International Socialists

The Monster at Our Door

Mike Davis

<><>

Edited talk given by Mike Davis in New York, International Socialist Review, October 2005

Writer, historian, and activist Mike Davis is the author of recently published, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, The New Press. Davis teaches in the Department of History at the University of California at Irvine, and lives in San Diego.

The threat of avian influenza cannot really be understood apart from the impact of agro-capitalism, particularly the ongoing “livestock revolution,” upon the ecology of disease. Pandemics, like earthquakes and floods, have ceased to be purely “natural” events; viral plagues, to a surprising extent, are monsters of our own making. Like HIV/AIDS, the emergence of avian influenza demands an analysis in terms of world economic and social transformations ­ in short, an understanding of the capitalist relations of production and their environmental consequences on a global scale.

But, first, why such hysteria over an illness that so far has affected so few people? To date, fewer than 100 people are known to have died from avian flu since the virus first jumped from birds to humans in Hong Kong in 1997. Tens of millions in the same period, meanwhile, have died from malaria, HIV/AIDS, or diarrheal diseases.

The attention that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has lavished on the strain known as H5N1 derives from the flu pandemic of the winter of 1918-19, which was the single largest mortality event in human history: killing probably 100 million people worldwide. The squalid sanitary conditions in the trenches as well as civilian food shortages were an ideal incubator for high-mortality diseases. But a flu plague was the last fear on most experts’ minds, as it was hardly considered a major danger prior to 1918. All this changed when large numbers of healthy young conscripts started dying. Indeed, as flu spread through the trenches it became a factor in deciding the outcome of the First World War.

The epicenter was British India, where famine and flu formed a sinister alliance: between 12-20 million people died as the pandemic spread inland from the port of Bombay. Like the Bengal famine of 1943, the 1918 famine was a direct result of the British export of grain surpluses to England and cold indifference to life and death in poor villages. Once the flu had reached the famine areas, the absence of any public health systems ensured the highest possible mortality rate.

The unprecedented toll of famine and disease in British India between the famines of the 1890s and the flu pandemic of 1918, is one of the most skirted around gigantic facts of modern history. Thirty to fifty million poor people died from flu, plague, and famine-related diseases in this belle époque of British power.

In my new book, The Monster at Our Door, I argue that major factors responsible for the reemergence of a pandemic threat have less to do with nature and more to do with the global economy ­ with the corporatisation of livestock production, the growth of urban poverty, and the neoliberal-engineered destruction of public health response capacity.

The coming pandemic may combine the virulence of AIDS/HIV or Ebola fever with the transmissibility of a common cold. In the evolution of such a formidable viral monster, dramatic ecological changes must attend changes in molecular biology and antigen behavior. The emergence of H5N1 and its possible demon offspring have required, in particular, unprecedented concentrations of wild birds, poultry, and humans in ecological intimacy with each other.

In my book, I focus especially on the role of the so­called livestock revolution in accelerating the evolution of virulent flu strains. The industrialisation of livestock production on a global scale is an ongoing development of the last 10-15 years, and is part of a much larger upheaval as vertically integrated agribusiness displaces or subordinates remaining zones of peasant and small-plot production. The origins of large-scale agrocapitalism, of course, dates back to the end of the 19th century and became the subject of important studies by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, and other classical Marxists.

On the demand side, the Livestock revolution is being driven by dramatic increases in the consumption of animal protein in rapidly urbanising countries like China and Indonesia. In the West, we equate meat with beef, but in most of Asia, the major traditional source of animal protein has been pork. Pork consumption indeed has increased dramatically, but even more spectacular has been the increase in per capita consumption of chicken. Globally, chicken has replaced beef to become the 2nd most important source of animal protein, and soon will replace pork in countries where previously people have eaten very little chicken. The hundreds of KFC franchises across China are only the tip of an iceberg.

