[The following is the revised text of a talk PReP’s Rob Wallace originally gave on April 16, 2020, at a Transnational Institute webinar in conversation with organizers Moayyad Bsharat, Arie Kurniawaty, Sai Sam, and Paula Gioia from, respectively, Palestine, Indonesia, Myanmar, and Germany by way of Brazil. The presenters talked through how SARS-CoV-2, the COVID virus, evolved out of the very structural inequalities it is also now exacerbating.]

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here in spite of our present circumstances.

Inequalities in outcomes based on different policies and practices

Let’s begin with the status of the pandemic. The Johns Hopkins global map has us this morning at 5.5 million confirmed COVID cases worldwide and 350,000 dead.[1] Given the counts some countries are reporting as suspected cases, this confirmed caseload is likely 5 to 10 times an underestimate.[2] So at worst as many as 50 million people have to this point been infected – some more critically than others. For the worse outcomes – with uneven testing across the globe and some areas stretched to medical capacity – deaths are also likely undercounted.[3]

More than a quarter of the confirmed cases have been situated in the United States, with large outbreaks in Europe and the Middle East. The global South already began its own run up the epicurve, in a context of comparatively lesser public health capacity, fewer household resources for sheltering-in-place, and a wider array of underlying co-morbidities – that is, other health conditions that can complicate a COVID infection.[4] Indeed, as occurred for the HIV epidemic, in the most impoverished areas of both global North and South, other matters – including getting enough food to eat – may be more pressing than what many infected may gamble is only a passing shortness of breath.[5]

That all said, COVID isn’t merely business as usual. We see some telling reversals. Britain accepted shipments of masks from Vietnam.[6] Cuba sent doctors to NATO member Italy.[7] And Senegal turned around COVID tests in four hours, while in the U.S. such tests, even when available, were taking up to ten days.[8]

These telltales are underway during what the world-systems theorists describe as a major shift in the prevalent cycles of capital accumulation that have structured much of the world order the past 500 years.[9] The pandemic serves as much as a marker of such a shift as a shockingly immediate crisis. The United States, on the tail end of its cycle of accumulation, turning capital back to money for the wealthiest – that is, cashing out – is, outside its military budget, no longer newly investing in the infrastructure of global empire.

U.S. power, for instance, was until this outbreak on the hook for cleaning up pandemics that capital the world over helped create.[10] The U.S. tasked itself with keeping the global system on the same developmental path despite the ultimately unsustainable (and hideous) destruction to land and people that path represents. So defunding the World Health Organization, as the U.S. did, wasn’t an exercise in imperial might.[11] It was a white flag, a capitulation.

Domestically, the U.S. failures to respond to its own outbreak were more than missteps by the Trump administration, and were programmed in decades ago as the shared commons of public health were simultaneously neglected and sold off.[12] A country captured by a regimen of individualized, just-in-time epidemiology – an utter contradiction – with barely enough hospital beds and equipment for normal operations, was unable to marshal the resources necessary to pursue the scale of disease suppression that a COVID outbreak demands.

Indeed, many a New Yorker denied access to a critical care bed and then gasping for breath on their couches at home had much more in common with a West African infected with Ebola in a structurally adjusted health care system than with any other New Yorker wealthy enough to pay for medical care on demand.[13] Nearly two thousand New Yorkers were found dead in their homes the first eight days of April 2020.[14]

Rural areas also got pummeled.[15] Louisa County in Iowa, home to a Tyson company meat packing plant through which COVID burned right through, at one point hosted more cases per capita than New York State.[16] The county, home to 11,000 people, had neither a hospital nor a practicing physician living there.

China, in contrast, is on the front end of its cycle of accumulation.[17] It is invested in building the infrastructure, including global public health, it needs to turn money into capital (and imperial might). Such a transition – U.S. to China – is neither assured nor absolves China of its public health ills, including producing conditions for COVID-19’s very emergence as we’ll discuss further.[18] But we should note that the structural impulse there is different. Indeed, upon an initial stumble, China moved to eradicate COVID from Hubei, the province of origin, by deploying 40,000 medical staff from other provinces and conducting comprehensive contact tracing and testing.[19] China donated millions in U.S. dollars to its African trade partners to fight COVID.[20]

Beyond this contrast of two giants, the question of why some countries escaped the worst of the outbreak is worth comment. There was a matter of geography. How close to an epicenter? South America and Africa started up late this way. But even countries bordering China escaped the worst of it. It helps if a government both prepares the country during the advance warning it’s been given and sees the shared commons as still part of the purview of governance.

Taiwan, for instance, tested people at the airport for COVID-19, disinfected their suitcases, drove each person separately to their destination in a government-provided taxi, and gave each arrival one phone app that tells them where in their area they’re staying that they could purchase a mask and another app that listed local infections and their case histories.[21]

Iceland aggressively tested its population and isolated the positive cases.[22] It deployed detectives to contact-trace any infection. Those in contact with a case were also sequestered, so that if any of these people proved to be infected, they were already in quarantine. The rest of the country went about its business, walking free outside without masks.

