Big Farms Make Big Flu: A Conversation

Our economy is transforming planet Earth into planet Farm. Forty percent of the planet’s ice-free land surface is dedicated to agriculture. Livestock, representing over 70% of vertebrate biomass, use a third of our available freshwater and a third of our cropland for feed. Industrial animal production is a major source of greenhouse gases.

Agribusiness’s impact extends to the deadliest of diseases. If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture increasingly acts as a gateway through which a wide array of deadly pathogens are migrating from the deepest forests and most isolated of farms to the most cosmopolitan of cities.

Ebola and Zika both recently re-emerged when logging, mining, and intensive agriculture opened up neotropical forests to their escape. There are other pathogens evolving more directly off megafarms. Nipah virus, Q fever, yellow fever, SARS, MERS, hepatitis E, Salmonella, foot-and-mouth disease, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and a veritable grocery list of novel influenza variants have now emerged.

Evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace and Food First's Eric Holt Giménez will discuss Wallace's new book, Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review Press), and other topics that may arise during the course of the conversation.

https://farmingpathogens.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/big-farms-make-big-flu.jpg