The state-of-the-art template for the livestock revolution ­ pork production as well as poultry ­ is Tyson Industries. Tyson is one of the worst exploiters of labour in the US. Tyson has flourished in the Southern, union-free environment of right-to-work laws and Darwinian entrepreneurialism. Tyson is Henry Ford applied to poultry, or in official terminology, the world’s biggest “integrator.” Hard scrabble family farmers contract with Tyson as little more than poultry warehousemen. Everything is supplied by the corporation: baby chickens, feed, veterinary products, technology. The contractors, however, bear all the risk if the chickens get sick or die. Across the South, Tyson has huge central processing plants surrounded by belts of contract growers. Chickens are slaughtered in almost incomprehensible numbers: one billion each year in northwestern Arkansas, another billion in Georgia. The vertically integrated, continuous-flow process bears more resemblance to the petrochemical industry than to traditional agriculture, and the ultimate output is also consumed assembly-line fashion at the nearest KFC or McDonald’s.

The Tyson model has been adopted with enormous ruthlessness in Southeast Asia, particularly by Bangkok-based Charoen Pokphand (CP) that has expanded throughout China. As a result, poultry populations have been essentially “urbanised.” The Tyson/CP model has created huge, unprecedented concentrations of poultry ­ hundreds of millions of birds ­ in small geographical areas. Such super-populations, of course, have never existed before in nature, and the new densities of birds radically change key variables in the relationships between poultry and the diseases they carry. In the case of flu in particular, industrial poultry production has put viral evolution on fast-forward.

As H5N1 has decimated flocks and killed farm children in Vietnam and Thailand over the past 2 years, CP, Tyson, and other livestock revolution giants have attempted to use the avian flu scare to restructure poultry production in their favour, by blaming the epidemic exclusively on the practices of small farmers. But the virulence of H5N1 seems to have evolved out of the coexistence of both systems of production, small and large. If Asia’s ubiquitous backyard flocks bring domesticated and wild birds in constant contact, the corporations’ huge warehoused poultry populations provide ideal conditions for the natural selection of the most virulent strains. In Thailand, China, and Indonesia, moreover, governments have colluded with CP and other politically powerful corporations to cover up infections and allow the export of meat from diseased birds.

The livestock revolution, of course, is spurred by the urban revolution throughout Asia and the Third World. China’s cities alone added more population in the single decade of the 1980s than did all of Europe, including Russia, during the entire 19th century. And everywhere, city growth is the urbanisation of formerly rural poverty. The explosion of informal urban settlement over the last generation ­ the UN now officially estimates a world slum population of more than one billion ­ has created unprecedented concentrations of biologically vulnerable humans living in congested and unsanitary conditions. All through Asia and Africa, indeed, are dense concentrations of poverty as inviting to disease growth as the environment of any First World War troop ship or frontline trench.

So, in addition to the livestock and urban population revolutions, you also have unprecedented numbers of people in poor health (often with chronic respiratory ailments) living in dense, unsanitary conditions. In the last instance, humans are simply a viral food supply. Added to this is the shrinkage of time and distance due to globalisation ­ with shorter travel-times for the transmission of viruses and bacteria to any corner of the world ­ and you have the optimum conditions in human history for new plagues and pandemics.

What has been the systemic response to these new potentials for disease emergence? Globalisation’s transformation of livestock ecology and disease evolution, of course, has taken place without any countervailing investment in the public health systems needed to surveil and respond to novel infections or the reemergence of old plagues. Indeed, one of the principal impacts of a generation of debt has been the deliberate shrinkage of public health expenditure in poor countries. The results, especially in Africa, have been devastating: hospital and clinic closures, the emigration of doctors and medical staff, and inability to buy life-saving but expensive pharmaceuticals. The genocidal progress of HIV/AIDS in the tropics owes as much to neoliberal structural adjustment as it does to biological factors.

Thus, if the livestock revolution has created conditions for the accelerated evolution of influenza strains, global urban poverty and disinvestment in public health assure the vulnerability of huge populations. The same kind of catastrophic synergy between flu, hunger, and poor health that devastated India in 1918 could kill tens of millions in India or Africa tomorrow.

