July 27, 2015
by Rob Wallace
The notion of a
neoliberal Ebola is so beyond the pale as to send leading lights in ecology and health into apoplectic fits.
Here’s one of bestseller David Quammen’s
five tweets
denouncing my hypothesis that neoliberalism drove the emergence of
Ebola in West Africa. I’m an “addled guy” whose “loopy [blog] post” and
“confused nonsense” Quammen hopes “doesn’t mislead credulous people.”
Scientific American’s Steve Mirksy
joked that he feared “the supply-side salmonella”. He would walk that back when I pointed out the large
literature documenting the ways and means by which the economics of the egg sector is driving salmonella’s evolution.
The facts of the Ebola outbreak similarly turn Quammen’s objection on its head.
Guinea Forest Region in 2014 (Photo Credit Daniel Bausch)
The virus appears to have been spilling over for years in West Africa. Epidemiologist Joseph Fair’s group
found
antibodies to multiple species of Ebola, including the very Zaire
strain that set off the outbreak, in patients in Sierra Leone as far
back as five years ago. Phylogenetic analyses meanwhile
show the Zaire strain Bayesian-dated in West Africa as far back as a decade.
An
NIAID team
showed
the outbreak strain as possessing no molecular anomaly, with nucleotide
substitution rates typical of Ebola outbreaks across Africa.
That
result begs an explanation for Ebola’s ecotypic shift from intermittent
forest killer to a protopandemic infection infecting 27,000 and killing
over 11,000 across the region, leaving bodies in the streets of capital
cities Monrovia and Conakry.
Explaining the rise of Ebola
The
answer, little explored in the scientific literature or the media,
appears in the broader context in which Ebola emerged in West Africa.
The
truth of the whole, in this case connecting disease dynamics, land use
and global economics, routinely suffers at the expense of the principle
of expediency. Such contextualization often represents a
threat to many of the underlying premises of power.
In
the face of such an objection, it was noted that the structural
adjustment to which West Africa has been subjected the past decade
included the kinds of divestment from public health infrastructure that
permitted Ebola to incubate at the population level once it spilled
over.
The effects, however, extend even farther back in the causal
chain. The shifts in land use in the Guinea Forest Region from where
the Ebola epidemic spread were also connected to neoliberal efforts at
opening the forest to global
circuits of capital.
Daniel Bausch and Lara Schwarz
characterize
the Forest Region, where the virus emerged, as a mosaic of small and
isolated populations of a variety of ethnic groups that hold little
political power and receive little social investment. The forest’s
economy and ecology are also strained by thousands of refugees from
civil wars in neighboring countries.
The Region is subjected to
the tandem trajectories of accelerating deterioration in public
infrastructure and concerted efforts at private development
dispossessing smallholdings and traditional foraging grounds for mining,
clear-cut logging, and increasingly intensified agriculture.
The Ebola hot zone as a whole comprises a part of the larger Guinea Savannah Zone the World Bank
describes
as “one of the largest underused agricultural land reserves in the
world.” Africa hosts 60% of the world’s last farmland frontier. And the
Bank sees the Savannah best developed by market commercialization, if
not solely on the agribusiness model.
As the Land Matrix Observatory
documents, such prospects are in the process of being actualized. There, one can see the
90 deals
by which U.S.-backed multinationals have procured hundreds of thousands
of hectares for export crops, biofuels and mining around the world,
including multiple deals in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Observatory’s online
database shows similar land deals pursued by other world powers,
including the UK, France, and China.
Under the newly democratized Guinean government, the Nevada-based and British-backed Farm Land of Guinea Limited
secured
99-year leases for two parcels totaling nearly 9000 hectares outside
the villages of N’Dema and Konindou in Dabola Prefecture, where a
secondary Ebola epicenter developed, and 98,000 hectares outside the
village of Saraya in Kouroussa Prefecture. The Ministry of Agriculture
has now tasked Farm Land Inc to survey and map an additional 1.5 million
hectares for third-party development.
While these as of yet
undeveloped acquisitions are not directly tied to Ebola, they are
markers of a complex, policy-driven phase change in agroecology that our
group hypothesizes undergirds Ebola’s emergence.
The role of palm oil in West Africa
Our thesis orbits around palm oil, in particular.
