farmingpathogens | There’s something fishy about the bushmeat narrative of Ebola.
In August we explored the way the story internalizes the outbreak to local West Africans. It’s part of the ooga booga epidemiology that detracts from the circuits of capital,
originating in New York, London and elsewhere, that fund the
development and deforestation driving the emergence of new diseases in
the global South.
But in addition, and not unconnected, there’s something missing from
the model’s purported etiology. Indeed, Ebola may have almost nothing,
or only something tangentially, to do with the bushmeat trade.
In this new commentary just published in Environment and Planning A,
a team of ecohealth scientists of which I’m a part proposes Ebola
emerged out of a phase change in West Africa’s agroecology brought about
by neoliberal development.
We hypothesize more specifically that the pathogen arose as oil palm,
to which Ebola-bearing bats are attracted, underwent a classic case of
creeping consolidation, enclosure, commoditization, and
proletarianization that at one and the same time curtailed artisanal
production and expanded the human-bat interface over which Ebola traffic
likely increased.
Explorations of such structural causes, the heart of the matter, have
largely been shelved before they’ve begun. The emergency response, or
lack thereof, has moved front and center. Both eminently understandable
and opportunistically convenient. The failure to address upstream causes
produces the crisis that becomes another way of avoiding such a
discussion.
The tension manifests in some striking ways, with many veiled allusions to
structural sources of the outbreak but few open declarations. It’s as
if scientists and first responders are expected to talk about the
outbreak’s origins without using anything more than generalities,
careful euphemisms and pointed ellipses, avoiding offending funding sources whose capital accumulation helped drive the outbreak in the first place.
