This connection with avian flu connects in turn to Mike Davis's analysis which is itself built upon his excellent book-length account of The Monster at the Door. While Davis never shies away from apocalyptic argument, and while this may lead some to dismiss him as a scare-mongerer, his earlier work on avian flu has enabled him to very effectively connect the dangers posed by swine flu to the more general vulnerabilities produced by neoliberalized global capitalism. In this way, he underlines how, in addition to deregulated agribusiness, another enabling factor in the emergence of new global flu strains is the undermining of public health and underfunding of disease surveillance that has resulted globally as a result of structural adjustment programs, free trade regimes and other forms of neoliberal entrenchment.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Remapping the viral breeding grounds
If the normal outbreak narrative localizes and exteriorizes the origins of disease with a simple geography of blame, how can such narratives be most usefully remapped? Critical accounts of swine flu by Robert Wallace, Mike Davis and Johann Hari indicate that one useful strategy is to map the emergence of today's global H1N1 virus in relation to the transnational networks of global capitalism.
For Wallace this involves exploring how viral breeding grounds (in which the H1N1 virus has evolved through genetic reassortment) have been created by a mix of agricultural industrialization, transnational agribusiness movements, and, the related consolidation of huge global food networks in which pig and poultry products move through overlapping commodity chains that also make genetic reassortment possible .
"Early reports have identified the sources of the new H1N1’s genome as strains that have infected humans, birds and pig populations from both North America and Europe. In an important way, then, ’swine flu’ is a misnomer. This influenza is a ’swine-bird-human’ reassortant. The extraordinarily complex origins of the new influenza—across so many host types and geographic regions—is telling us something about influenza’s present ability to cross host species and bridge great spatial distances between livestock populations."
"The swine flu, in any case, may prove that the WHO/Centers for Disease Control (CDC) version of pandemic preparedness--without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health and global access to lifeline drugs--belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as AIG derivatives and Madoff securities."
As governments around the world struggle to respond to swine flu, what questions does the comparison drawn by Davis pose for their chances of success? And will any attention be paid to the critical maps of the viral breeding grounds sketched by Davis and Wallace?
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A comment on the ways in which this epidemic is being imagined and managed in terms of war as well as political economy.
ReplyDeleteWe see this for example in ideas of contagion, whether to do with terrorism, viruses or financial crisis. In terms of response we get variants on counter-insurgency: to stem the crisis, contain the threat and rehabilitate the victim into the normal social order. A lot of theorists have suggested that this has become a key mode of government, as indicated by the ubiquity of security as a prism for thinking about all kinds of problems. However, the link between public health, militarism and political-economy goes back a long way.
So, when the Economist begins a recent leader (http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13576183) (of 2 May 2009) with the statement 'It is said that no battle-plan survives contact with the enemy', the allusion to war is neither simply playful, nor purely metaphorical. Rather it mobilizes some powerful, institutionally-embedded ways of imagining and reproducing the world.
The fact that, rather than challenging formulations that appeal to militarism, public health officials have often appealed to them, indicates a powerful discursive formation at work. For example, on World Health Day 2007, in a speech on 'international health security', Margaret Chan stated,
'A foreign agent that invades sovereign territory, evades detection, kills civilians, and disrupts the economy is a security threat by most definitions. Not all new diseases are highly lethal, contagious, and able to spread internationally, inciting panic as they do. But those that can are international threats to health security.'
http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2007/020407_whd2007/en/index.html
This is walking a dangerous line. Not least, the association between viruses and terrorism can easily slip to encompass all kinds of marginal people and places as actual or potential threats to the body politic. Recourse to the war paradigm thus risks compounding the worst features of the outbreak narratives identified by Matt: the pathologization of people and places that do not fit the template of the norm.
Alan Ingram
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~aingram