For many, the COVID-19 pandemic which has halted the global economy and killed hundreds of thousands is nothing more than an act of God. To assign blame to any human actor is as absurd as trying to hold someone responsible for a tornado or earthquake. But this attitude fails to grasp the metabolism which exists between humanity and nature, and the ways in which human activity influences natural occurrences such as the spread of viruses — climate change is also a “natural” phenomenon, but only a conspiracy theorist or an oil executive would say it has no human cause.
COVID-19 is the latest in a series of increasingly deadly new epidemic diseases which have sprouted up in the last half-century: HIV/AIDS, Ebola, the SARS coronavirus, bird flu (H5N1), swine flu (H1N1), and countless others. Are the sudden entrances of these diseases into the human population mere coincidences, or is there a factor of socioeconomic organization at play in these natural calamities? The wave of new diseases, like the looming threat of climate disaster, is intimately related to the expansion of global capitalism since the 1970s. Specifically, it is related to the “industrial revolution” which occurred in global food production during that time, in which smallholder production was increasingly outcompeted around the world by corporatized, vertically-integrated factory farms, owned and operated by capitalist enterprises for the purpose of profit.
It is now more or less beyond dispute that the origin point for COVID-19 was a bat, as analysis of the virus has shown it to be structurally similar to a number of bat-borne coronaviruses. Moreover, a number of the initial cases of the virus have been traced back to a wet market — a place where live animals, including wild or semi-wild animals, are sold for consumption — in Wuhan, China. For many, this information is enough to ascertain the cause of the virus: someone in China ate a bat. The cause of the virus, and thus the responsibility for its destructive effects, can thus be laid at the feet of the Chinese government for allowing the wet markets to function, or worse, at those of the Chinese people for their apparent proclivity for eating disease-ridden wild animals.
This explanation, aside from its invocation of racist associations of Asians with disease and its chauvinistic assumptions about what constitutes a food animal, fails to suss out the structural factors which created the coronavirus pandemic. Firstly, it’s unlikely the virus was transmitted directly to humans from bats; it’s unclear if bats were even sold at the market where the virus is said to have originated. Instead, coronavirus likely reached humanity from its origin point through the mediator of another animal host — some evidence suggests this intermediary may have been an armadillo-like creature called a pangolin, while some suggests it may have been a more common food animal — a pig. Regardless of the culpable species, the question is this: how did an animal intended for human consumption come to be exposed to wild bats to the extent that it could be infected by one in the first place?
The answer to this question lies in an examination of the recent economic transformation of China’s food production. As Maoist-era protectionism was eliminated and the Chinese economy was rapidly privatized, the livestock industry, starting with the Thai company Charoen Pokphand (CP) and closely followed by US companies like Tyson Foods, were the first to gain a foothold in China’s lucrative emerging market. Industrial farming, with its massive and centralized production, rapidly outcompeted the smallholder farming economy which had dominated China’s production of meat for most of its history.
The small farmers whose livelihoods were thrown into disarray by China’s liberalization were displaced both economically and geographically. In order to survive their forcible integration into the global commodity market, many farmers had to fill a niche unsuited for big factory farms: the trade of wild animals, such as pangolins, for human consumption. Others became subcontractors, raising pigs or chickens belonging to the factory farms in their plots, which would be taken back to their owners for slaughter upon reaching maturity. At the same time, the smallholders were pushed out of the fertile land (now occupied by large businesses) and forced to settle in lands closer to forests and other animal habitats.
The integration of smallholders into global commodity chains, their displacement closer and closer to the homes of wild animals, and the increased commodification of those wild animals for consumption were the result of the industrialization of Chinese food production. Taken together these factors greatly increased the likelihood of a wild pathogen transmitting itself from animals into humans. This is likely how COVID-19 made its way into the human population and became a worldwide pandemic.
Factory farming also contributes to disease in a more direct way, by serving as a perfect environment for diseases transmitted from wild animals to mutate into astoundingly deadly and virulent pathogens. Thankfully, this does not seem to have happened with COVID-19, but the same cannot be said for the deadly bird flu (H5N1) which threatened South China and Southeast Asia in the early 2000s. H5N1, despite killing ⅔ of those infected, miraculously did not develop the mutations necessary to reliably transmit from human to human. Humanity was saved from a pandemic borne of a virus far deadlier than COVID-19, not through the heroic efforts of any government or international organization, but simply through sheer dumb luck.
Nor is this simply a problem in China, as industrial farming is a global affair. The swine flu (H1N1) pandemic of 2009 likely originated in a US-owned industrial pig farm in Central Mexico, just as its predecessor, the misleadingly-named Spanish flu of 1918 — the most deadly pandemic in human history, killing upwards of 50 million — originated on a pig farm in Kansas.
One of the most horrific epidemics in recent memory, the Zaire Ebolavirus of 2013, also came about as the result of economic liberalization and the industrialization of food production, this time on palm oil plantations in West Africa. Massive palm producing operations, mostly owned by US and European agribusiness firms, have destroyed much of West Africa’s natural forest land. The fruit bats who made their homes in this forest were forced to adapt, taking up residence on newly-developed palm plantations. The proletarianized workers on these plantations, as well as workers in the logging industry, were thus exposed to the bats, potentially contracting ebola through bat urine deposited on the palms, or through being bitten or scratched.
In the past half-century, humanity has found itself confronted with new and deadly pandemic diseases: HIV/AIDS, ebola, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, and of course, COVID-19. But the sudden emergence of so many new diseases is no mere act of god or unlucky coincidence, it is the direct result of the “revolution” in agricultural and livestock production which occurred at the same time.
As food production is increasingly organized as a capitalist endeavor, in massive, privately-owned, industrial factories, it’s purpose ceases to be the fulfillment of human needs and instead fulfills the “need” for profit. It also serves more and more as a breeding ground for ever-deadlier pathogens which are unleashed to ravage humanity. The latest horror of COVID-19, which has stopped the global order in its tracks and taken so many lives, must serve as a wake up call. This pandemic is not the first humanity has encountered, nor will it be the last. But far greater horrors can be prevented, if only we can abolish the profit motive in food production and heal the metabolic rift which has developed between humankind and nature. •
