https://socialistaction.org/2017/04/21/can-we-survive-the-epidemics-that-big-agriculture-produces-an-interview-with-biologist-rob-wallace/
Can we survive the epidemics that Big Agriculture produces? An interview
with biologist Rob Wallace
/ 2 days ago
May 2017 ChickensBy BUD SCHULTE and JOHN SCHRAUFNAGEL
Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and the author of “Big Farms
Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the
Nature of Science” (Monthly Review Press). Through a dialectical process
he shows us how Big Agriculture and its organization and methodology
conflict with the epidemiological controls needed to stop flu epidemics
from emerging and killing millions of people. We sat down with Rob
Wallace in late November 2016 at May Day Books in Minneapolis.
Bud Schulte: I’m curious about how you came to your Marxist approach to
science.
Rob Wallace: My parents were radical scientists. My father is trained as
a physicist, my mother as a marine biologist. They met on a picket
protesting my father’s professors in the Physics Department [at Columbia
University] who were working with the JASON group at the time. The JASON
group were physicists helping the DOD come up with various weapons
systems, including Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.
My parents helped found “Scientists and Engineers Against the War.” That
same year, “Science for the People” was founded in Boston. This is a
time when there were so many radical scientists that those two groups
were rivals. If only we were in that stage again! So I grew up
cultivating a certain sensibility around the dinner table: that against
bourgeois scientific practice, truth and justice are deeply intertwined.
When I first started grad school, I put these notions into practice. As
a grad student at the City University of New York, I participated in a
lot of student activism. So I had activism and I had science, and some
of it spilled over and some of it didn’t. But it was working on
influenza as a postdoc at the University of California that the pieces
really came together. I began to think through what bourgeois science is
and what it destroys, and later, the way I got squeezed out [of
establishment science] for saying what was right in front of me.
It is a process. Once you come through your training, it seems like an
obvious path, but really there are twists and turns along the
way—misdirections, convergences, realizations. The most obvious
realizations often take years to crystalize.
A message is sent when you are bounced out of establishment science for
what you think is good work. For a long time it seems like even if you
object to the premises of the typical science, at least you’re able to
pay bills. But then when you are told that doing good work is not what
is wanted, when you have always believed that science is about figuring
out complicated problems in natural phenomena and you are told not to
figure them out anymore, then there is a profound break between the
system that helped produce you as a scientist and the desire to help
that system any more.
You can see what the larger system does to people around you and the
broader world. That happens to a lot of scientists: The accumulation of
understanding of how [scientists] are used and abused—not to advance
science but for a system that only cares about advancing its particular
brand of science.
John Schraufnagel: Just today, I saw several headlines—Ebola is changing
faster than they thought. And new flu outbreaks—I think today I read
about one in Sweden. H5N8, I think, is all across Europe now. Is this
something new?
RW: That’s the interesting question. Despite the fact that some of the
influenzas are celebrities—H5N1 was at century’s turn and then H1N1, the
swine flu [that emerged outside Mexico City in 2009]—these are only two
of multiple new reassortants that evolved and spread over the past 30
years. And in ways that many scientists would agree have not been seen
before. Multiple new strains that have emerged, and largely (in our
hypothesis, speaking very broadly), it’s because the spread of
globalized monoculture hog and poultry production.
BS: Explain how segmenting and reassortment work.
RW: Influenza has a segmented genome. It has eight segments. When you
have two different influenza types that occupy the same host, they can
trade the segments like a deck of cards. Most of the time, the influenza
that comes out of that exchange is crap, but every so often you get a
Royal Flush from it, and that new combination is much better in a
particular host species, or in spreading to humans, than previous
combinations.
The recombination accelerates evolution by virtue of the biology of the
virus. And that has happened historically—throughout the history of
influenza. At lot of the reassortment happens when all the different
wild waterfowl species come together in the summer up in the Arctic
Circle. That kind of trading has happened for eons. In influenza time,
anyway, that’s in eons.
That is now also happening within industrial hog and poultry, and
[scientists] have been able to track the shift and see this kind of
reassortment going on. Typically, as in all organisms, you might have a
mutation, a point mutation, within the genetic code at a single
nucleotide position that changes the virus. And that still happens, but
this reassortment, this trading of whole segments, is an accelerant
through evolution that allows the virus to arrive upon entirely new
adaptations in ways that point mutation alone wouldn’t allow them. Or,
in any short order anyway.