Palm
is a vegetable oil of highly saturated fats derived from the red
mesocarp of the African oil palm tree now grown around the world. The
fruit’s kernel also produces its own oil. Refined and fractionated into a
variety of byproducts, both oils are used in an array of food, cosmetic
and cleaning products, as well as in some biodiesels. With the
abandonment of trans fats, palm oil represents a growing market, with
global exports totaling nearly 44 million metric tons in the 2014
growing season.
Oil palm plantations, covering more than 17
million hectares worldwide, are tied to deforestation and expropriation
of lands from indigenous groups. We see from
this
Food and Agriculture Organization map that while most of the production
can be found in Asia, particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand,
most of the suitable land left for palm oil can be found in the Amazon
and the Congo Basin, the two largest rainforests in the world.
Palm oil represents a classic case of
Lauderdale’s paradox.
As environmental resources are destroyed what’s left becomes more
valuable. A decaying resource base, then, is no due cause for
agribusiness turning into good global citizens, as industry-funded
advocates have
argued. On the contrary, agribusiness seeks exclusive access to our now fiscally appreciating, if ecologically declining, landscapes.
Food production didn’t start that way in West Africa, of course.
Natural and semi-wild groves of different oil palm types have long
served
as a source of red palm oil in the Guinea Forest Region. Forest farmers
have been raising palm oil in one or another form for hundreds of
years. Fallow periods allowing soils to recover, however, were reduced
over the 20th century from 20 years in the 1930s to 10 by the 1970s, and
still further by the 2000s, with the added effect of increasing grove
density. Concomitantly, semi-wild production has been increasingly
replaced with intensive hybrids, and red oil replaced by, or mixed with,
industrial and kernel oils.
Other crops
are grown too, of course. Regional shade agriculture includes coffee,
cocoa and kola. Slash-and-burn rice, maize, hibiscus, and corms of the
first year, followed by peanut and cassava of the second and a fallow
period, are rotated through the agroforest. Lowland flooding supports
rice. In essence, we see a move toward increased intensification without
private capital but still classifiable as agroforestry.
But even this kind of farming has since been transformed.
The Guinean Oil Palm and Rubber Company (with the French acronym SOGUIPAH)
began
in 1987 as a parastatal cooperative in the Forest but since has grown
to the point it is better characterized a state company. It is leading
efforts that began in 2006 to develop plantations of intensive hybrid
palm for commodity export. SOGUIPAH economized palm production for the
market by forcibly expropriating farmland, which to this day continues
to set off
violent protest.
International aid has accelerated industrialization. SOGUIPAH’s
new mill, with four times the capacity of one it previously used, was
financed by the European Investment Bank.
The
mill’s capacity ended the artisanal extraction that as late as 2010
provided local populations full employment. The subsequent increase in
seasonal production has at one and the same time led to harvesting above
the mill’s capacity and operation below capacity off-season, leading to
a conflict between the company and some of its 2000 now partially
proletarianized pickers, some of whom insist on processing a portion of
their own yield to cover the resulting gaps in cash flow. Pickers who
insist on processing their own oil during the rainy season now risk
arrest.
The new economic geography has also initiated a classic
case of land expropriation and enclosure, turning a tradition of shared
forest commons toward expectations whereby informal pickers working
fallow land outside their family lineage obtain an owner’s permission
before picking palm.
Palm oil and Ebola
What does all this have to do with Ebola?
Fig. 1 Palm Oil and Ebola
The
figure at top left (of Fig. 1) shows an archipelago of oil palm plots
in the Guéckédou area, the outbreak’s apparent ground zero. The
characteristic landscape is a mosaic of villages surrounded by dense
vegetation and interspersed by crop fields of oil palm (in red) and
patches of open forest and regenerated young forest.
The general
pattern can be discerned at a finer scale as well, above, west of the
town of Meliandou, where the index cases appeared.
The landscape
embodies a growing interface between humans and frugivore bats, a key
Ebola reservoir, including hammer-headed bats, little collared fruit
bats and Franquet’s epauletted fruit bats.
Nur Juliani Shafie and colleagues
document
a variety of disturbance-associated fruit bats attracted to oil palm
plantations. Bats migrate to oil palm for food and shelter from the heat
while the plantations’ wide trails also permit easy movement between
roosting and foraging sites.
Bats aren’t stupid. As the forest disappears they shift their foraging behavior to what food and shelter are left.
Bush meat hunting and butchery are one means by which subsequent spillover may take place. But to move away from the kinds of
Western ooga booga epidemiology that wraps outbreaks in such ‘dirty’ cultural cloth, agricultural cultivation may be enough. Fruit bats in Bangladesh
transmitted Nipah virus to human hosts by urinating on the date fruit humans cultivated.
