Re: [Marxism] Impresssions of Coronavirus crisis

2020-01-26 Thread Fred Murphy via Marxism
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Ecosocialist epidemiologist *Rob Wallace*, author of *Big Farms Make Big
Flu*, is worth following on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/rob.wallace.3133

Rob posted this a few days ago:

“Wuhan has imposed a transport lockdown on air, train, and bus travel, with
17 dead in the city and nearly 600 cases across China, with cases spreading
out globally.

As the infection appears to have a week incubation period, there is no
stopping its spread. And it does appear infectious, with all 14 doctors and
nurses of an operation team infected by a patient whose infection was
unknown.

nCoV-2019's apparent mortality rate of 2% appears comparatively less than
SARS's 10%. But a small percent of a large number is still a large number.
Two percent of 1 billion infected means 20 million dead. And the mortality
speaks little of the possible evolution of the pathogen's virulence.

That's where we sit now.

Switching gears, a discussion about origins and blame I participated over
on Aaron Vansintjan's page. with minor edits, might be of some interest:

Paul Tang: while i'm no fan of mass-scale factory farming, my understanding
is that 2019-ncov is widely assumed to have its first animal-to-human
transmission at a wet market, which typically have live poultry, fish, etc
sourced from smaller farms (what a lot of people might call "organic" farms
owned by its farmers). the issue is more to do with the concentrated
variety of live animals and humans in a single place, although that isn't
to say that this can't happen as a result of factory farming as well. wet
markets were also implicated in the outbreak of sars, iirc.

(happy to be corrected if i'm wrong though!)

Aaron Vansintjan: My understanding is that though Chinese policy has been
to crack down on smaller, "unhygienic" farms in response to virus
outbreaks, blaming small producers, the issue is that the interplay of
small farming and mass industrial farming causes the virus to quickly
mutate. Without the industrial part, this wouldn't happen to the same scale.

Paul Tang: I agree that that definitely occurs, at least according to my
own reading on the matter, and I'm not at all denying there could be
consequences like what you've mentioned. (I hope I didn't come off as
demonizing small farmers!) Viral outbreaks also often have the perverse
effect of strengthening mass industrial farming in the sense that the state
response is to bolster it.

Chinese agricultural policy is a massive topic and there are multiple
political and ideological tensions in play even within the (quite opaque)
policymaking process; definitely worth a longer conversation, but perhaps
facebook isnt the right medium for it.

Rob Wallace: My [previous] comments [Aaron reposted] were directed at the
entirety of the periurban supply chain: from the deepest forest to rural
production and urban suppliers.

Worldwide even the wildest subsistence species are being roped into ag
value chains: Ostriches, porcupine, crocidiles, fruit bats, and the palm
civet, whose partially digested berries now supply the world's most
expensive coffee bean. Some wild species are making it onto forks before
they are even scientifically identified, including one new short-nosed
dogfish found in a Taiwanese market.

All are increasingly treated as food commodities. As nature is stripped
place-by-place, species-by-species, what's left over becomes that much more
valuable.

As Weberian anthropologist Lyle Fearnley points out, farmers repeatedly
manipulate the distinction between wild and domestic as an economic
signifier, producing new meanings and values, including to the very
epidemiological alerts issued in response to their sales. A Marxist might
push back that these signifiers emerge out of a context that presently
extends outside smallholder control.

So while the distinction between factory farms and wet markets isn't
unimportant, we may miss their foundational similarities (and dialectical
relationships).

As Aaron alluded to, the distinctions bleed together by a number of other
mechanisms. Many a smallholder, for instance, is in actuality a contractor,
growing out day-olds for industrial processing. So livestock--domestic or
wild--catch a pathogen forest-side before being shipped back to an urban
wet market or a processing plant on the outer ring of a major city.

Spreading factory farms meanwhile force increasingly corporatized wild
foods companies to trawl deeper into the forest, increasing the likelihood
of picking up a new pathogen, while reducing the environmental
stochasticity that the forest imposes on pathogens previously unable to
line up hosts in growing transmission chains and now suddenly sprung.

[Marxism] Impresssions of Coronavirus crisis

2020-01-26 Thread Ken Hiebert via Marxism
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The extensive coverage of the coronavirus crisis has given me an exposure to 
China as it is today.  I have to say it has updated my perceptions of China.  
Based on the coverage I have to see China as a more “modern" country than I had 
thought, with gleaming health care facilities and up to date equipment.
And I expect many were impressed by the announcement of a 1,000 bed hospital to 
be built in six days.

I am left with a question that others may be able to help me with.  Is there 
something wrong with agriculture in China that allows these outbreaks?  How 
common is this elsewhere?

ken h


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/world/asia/china-coronavirus-xi-jinping.html 


The turnaround from complacency to nationwide mobilization typifies how China 
can respond to unexpected crisis 

 like a lumbering giant, reluctant to stir, but then capable of shattering 
urgency. It represents both sides of the authoritarian political bargain under 
Mr. Xi.
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