And so, when biologists speak about H1N1s and H5N8s and all other
combinations, those are different numbers for the types of hemagglutinin
and the neuraminidase. Hemagglutinin is a kind of molecular key that
allows the virus to key into the host cell. The neuraminidase, the N in,
say, the H1N1, is a glycoprotein that allows the virus to key out of the
cell once it has replicated in the host cell.
Those are two of the eight segments. The H’s and the N’s, yes, but then
you have all these internal genes that are recombining as well. So swine
flu H1N1, it’s not like the seasonal H1N1. It has the hemagglutinin 1
and the neuraminidase 1, but the internal segments are all different. So
the influenzas trade these different “cards,” and they arrive upon these
different combinations of influenza that allow the virus to react to,
say, a new host or a new circumstance in a way that it didn’t before.
In the last 30 years, there’s been a clear acceleration in the evolution
of the virus through this reassortment, and there’s a growing
understanding among scientists that in all likelihood it’s being driven
by the industrialization of poultry and hog, which are now traded from
one side of the planet to the other, mixing previously isolated strains.
BS: I was an eviscerator at a hog plant. Does this account for the fact
that workers would get recurrent flus (especially those that work inside
the animals)? We thought maybe you’d be immune to it the next year, but
no such luck—you get it again and again and again.
RW: Your question is very specific, but it has broad implications
because it asks us, what is the nature of science? A lot of biologists
would focus on how the virus evolved, and that work needs to be done, it
is a necessary part of it, but viruses do not merely evolve in the
abstract, they evolve in a specific concrete context. And that concrete
context now is a particular neoliberal agriculture, and how animals are
organized, how they are grown, how labor is treated, the directions
subsidies run. All these things are fundamentally integrated and have a
profound effect on the evolution of the virus.
So, ultimately, I try to point this context out throughout the book in
order to explain the evolution of the virus. Virology and molecular
biology, while necessary, are insufficient. You need the bigger picture
of all these other factors in order to offer a cogent explanation for
the evolution of the new pathogens.
Now to your question: There was a paper I cite in the book in which
researchers describe the shifts in the hog industry through the 1990s
and its effects on influenza. Before World War II, but especially
afterward, you had a Livestock Revolution here in the United States in
the poultry sector. You have all the consolidation across the companies
and all the big companies—Tyson and others—began to take over production
all the way from breeding to distribution. So you reduce the variety of
birds, the number of farms declines, and the number of heads per farm
increases.
The hog industry didn’t consolidate until the 1990s. That was late in
the game. The hog sector followed in poultry’s footsteps, and that had a
profound effect on everybody associated—not just companies, not just the
hog, but the workers involved as well—and the farmers. And so it is an
integrated epidemiology where what happens to the industry affects how
the hogs are exposed to the viruses, which affects the workers who are
handling them. And so, some of the work that I quote in the book
describes how whatever perfect storm may be emerging for influenza–if it
is going to make its way out into human populations—in all likelihood,
it’s going to go through the farm workers who are handling the live hog.
JS: What’s behind the obsession with finding “patient zero” whenever
there’s an outbreak? They are doing so now with Ebola, but I remember in
the 1980s, there was a huge “hunt” for the patient zero of the AIDS
epidemic.
RW: You can always look at a particular outbreak and try to identify a
patient zero, but in many ways the search for patient zero distracts or
detracts from looking at the broader picture, from examining the larger
social forces—the context—of an outbreak. Explanations compete with each
other. One explanation may be favored as a way of avoiding talking about
the bigger picture. Something can be true and miss the big picture.
Yeah, Ebola is a virus. Yeah, it can be spread by burial practice. But
you are completely ignoring the larger context that is pushing the
emergence of multiple pathogens. In this case, our team’s conclusion is
that the outbreak is an expression of neoliberalism in West Africa. West
Africa has long been pillaged, but there is a particular shift that it’s
undergoing that is connected to a particular type of globalization at
this point in time.
Guinea, the epicenter of the West Africa outbreak, had not been long
part of that integration, unlike Liberia, which had been on the front
end of it since 1925 with the Firestone Rubber Company. Liberia has been
pillaged to the point that almost 45% of its land has been leased out to
foreign companies. Guinea was kind of trailing on that, but has recently
begun to turn in that direction.