But viruses will also track down the affluent in their gated suburbs. We live in an age of blind and ignorant belief that spatial apartheid will protect gilded lifestyles from the turbulent world outside. By driving a huge SUV (a gated community on wheels) and living in a “protected by armed response” outer suburb, the haves reproduce an illusion of invulnerability to the consequences of global inequality. A pandemic may be a great equalizer. Certainly the Bush administration has squandered every opportunity to organise an effective defense. Unlike HIV/AIDS, an avian flu pandemic would be no surprise attack. The world’s leading flu researchers, together with the WHO and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation, have been sounding the tocsin since 1997.

This desperate campaign by contagious disease experts to make avian flu a global priority, moreover, has coincided with the sudden availability of massive federal funding to meet the so-called threat of bioterrorism.

Recently 700 medical researchers led by Nobel Laureates published a petition protesting the draining of federal research funds from vital areas of disease research in order to support exotic biowarfare projects. Billions have been wasted on stockpiling vaccines for hypothetical smallpox or anthrax attacks, while flu vaccine development has received less annual funding than “abstinence education.” Despite repeated assurances that it takes the avian flu threat seriously, the Bush administration has seemingly been more worried about promiscuity than pandemics.

What about vaccinations and wonder drugs? The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly criticised first the Clinton administration and then the Bush regime for failure to get vaccine production under way in anticipation of an avian flu pandemic. Some trials are now taking place, but Washington is proposing to manufacture only a couple of million doses. Moreover, H5N1 is still evolving and there is no certainty that the vaccine under development will actually work.

Antivirals also exist, but their efficiency depends on careful safeguards against rampant misuse that encourages the evolution of viral resistance. Thus, the cheapest and most widely available antiviral, amantadine, no longer works against H5N1 because of secret and promiscuous employment in China to protect poultry after the original 1997 outbreak.

The sole remaining defense against avian flu is a far more expensive species of antivirals known as neuraminidase inhibitors. The principal pharmaceutical, called Tamiflu, is manufactured by Roche in a single plant in Switzerland. Canada, Australia, and Japan, following scientific recommendations, have stockpiled enough Tamiflu to protect one-quarter of their populations. Likewise, Britain and France have ordered large quantities.

The Bush administration, despite pleas from flu experts, has stockpiled only 2 million courses, with another 3 million recently ordered but not yet delivered. Out of a population of almost 300 million people, of whom at least 100 million are expected to contract during a pandemic, to whom will the Tamiflu go? At a recent conference, public health experts were unable to agree whether they should prioritise emergency personnel, health workers, or chronically ill elderly people. Soon after, however, the Pentagon clarified the situation with a memorandum assigning priority use of antivirals to military forces on active duty around the world.

If the sole superpower has failed to minimally protect its citizens, what is the fate of the far more vulnerable populations in poor countries? The answer is brutally simple: no vaccines, no antivirals. When a Thai representative at a recent summit conference on avian flu proposed that Tamiflu be generically manufactured to increase the supply and reduce the cost, the US and France circled wagons around Roche’s monopoly. Likewise, the Bush administration has rebuffed Vietnam’s desperate pleas for help in establishing a comprehensive system of viral surveillance and testing.

In the event of a pandemic outbreak, the greatest loss of life, as the WHO has repeatedly warned, will be in sub-Saharan Africa. Only white and wealthy South Africans have access to antivirals and potentially to a vaccine. In the rest of the continent, with its huge population of immune-suppressed and sick people, there is not a single firebreak against an H5N1 conflagration.

The threat of avian flu, in conclusion, maps with uncanny accuracy to the global topography of inequality, debt, and poverty. Like HIV/AIDS, avian flu is a plague that grows directly out of the new ecology of globalisation, the world public health crisis, and the obscene misallocation of resources by global capitalism. The pharmaceutical industry, as the recent flu vaccine shortage illustrated, has largely abandoned the research and development of “non-profitable” vaccines and antibiotics.

If neither the empire nor the market is willing to defend the planet against viral invasions, then what should be done? I think the socialist position is simple: lifeline medicines, like clean water and public health clinics, are an elementary human right. And capitalism is a fatal disease.