Producing Food, Producing Zoonosis: The Political Ecology of the COVID-19 Pandemic
By Mariel Aguilar-Støen and Jostein Jakobsen
Zoonoses stemming from wildlife have increased notably during the last 50 years. This increase is explained by our breaking the barriers that normally separate humans from wildlife. In our hunt for cheaper resources, we have disturbed complex ecological relationships. In a world that is closely connected and in which people and goods move at an incredible pace, the risk that new zoonoses can develop into pandemics is very high. The COVID-19 pandemic suggests that our wellbeing depends on relationships that are bigger and broader than the economy and that include viruses that can kill us if we do not leave them in peace. We believe that the key to our future lies as much in changes to our relationship to nature and wildlife as in our relationship to the animals we eat and the fodder that feeds them.
To produce food that yields higher profits, agricultural production has, during the last 200 years, constantly moved to new places where food can be produced, apparently, more cheaply. Forests, natural grasslands, and other types of nature have had to give their places to soy, palm oil, maize, sugarcane, and cattle ranching. But the COVID-19 pandemic shows that there is, as historian J.W. Moore argues in his 2015 book Capitalism in the Web of Life, there is no longer “cheap nature” available. Right now, we can only speculate the final cost of the pandemic in human lives and dollars, but regardless of the exact numbers, it is certain that there will be an extremely high cost. If producing food costs thousands of human lives and billions of dollars, it is no longer cheap — not because the price of land, water, or labor has increased, but because the pandemic is part of the bill.
Our meat consumption has increased enormously during the last 50 years. Middle-class appetites for meat seem insatiable both in the USA and Europe, and in Asia and Latin America. The type of meat that the world consumes the most is meat produced under regimes in which animals are concentrated in very small spaces and in which production is decoupled from nearby nature. On average, poultry consumption per head per year increased from 3 kg in 1961 to 14 kg in 2013, while pig meat consumption increased from 8 kg to 16 kg in the same time period. Industrial meat production involves a radical simplification of nature, genetically homogeneous monocultures, and that the fodder to feed the animals is produced in places far from where animals are raised — frequently in different countries. This type of production also requires the widespread use of antibiotics resulting in a constant increase in the number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is a public health problem in many parts of the world. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that in total, the area used for fodder production constitutes close to 70% of the cultivated area in the world, and that this area has increased by 30% during the last 50 years. Each year, the expansion of soy cultivation claims close to half a million hectares of tropical forest.
Meat production and consumption link together diverse geographies of the world, both because animal feed is produced in one site and exported to another, and also because the animals that are fed with this feed are exported to various sites. Brazil is an excellent example of these geographical connections. Brazil became the second-largest soy producer over the last 50 years. In the 1980s, Brazilian scientists developed a soy variety that can be cultivated in the tropics. With these new possibilities to “develop,” the Cerrado region opened up. The Cerrado region, with its almost 200 million hectares of land, was the start of the Brazilian soy adventure — an adventure that connects previous forest areas in Brazil with meat production in other parts of the world. This is an adventure that is also based on the expansive use of violence, exploitation of workers, and the grabbing of indigenous lands to make space for soy monoculture. At the same time, large areas of the Amazon forest are cut down to create space for cattle ranching, which is considered to be one of the main causes of deforestation in the world. Much of that deforestation happens in the Amazon.
Asia, and China in particular, are key in the new Brazilian soy production. China produces half of the global pig meat production and 20% of the poultry in the world. China also consumes close to one-third of all soy produced in the world. A historical increase at the world level in meat consumption is associated with the increase in poultry and pig meat production in China. This industry is strongly dependent on soy imports, particularly from Latin American countries, with Brazil being the main partner. Other Asian countries import enormous quantities of soy from Latin America — for example, there is a strong commercial link between Argentina and Vietnam. These meat geographic connections make the economies of various countries — Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia — increasingly dependent on the expansion of soy exports. This massive animal and plant complex, industrially produced to provide meat to meat-hungry middle classes, is promoted both by gigantic transnational corporations and medium-size companies. Governments also play a role in stimulating production through subsidies, tariffs, and commercial agreements. Meat is big business, but the nature that we intended to grab cheaply seems to have an unexpected price: zoonoses.
Mariel Aguilar-Støen is a professor in human geography. She is the director of the research group “Rural Transformations” and director of the Centre for Environment and Development’s research school. Her research on rural transformations has focused on extractive industries, agroindustries, migration, and the social and political dimensions of forest conservation compensation schemes as well as the elite’s role in environmental governance. She has also conducted research on peace-building. Geographically, most of her research is conducted in Latin America.
Jostein Jakobsen is a researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment. His research interests lie within political ecology and critical agrarian studies, and his fieldwork experience is in India.