So if we look at palm oil, as the land gets eaten up in Indonesia,
Malaysia, and Thailand, global palm oil looks for other places to grow
its crop—the Amazon and the Congo. Even though there aren’t foreign
companies in Guinea yet, the agricultural sector is changing now. There
was pressure on the state to try to develop some response to the changes
in the global market, so production went from a parastatal cooperative
developing Guinean palm oil to a state company that began to do all the
classic development from the second half of Marx’s “Capital,” Book I.
The enclosures and all the stuff that he described for early capitalist
agriculture in England—you can see it being played out in Guinea. And
so, the state company starts to violate the commons, enclose it,
consolidate, select for a particular type of industrial hybrid palm oil,
and clear the land so you can start producing at scale.
Our hypothesis was that this had an effect on the ecology. If a bunch of
host species in the forest die out, then their pathogens die with them.
But some of those [host] species are going to prosper. You have some bat
species, bird species, and monkeys that are quite adaptable and can
prosper and do quite well in this new agroforestry. Some bat species,
which are documented Ebola carriers, are attracted to the palm oil, and
that increases the interface between humans and bats.
Another [scientific] group had a hypothesis that it was an insectivore
bat—another Ebola reservoir—that was the cause of the particular
outbreak that infected a particular boy. Again, the focus on patient
zero. The insectivore hypothesis may be true, but does it miss the point?
We tracked that particular bat species as also attracted to cash crops.
Maybe not palm oil as we had hypothesized, but macadamia and sugar cane.
Focusing on the bat, while important, misses the bigger picture that it
is the change in broader agroecology that has had an effect on changing
the interface between these reservoirs of pathogens and humans. In fact,
we went all the way back to show that every single Ebola outbreak was
prefaced with capital-led shifts in land use, even to the first outbreak
in 1976 in Southern Sudan.
Pathogens and their outbreaks are a mirror, a reflection of our mode of
civilization. And the ones that win out are telling us something about
ourselves. The biology of the pathogen matters because it is figuring
out something about the nature of our social organization and what it
does. Our effects are profound and far and wide.
Every one of those pathogens—HIV, Ebola, and so on—going all the way
back to the beginning of civilization, are marginal at first, and then
when we change something in the landscape or in our cultural practice, a
new ecosystem niche opens up, and the pathogens take advantage of it—a
nice convergence of biology and ecosystemic circumstance. Every new
emergent pathogen, all the way back, can be explained that way.
BS: Doesn’t the hunt for patient zero also serve the media agenda? They
play on fears but in a way that deflects attention from the actual culprits.
RW: We need to object to trying to scare people–using public health
warnings as a weapon [of fear]. But there are those among us who would
say that such warnings are sometimes also very much needed and often
badly downplayed.
The real question is: What problem are we going to focus on? The notion
that someone from West Africa is in a Texas hospital and infected a
couple nurses—that sucks—but is it going to lead to an apocalyptic
outbreak here in the U.S.? The answer is no. But there are some really
big, horrible changes going on in West Africa, on the other hand. It’s
not just about West Africa, because the Ebola outbreak arose out of
relational geography.
If neoliberal deforestation and mining is driving the emergence of
multiple pathogens, where’s the money that is funding that
deforestation? This is why in the book I talk about how Hong Kong and
New York and London should be considered “hot spots” of disease. That’s
where the sources of capital that are driving the deforestation and
development originate.
But it is not just the public health scene but the broader media and
political consciousness that is organized around accepted premises that
are required to continue a system that exploits people here in the
States and abroad. I see it time and again in public health: brilliant,
good hearted people, doing the right thing but repeatedly arriving at
the wrong conclusion because they accept the premises of the system that
drives the outbreaks and on which they rely.
JS: All the articles I was reading today [about the most recent avian
influenza outbreak in Sweden] were blaming wild birds for all the
problems. Do you have any comment on that?
RW: Yes, they are blaming wild birds. Various health commissioners and
agricultural ministers would say that’s why we need to pack in all the
poultry and keep them on the farms and protect them from being hit by
wild waterfowl. But it’s the fact that you are packing them all in
that’s causing their deaths, because you’re selecting for the virulence
that doesn’t have the same impact in the wild. You have it there [in
Europe] and you have it here in Minnesota.
