Big farms produce big flu epidemics

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R author of Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on ob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and the Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (Monthly Review Press). Through a dialecti­ cal process he shows us how Big Agriculture and its organization and methodology conflict with the epi­ demiological 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. A longer ver­ sion of the interview can be found at www.socialis­ taction.org.

John Schraufnagel: Just today, I saw several head­ lines—Ebola is changing faster than they thought. And new flu outbreaks—I read about one in Sweden. H5N8, I think, is all across Europe now. Is this some­ thing new?

Rob Wallace: That’s the interesting question. De­ spite the fact that some of the influenzas are celeb­ rities—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 reassor­ tants 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.

Bud Schulte: Explain how segmenting and reas­ sortment 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 his­ torically—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 influ­ 6 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2017 how whatever perfect storm may be emerging for influenza–if it is going to make its way out into hu­ man 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 “pa­ tient 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 expla­ nation 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 mul­ tiple 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. Guin­ ea 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 Ama­ zon 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 (continued on page 7, in “How to counter right-wing speeches”)