The Corporate Food System is Making the Coronavirus Crisis Worse - CounterPunch.org

In India, for instance, internal migrants lost their jobs in just a few hours’ notice, leaving them with little money for food and rent and forcing them to trek hundreds of kilometers home, with scores beaten up by police seeking to quarantine them as they crossed state lines. The story of how the novel coronavirus leaped from its animal host to humans in a wet market in Wuhan still has to be told in detail — and with the ruling Communist Party in China so sensitive about its bungling first efforts to contain the disease, this may never come to pass. Bats were also the original hosts for the coronavirus that caused SARS, the disease that hit humans in the early 2000s, and MERS or “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” that made its appearance nearly a decade later. As food systems expert Mahendra Lama points out, China hosts “scores of both licensed and illegal commercial breeding centers supply tigers, porcupines, pangolins, bears, snakes and rats.” A study by the Chinese Academy of Engineering stated that, in 2016, there were more than 14 million people working in the wildlife-related industry that fetched $74 billion. “Labor is going to be the biggest thing that can break” in the United States food supply chain as well, Karan Girotra, a supply-chain expert at Cornell University told the New York Times . It must be emphasized that China’s exotic culinary practices involving the illegal commercial poaching of wildlife have now produced two pandemics in less than two decades — SARS and COVID-19. Also, Beijing is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and has imposed wildlife crime penalties of $29,441 and life imprisonment. One of these is Sumatra’s Batang Toru forest highlands, one of Indonesia’s most biodiverse regions, where a $1.6 billion hydroelectric power plant poses a danger to the rare Tanapuli orangutan and the critically endangered Sumatran tiger and Sunda pangolin. According to one study, BRI’s network of roads, railways, and pipelines could introduce more than 800 alien invasive species — including 98 amphibians, 177 reptiles, 391 birds, and 150 mammals — into several countries along its many routes and developments, destabilizing their ecosystems. + Traditional peasant and indigenous agricultural technologies contain a great deal of wisdom and represent the evolution of a largely benign balance between the human community and the biosphere.