Almudena Marí Saéz and colleagues have since
proposed
the initial Ebola spillover occurred outside Meliandou when children,
including the putative index case, caught and played with Angolan
free-tailed bats in a local tree. The bats are an insectivore species
also previously documented as an Ebola virus carrier.
Whatever the specific reservoir source, shifts in agroeconomic context still appear a primary cause. Previous studies
show
the free-tailed bats also attracted to expanding cash crop production
in West Africa, including of sugar cane, cotton, and macadamia.
Indeed, every Ebola outbreak appears
connected
to capital-driven shifts in land use, including back to the first
outbreak in Nzara, Sudan in 1976, where a British-financed factory spun
and wove local cotton. When Sudan’s civil war ended in 1972, the area
rapidly repopulated and much of the local rainforest—and bat ecology—was
reclaimed for subsistence farming, with cotton returning as the area’s
dominant cash crop.
Are New York, London and Hong Kong as much to blame?
Clearly such outbreaks aren’t merely about specific companies.
We have started
working with
University of Washington’s Luke Bergmann to test whether the world’s
circuits of capital as they relate to husbandry and land use are related
to disease emergence. Bergmann and Holmberg’s
maps,
still in preparation, show the percent of land whose harvests are
consumed abroad as agricultural goods or in manufactured goods and
services for croplands, pastureland and forests.
The maps show
landscapes are globalized by circuits of capital. In this way, the
source of a disease may be more than merely the country in which it may
first appear and indeed may extend as far as the other side of the
world. We need to identify who funded the development and deforestation
to begin with.
Such an epidemiology begs whether we might more
accurately characterize such places as New York, London and Hong Kong,
key sources of capital, as disease ‘hot spots’ in their own right.
Diseases are
relational in their geographies, and not solely
absolute, as the ecohealth cowboys
chronicled by David Quammen claim.
Similarly, such a new approach ruins the neat dichotomy between emergency responses and structural interventions.
Some disease hounds who acknowledge global structural issues tend to still focus on the
immediate logistics of any given outbreak. Emergency responses are needed, of course. But we need to acknowledge that the emergency
arose
from the structural. Indeed, such emergencies are used as a means by
which to avoid talking about the bigger picture driving the emergence of
new diseases.
The forest may be its own cure
There’s another false dichotomy to unpack—this one between the forest’s ecosystemic noise and deterministic effect.
The
environmental stochasticity at the center of forest ecology isn’t synonymous with random noise.
Here a bit of math can help. A simple stochastic differential model of
exponential pathogen population growth can include fractional
white noise of an index 0 to 1 defined by a covariance relationship across time and space. An
Ito expansion produces a classic result in population growth:
When
below a threshold, the noise exponent is small enough to permit a
pathogen population to explode in size. When above the threshold, the
noise is large enough to control an outbreak, frustrating efforts on the
part of the pathogen to string together a bunch of susceptibles to
infect.
Never mind the technical details. The important point is
that disease trajectories, even in the deepest forest, aren’t divorced
from their anthropogenic context. That context can impact upon the
forest’s environmental noise and its effects on disease.
How exactly in Ebola’s case?
It’s been long known that if you can lower an outbreak below an infection
Allee threshold—say
by a vaccine or sanitary practices—an outbreak, not finding enough
susceptibles, can burn out on its own. But commoditizing the forest may
have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to such a point where no
emergency intervention can drive the Ebola outbreak low enough to burn
out on its own. The virus will continue to
circulate, with the potential to explode again.
In
short, neoliberalism’s structural shifts aren’t just a background on
which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency
as much as the virus itself.
In contrast to Nassim Taleb’s
Black Swan—history
as shit happens—we have here an example of stochasticity’s impact
arising out of deterministic agroeconomic policy—a phenomenon I’ve taken
to calling the
Red Swan.
Here,
sudden switches in land use may explain Ebola’s emergence.
Deforestation and intensive agriculture strip out traditional
agroforestry’s stochastic friction that until this point had kept the
virus from stringing together enough transmission.
Under certain
conditions, the forest may act as its own epidemiological protection. We
risk the next deadly pandemic when we destroy that capacity.
Rob
Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer
currently visiting the Institute of Global Studies at the University of
Minnesota. He also blogs at
Farming Pathogens.
