The increased occurrence of virulent diseases is directly linked to the intensity and scale of land use and food production under capitalism. Around 50% of all the habitable land on Earth is agricultural land, most of which is under the control of big agribusinesses whose goal is to maximise profit at any cost. Their assault on the environment has created pathways for diseases to cause misery and mortality in animals and humans alike. BJORK LIND reports.
The majority of pathogens found in humans – bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms – originate in other animals. Some come directly from commercial farms, like salmonella and bird flu, but most, like Covid-19 and Ebola, spill over from wild animals to local human communities. Animals, however, are not especially infested with deadly pathogens ready to infect us. On the contrary, biodiverse areas contain numerous harmless pathogens that have been passed back and forth between animals over time. The co-evolution of pathogens and animals has led to a natural defence system that keeps disease outbreaks in check.
The deadly pathogens that have emerged in human populations over the past centuries have done so in response to humanity’s activities – habitat destruction, industrial production, urbanisation and expanding global travel and trade networks. This has altered ecosystemic relations and thus the pathways along which pathogens evolve and disperse, causing harmless microbes to transform into human diseases.
Agribusiness and the destruction of wildlife habitats
The scale at which big agribusinesses conduct production entails the massive appropriation and exploitation of land. This has been achieved through the destruction of natural animal habitats, such as forests, jungles and wetlands. Additionally, these businesses are on track to be the world’s biggest contributors to climate change – surpassing even the oil industry – which upsets natural conditions. These factors have led to the threat of extinction for a vast number of wild species, and have pushed surviving animals to relocate into smaller fragments of remaining habitat. Meanwhile, cities have grown and suburbs and towns have expanded into forests and jungles where the likelihood of coming into contact with wild animals is high. The disruption of ecosystems and the increasing contact between humans and wildlife have created the perfect conditions for virus spillover.
As the African Centre for Biosafety recently stated: ‘There are many examples of how ecosystem disruption causes diseases and outbreaks […] Most pandemics in fact, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more, have their roots in environmental change and ecosystem disturbances.’
Malaria – which kills over a million people annually due to the transmission of parasites by mosquitoes – has long been shown to go hand in hand with deforestation. Ebola outbreaks, with a fatality rate at about 50%, have been linked to the displacement of bats and people following the expansion of industry. Covid-19 derives from ecosystem disturbances as well. As agribusinesses in China have encroached upon the regional forests, wild food operators have moved further into a contracting wilderness to obtain their source. It is thought likely that, as a result, bat-hosted Covid-19 found its way onto a truck and crossed over to humans.
Such spillover is not new. In England capitalism was intensified via the mass clearing of peasants from their land and the replacement of existing ecosystems with industrial agriculture. Sick cattle were imported and concentrated in ways which resulted in pandemics ripping through the population in the 19th century – much more aggressively than had occurred before. The results of capitalist intrusions elsewhere were even more devastating and torment communities to this day: British colonists in Bangladesh cut down the Sundarbans to build rice farms, exposing humans to water-borne bacteria now known as cholera. European colonists in Central Africa established routes along rivers and into dense forests which eventually allowed a lentivirus in local primates to spill over, perfect its adaptation to the human body and evolve into HIV.
The redirection of the worst damage from industrial production has continued into the post-colonial era where agribusinesses are taking advantage of cheap labour and cheap land by moving their operations to the tropics. While the international community has responded vigorously to the Covid-19 pandemic, infectious diseases that cause a substantial health burden in the oppressed nations are largely ignored.
Monoculture and mega-farms
It is not habitat destruction alone that heightens the risk of disease emergence, but also the fact that wild habitats are replaced with monoculture farming – the practice of keeping animals or crops of the same species and with nearly identical genomes. It is an attractive option for agribusinesses since it is simpler, easier to automate and requires fewer employees. As a result, three quarters of the world’s food today is generated from as few as 12 plants and five animal species.
When a ‘wild’ virus strikes a monoculture, its severity is drastically increased. This is because natural selection, which in wild animals allows immune evolution to track pathogens and ensure within-species variation, has been replaced with artificial selection. While this increases production and economic gains, it simultaneously reduces genetic variation and prevents animals from co-evolving with a natural environment comprising benign and pathogenic microorganisms. Consequently, farm animals’ immune response is weak, and exacerbated by the physiological distress they endure in their state of captivity.
Bird flu is a salient example. Studies have shown that while the source of nearly all influenza subtypes comes from wild bird populations, no endemic strains of influenza have been found in the wild birds themselves. Instead, multiple low infectious influenza subtypes in such populations develop into harmful viruses only once they enter domestic bird farms.
Crowded conditions and large farm animal population sizes make the transmission of pathogens easier. In 1998 swine flu virus was discovered in North Carolina, USA – the same year the state’s pig population hit ten million, up from two million just six years earlier.
The end of agribusiness
Even though many viruses are wholly avoidable, governments worldwide – in an effort to protect profits – choose to pick up the pieces rather than hold agribusiness accountable. Given the stakes, immediate action is needed. Rather than restarting the economy that produced the damage, we must end agribusiness by destroying the private ownership that lay at the roots of its foundation. We must institute systematic socialised changes including the socialisation of land and natural resources. The redistribution of land would not only achieve a greater diversity in food production but also preserve the natural evolution of our ecosystems which, in turn, protects our farms from harmful pathogens. Only with socialism can the plundering of nature be stopped and nature’s ability to protect itself be restored.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 276 June/July 2020
