Rob Wallace: Connecting the Coronavirus to Animal Agriculture
While SARS and COVID-19 appear to have emerged out of China's wet meat markets, MERS (the other deadly coronavirus) emerged straight out of the camel meat sector in the Middle East.
ROB WALLACE: ‘Structural causes of disease are themselves a source of debate. For one, questions remain as to 2019-nCoV’s origins. Much initial attention has been placed on a particular exotic food market in Wuhan, with an orientalist preoccupation with strange and unsavory diets… There is epidemiological evidence in the hypothesis’s favor. Thirty-three of 585 samples at the Wuhan market were found positive for 2019-nCoV, with 31 at the west end of the market where wildlife trading was concentrated…
Other infected marketers trafficked in hog alone, a livestock species that expresses a common vulnerable molecular receptor, leading one team to hypothesize hog as the putative source for the new coronavirus. Atop African swine fever, which has killed as many as half of China’s hog this past year, the latter possibility would represent quite the clusterfuck. Such disease convergences are not unheard of, even folding into an intimate reciprocal activation, wherein proteins of each pathogen catalyze each other, facilitating new clinical courses and transmission dynamics for both diseases…
Expanding industrial production may push increasingly capitalized wild foods deeper into the last of the primary landscape, dredging out a wider variety of potentially protopandemic pathogens. Peri-urban loops of growing extent and population density may increase the interface (and spillover) between wild nonhuman populations and newly urbanized rurality.
Worldwide, even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag value chains: among them ostriches, porcupine, crocodiles, fruit bats, and the palm civet, whose partially digested berries now supply the world’s most expensive coffee bean. Some wild species are making it onto forks before they are even scientifically identified, including one new short-nosed dogfish found in a Taiwanese market…
Anthropologist Lyle Fearnley pointed out that farmers in China repeatedly manipulate the distinction between wildness and domesticity as an economic signifier, producing new meanings and values attached to their animals, including in response to the very epidemiological alerts issued around their trade…
Spreading factory farms meanwhile may force increasingly corporatized wild foods companies to trawl deeper into the forest, increasing the likelihood of picking up a new pathogen, while reducing the kind of environmental complexity with which the forest disrupts transmission chains…
As a class, the coronaviruses appear to straddle these distinctions. While SARS and 2019-nCoV appeared to have emerged out of wet markets — possible pigs aside — MERS, the other deadly coronavirus, emerged straight out of an industrializing camel sector in the Middle East. It’s a path to virulence largely left out of broader scientific discussion about these viruses…
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.
Perhaps then we should refrain from choosing between one of two cycles of capital accumulation: the end of the American cycle or the start of the Chinese one (or, as Reid appears to do, both). At the risk of accusations of third campism, choosing neither is another option’. SOURCE…
RELATED VIDEO: