Thanks to breakthroughs in production and food science,
agribusiness has been able to devise new ways to grow more food and
get it more places more quickly. There is no shortage of news items
on hundreds of thousands of hybrid poultry - each animal
genetically identical to the next - packed together in megabarns,
grown out in a matter of months, then slaughtered, processed and
shipped to the other side of the globe. Less well known are the
deadly pathogens mutating in, and emerging out of, these
specialized agro-environments. In fact, many of the most dangerous
new diseases in humans can be traced back to such food systems,
among them Campylobacter, Nipah virus, Q fever, hepatitis E, and a
variety of novel influenza variants.Agribusiness has known for
decades that packing thousands of birds or livestock together
results in a monoculture that selects for such disease. But market
economics doesn't punish the companies for growing Big Flu - it
punishes animals, the environment, consumers, and contract farmers.
Alongside growing profits, diseases are permitted to emerge,
evolve, and spread with little check. "That is," writes
evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace, "it pays to produce a pathogen
that could kill a billion people."In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a
collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking,
Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from
an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. Wallace
details, with a precise and radical wit, the latest in the science
of agricultural epidemiology, while at the same time juxtaposing
ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless
chickens, microbial time travel, and neoliberal Ebola. Wallace also
offers sensible alternatives to lethal agribusiness. Some, such as
farming cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed
crop-livestock systems, are already in practice off the
agribusiness grid.While many books cover facets of food or
outbreaks, Wallace's collection appears the first to explore
infectious disease, agriculture, economics and the nature of
science together. Big Farms Make Big Flu integrates the political
economies of disease and science to derive a new understanding of
the evolution of infections. Highly capitalized agriculture may be
farming pathogens as much as chickens or corn.
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