[D66] Big Farms Make Big Flu

R.O. jugg at ziggo.nl
Tue Aug 11 19:42:54 CEST 2020


https://monthlyreview.org/product/big_farms_make_big_flu/
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  Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease,
  Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science

/by/ Rob Wallace <https://monthlyreview.org/author/robwallace/>

$20.40 – $89.00

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 the 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.

In /Big Farms Make Big Flu/, a collection of dispatches by turns 
harrowing and thought-provoking, Rob Wallace tracks the ways influenza 
and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by 
multinational corporations. With a precise and radical wit, Wallace 
juxtaposes ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless 
chickens with 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 
is 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 into a new understanding of 
infections.

In /Big Farms Make Big Flu/, Rob Wallace stands boldly on the shoulders 
of giants in clearly expressing the problems with our agroindustrial 
system that so many already see but far too few are willing to say. With 
mordant wit and a keen literary sensibility, Wallace follows the story 
of this dysfunctional—and dangerous—system wherever it may lead, without 
regard to petty concerns of discipline or the determined ignorance of 
the commentariat and mainstream research institutions. /Big Farms Make 
Big Flu/ shows the power, possibility, and indeed, absolute necessity of 
political ecology, lest we not only fail to properly understand the 
world, but fail to change it.”

—M. Jahi Chappell, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist, Institute for 
Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)

These essays put you in the company of a delightful mind. Wallace is 
filled with curiosity, deep learning, and robust skepticism. In his 
company, you’ll learn about phylogeography, clades and imperial 
epizoology. He can also weave a mean story, with the kinds of big 
picture analysis that puts him alongside minds like Mike Davis’s. Who 
else can link the end of British colonial rule in China or the 
devaluation of the Thai Baht to the spread of bird flu? This collection 
is a bracing innoculant against the misinformation that will be spewed 
in the next epidemic by the private sector, government agencies and 
philanthropists. My copy is highlighted on almost every page. Yours will 
be too.

—Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas at Austin, author, 
/Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System/

This collection of short, provocative essays challenges the reader to 
draw important connections between industrial farming practices, 
ecological degradation, and viral epidemiology. Wallace deftly links 
political analysis of biological and economic phenomena, demonstrating 
the importance of place, capital and power in discussions about disease 
outbreak dynamics.

—Adia Benton, Department of Anthropology, Program of African Studies, 
Northwestern University, author, /HIV Exceptionalism: Development 
through Disease in Sierra Leone/

If you’ve missed the wit and brilliance of Stephen Jay Gould, here’s 
consolation: holistic, radical science from the frontlines of the battle 
against emergent diseases. Using the wide-angle lens of political 
ecology, Rob Wallace demonstrates the central roles of the 
factory-farming and fast-food industries in the evolution of avian flu 
and other pandemics that threaten the entire planet. Bravo to MR Press 
for publishing this landmark collection of essays.

—Mike Davis, author, /Monster at Our Door/ and /Planet of Slums/

Eye-opening and disturbing, /Big Farms Make Big Flu/ calls into question 
the status quo of livestock farms. Chapters directly address both 
potential hazards, and prospective solutions that could prove more 
humane for both the farm animals and humanity as a whole. Extensive 
notes and an index round out this alarmist yet highly recommended scrutiny.

—/Midwest Book Review/

Noam Chomsky has repeatedly noted that telling the truth sometimes 
requires making outlandish statements, which then requires considerable 
intellectual effort to explain why the statement only seems outlandish 
when it is evidently the truth. Wallace knows his Chomsky. He has, in 
his own words become an “enemy of the state,” and repeatedly makes 
“outlandish” statements in his thoughtful and thought-provoking 
collection of essays in /Big Farms Make Big Flu/. For example, one that 
summarizes much of his thinking is “Big Food has entered a strategic 
alliance with influenza … agribusiness, backed by state power home and 
abroad, is now working as much with influenza as against it.” Outlandish 
to be sure. But convincingly true nevertheless…

—/The Quarterly Review of Biology/

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