pathogens.

    In short, the increasing numbers and perhaps severity of emergent pathogen outbreaks, epidemics, pandemics in recent decades, are products of the market-shaped anthropocene.

  • Hi there. I am writing a piece on Coronavirus and I would like to cite this one. How should I do that? cheers

  • Covid-19 probably came from eating wild animals which is a fringe practice in Wuhan. Apparently it is rooted in culture and more prevalent in old people. I don’t see the link to capitalism at all. It is interesting how long this article is, yet it fails to make a clear link between big agriculture and epidemics. Ebola is treated as an example for how Capitalism is the blame. Yet the leading theory has it originating from contact to bats in an rural area.

    • Even assuming you are correct about the initial transmission — and the jury is still out on that — you are ignoring the fact, which Wallace clearly describes, that capitalist agriculture and globalization has created the conditions for the rapid expansion and spread of new diseases — from a local infection to a worldwide pandemic.