When we had the massive H5N2 outbreak here, the veterinary medicine folk
were hiring ecologists to try to figure out how the wild birds are
infecting the poultry. Now they’ve latched on to the notion of
“ecohealth” because they are searching for a means and mechanism to wash
the hands of their patrons’ business model. So something beautiful and
wonderful—the notion of tracking how wild animals and livestock and
human health are integrated—now becomes a way to avoid the fact that
agribusiness’s business model is the source of the virulence and the
outbreaks.
JS: In your book you quote Cargill CEO Gregory Page as saying, “Cargill
is engaged in the commercialization of photosynthesis. It is at the root
of what we do.” That pretty much sums up the assumptions of this system.
Everything is a commodity.
RW: Even that which we think would be a source of free energy is now
something to be encapsulated within a paradigm of an economic system
that is making money off of the commons. Page is alluding to the notion
that he can somehow bottle the sun. And that’s what happens when Cargill
grabs land and in essence takes it out from underneath the feet of
subsistence and smallholder farmers. They’ve removed the right to use
free energy for making food out of thin air—with seeds and some land,
the sun does most of the work. And now, all of a sudden, small farmers
aren’t able to do that.
BS: Evolutionary epidemiology is your field. Which means you probably
have some ideas about how we actually could combat these viruses, if we
were willing to do so. In your opinion, what should we be doing
differently, and why aren’t we doing what we should be doing?
RW: If you look at the genetics of influenza or Ebola or HIV, they are
evolutionary machines. They speed through point mutations with
extraordinary speed to the point where—and I describe this in the
book—their evolution violates our notion of cause and effect. HIV or
influenza weekly come up with solutions to vaccines or drugs that we
haven’t even invented yet.
This is why any effort going toe-to-toe with influenza, Ebola, or HIV is
a losing battle. I’m not opposed to vaccines or drugs or medicine more
generally, but the notion that you are going to go toe-to-toe with that
kind of evolutionary machine is ridiculous. We don’t have the capacity
to do that. So we have to address the broader sociological and
ecological context and hopefully maneuver our way to arrive at a détente
with many a pathogen. We could maneuver a lot of pathogens to a place
where they couldn’t do as much damage.
Except, we’re going in the other direction! If I wanted to select for a
strain of influenza that would do maximum damage and spread around the
world, I would produce my hog and poultry exactly the way agribusiness
does it. That arises out of the fact that Big Ag separated out ecology
from economy. And that goes deep into the heart of the Victorian origins
of capitalism and the capacity of the bourgeoisie to manipulate the
world, which includes the premise that as a class they can separate
themselves out from the world they seek to manipulate.
I get asked all the time if there is a right way to mass produce food,
but the people who ask me don’t want the answer I give. Immediately, we
could institute three practical changes that would maneuver dangerous
disease out of poultry and livestock:
If agriculture is about piling in 15,000 birds together, that’s going to
select for greater virulence. Well we can’t do that anymore, so somehow
we have to space them out a little bit more across the food landscape.
And we can’t do genetic monoculture anymore; there have to be different
varieties. And we have to allow them to reproduce on site, to allow the
immune resistance to develop to any circulating pathogen. Agribusinesses
don’t do that now. The birds and hogs can’t reproduce on site—all the
breeding is done offshore and for morphometric characteristics, not for
immune response. We want our birds that are infected and survive to be
able to pass on their immunological adaptations to the next generation.
That’s how nature works to our benefit.
So there! Three immediately practical things! But those are things that
would in essence end the business model of livestock production—because
the whole point of raising them as monoculture now is to make a shitload
of money.
The system says it wants solutions in the concrete, but in this case
these can’t be applied unless the broader shifts in our economic
structure are imposed as well. And they must be. As the farmers will
tell us, we’ve reached a boundary condition. We’ve come up to a point
where the economics cannot survive the epidemiology it produces.
Share this:
Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
2Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)2
Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
April 21, 2017 in Environment.
Related posts
Straight From the Horse’s Mouth: UN Reports on Growth of Global Poverty
Salute to Herman Wallace & Angola 3
FIGHTBACK: Religion VS Reality
Post navigation
← Is Ontario NDP ready for 2018 election?
Get Involved!