Vietnam provided comprehensive health care to nearly the entirety of its population, and, unlike, say, Louisa County in Iowa, had doctors and nurses in every community.[23] Along with the typical border protocols, like China, whole buildings were quarantined should a case be detected but the building’s occupants were provided three meals a day for a small charge. Apartment buildings hosted whole-body sanitizing stations at all entrances.[24] Empty hotels were used as quarantine sites, where doctors made house calls. Everybody wore a mask. And unlike the U.S., where the federal government set off a black market bidding war for ventilators among its states, there were few if any reports from Vietnam of price gouging, panic buying, or hoarding.[25]

That said, all countries were in for a rough ride with the global economy already falling toward a recession before the outbreak began.[26] Those countries pummeled worst by the pandemic found themselves farther in the fiscal hole. In an effort to fix outbreak and economy at the same time, the grim calculus of capital attempted to push the two crises of its own making onto the indigenous and the poorest workers worldwide. Brazil under Bolsonaro even before the Amazonian fires showed that calculus.[27] But also, in the U.S., the government aimed to reduce the already criminal wages that immigrant farmworkers were making as “pandemic relief” for agricultural companies.[28]

Industrial agriculture and pandemics

Our cycles of accumulation – the U.S. cashing out and China ramping up – impacted COVID’s very origins. Over the past forty years, China chose to engage in massive shifts in land use and migration to domestically feed and pay its population.[29] These shifts had considerable impact in decoupling (and recoupling) traditional ecologies into new configurations that had a profound effect on economy and epidemiology alike. So we see post-economic liberalization, the rise of multiple strains of new influenzas, including H5N1, H6N1, H7N9, and H9N2, as well as SARS-1 and, now, an explosion in cases of African Swine fever which killed half of China’s hogs in 2019.[30]

There is some controversy as to COVID’s local origins, but the genetics of the virus – SARS-CoV-2 – show it to be recombinant of a bat coronavirus and a pangolin strain that subsequently went through some attuning to the human immune system whether before or upon the Wuhan outbreak.[31] But clearly agriculture had a role to play in this process even if that central Wuhan market didn’t. Somehow the virus got from one of the many coronaviruses documented to circulate among a variety of bat species in Central China into Wuhan proper.[32] To claim agriculture had no impact, as China is moving toward as an official position, or absurdly, that the virus didn’t originate in China at all, would position opponents of agriculture’s role in a pretty precarious position.[33] How to explain the move from bats through pangolins through perhaps another intermediate species such as hogs into humans without bringing up agriculture (or logging or mining)? The genetics don’t support a lab accident.[34]

In all likelihood an expanding regional circuit of production maneuvered both the increasingly formalized wild foods sector and industrial livestock production further into the hinterlands where both sectors increasingly encountered bat reservoirs.[35] Periurban loops of growing extent and population density can increase the interface (and spillover) between wild nonhuman populations and newly urbanized rural areas. Those new geographies also reduce the kind of environmental complexity with which forests can disrupt the transmission of deadly viruses as we would like our forests to do.[36]

That regional circuit of production of COVID’s likely origins – forest through periurban to city – is reproduced around the world.[37] This scenario offers a broader framework by which to organize our thinking about outbreaks nearly everywhere – not just China. SARS 1 and 2, Ebola, Zika, yellow fever, African swine fever, avian and swine influenzas, Nipah virus, Q fever, among others, and, historically, HIV, all originated or re-emerged somewhere along such expanding circuits of production, whether in the forest, in the new periurban continuum, or in factory farms or processing plants near or in cities. Many such new ecologies are driven by imperial or neoliberal imposition.[38] Clearly infectious diseases aren’t merely matters of the virus itself, but also the context in which they emerge.[39]

Indeed, looking toward the future, we find coronavirses are only one of many pathogens developing in such an agroeconomic context. What we are suffering today is already also in motion somewhere else, many times over, like viral hurricanes lining up in the Atlantic Ocean.

Agroecology, habitat restoration, pandemic prevention

What to do? As perhaps a prompt for our conversation today, I’ll touch upon some possibilities if only as a series of questions.

Are we prepared to rebuild the town economies that permit farmers and fisher folk around the world the autonomy they need to source local inputs without destroying wilderness?[40] Can we learn to learn from indigenous groups how to treat a landscape as much as a matter of our ethos as a source of food?[41]

Will we finally abandon settler ideologies? Will we reintroduce ourselves back into Earth’s cycles of regeneration?[42] Can we rediscover our sense of individuation – who we are – in multitudes of people beyond what capital and the state offer us?[43]

Are we prepared to fight to reclaim rural and forest landscapes and local waters that agribusiness has turned into sacrifice zones for global capital?[44] Will we aim to defeat agribusiness as both a mode of production and a political opponent – from its lobbying in State capitols to its campaigns in killing environmental activists along neoliberal frontiers of the forest edge?[45]

I believe these questions are the fires we must walk through in order to be able to introduce the now suddenly-obvious strategies in pandemic prevention:

Among them, we need to protect the forest complexity that keeps deadly pathogens from lining up livestock and human hosts for a straight shot onto the world’s travel network.[46] We need to reintroduce the livestock and crop diversities, and reintegrate animal and crop farming at scales that keep pathogens from ramping up in deadliness.[47] We must once again allow our food animals to reproduce onsite, restarting the natural selection that allows immune evolution to track pathogens in real time.

In short, what to do includes many of the very practices the indigenous and smallholders of the world engage in as a matter of course in their everyday cultivation.[48] Can we scale these out specific to the needs of people and place? Can we, as the Zapatistas have been paraphrased, can we make un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos?49 – a world where many worlds fit?

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(Robert G. Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps. He is author of several books, including Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19, and Big Farms Make Big Flu. He has consulted for the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Centers for Disease Control. Courtesy: ‘Pandemic Research for the People’, Daraja Press, and MR Online. Article courtesy: MR Online, a webportal set up by the US socialist journal, Monthly Review.)