Donate to help support our work
Get email updates
Join Socialist Action
Newspaper Archives
Newspaper Archives Select Month April 2017 (10) March 2017 (13)
February 2017 (19) January 2017 (13) December 2016 (12) November
2016 (19) October 2016 (12) September 2016 (10) August 2016 (10)
July 2016 (14) June 2016 (14) May 2016 (9) April 2016 (12) March
2016 (14) February 2016 (8) January 2016 (11) December 2015 (11)
November 2015 (9) October 2015 (8) September 2015 (10) August 2015
(7) July 2015 (13) June 2015 (9) May 2015 (10) April 2015 (12) March
2015 (9) February 2015 (11) January 2015 (10) December 2014 (12)
November 2014 (11) October 2014 (9) September 2014 (6) August 2014
(10) July 2014 (11) June 2014 (10) May 2014 (11) April 2014 (10)
March 2014 (9) February 2014 (11) January 2014 (11) December 2013
(10) November 2013 (11) October 2013 (17) September 2013 (13) August
2013 (10) July 2013 (11) June 2013 (15) May 2013 (14) April 2013
(14) March 2013 (12) February 2013 (10) January 2013 (17) December
2012 (7) November 2012 (8) October 2012 (19) September 2012 (2)
August 2012 (27) July 2012 (18) June 2012 (3) May 2012 (19) April
2012 (14) March 2012 (17) February 2012 (19) January 2012 (17)
December 2011 (3) November 2011 (33) October 2011 (14) September
2011 (13) August 2011 (34) July 2011 (24) June 2011 (19) May 2011
(19) April 2011 (15) March 2011 (15) February 2011 (16) January 2011
(15) December 2010 (17) November 2010 (1) October 2010 (6) September
2010 (3) August 2010 (8) July 2010 (7) June 2010 (2) May 2010 (9)
April 2010 (3) March 2010 (8) February 2010 (3) January 2010 (9)
December 2009 (6) November 2009 (5) October 2009 (16) September 2009
(3) August 2009 (2) July 2009 (5) June 2009 (2) May 2009 (7) April
2009 (6) March 2009 (16) February 2009 (9) January 2009 (10) December
2008 (11) November 2008 (8) October 2008 (16) September 2008 (14)
August 2008 (18) July 2008 (12) June 2008 (3) May 2008 (2) April
2008 (3) March 2008 (14) February 2008 (11) January 2008 (11)
December 2007 (8) November 2007 (1) July 2007 (1) June 2007 (1)
April 2007 (1) March 2007 (1) February 2007 (3) December 2006 (11)
November 2006 (11) October 2006 (13) September 2006 (15) August 2006
(11) July 2006 (18) June 2006 (7) May 2006 (14) April 2006 (6) March
2006 (14) February 2006 (5) January 2006 (2) December 2005 (9)
November 2005 (8) October 2005 (13) September 2005 (12) August 2005
(9) July 2005 (16) June 2005 (16) May 2005 (16) April 2005 (12)
March 2005 (14) February 2005 (19) January 2005 (15) December 2004
(14) November 2002 (17) October 2002 (19) September 2002 (22) August
2002 (21) July 2002 (15) May 2002 (21) April 2002 (21) February
2002 (15) January 2002 (15) December 2001 (17) October 2001 (24)
September 2001 (18) July 2001 (19) June 2001 (18) October 2000 (17)
September 2000 (21) August 2000 (19) July 2000 (16) June 2000 (26)
May 2000 (21) April 2000 (22) March 2000 (28) February 2000 (18)
January 2000 (20) December 1999 (20) November 1999 (26) October 1999
(25) September 1999 (18) August 1999 (40) July 1999 (38) June 1999
(24) May 1999 (27) April 1999 (25) March 1999 (26) February 1999
(29) January 1999 (24) July 1998 (12)
Search
View socialistactionusa’s profile on Facebook
View SocialistActUS’s profile on Twitter
View SocialistActionCT’s profile on YouTube
Subscribe to Our Newspaper
Upcoming Events
San Francisco: Honoring our Heroes and Martyrs... Celebrating the Life
of People's Attorney Lynne Stewart Renewing the Fight to Free Mumia
Abu-Jamal
May 6, 2017 at 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Eric Quesada Political and Cultural Center, 518 Valencia St., San
Francisco, CA
Category Cloud
Actions & Protest Africa Anti-War Arts & Culture Black Liberation Canada
Caribbean Civil Liberties Cuba East Asia Economy Education & Schools
Elections Environment Europe Immigration Indigenous Rights International
Labor Latin America Latino Civil Liberties Marxist Theory & History
Middle East Palestine Police & FBI Prisons South Asia Uncategorized Vote
Socialist Action Women's Liberation
View Calendar
Blog at WordPress.com.