Running off the lane on which I live there is a footpath. It leads firstly over a little wooden bridge over a ditch that right now is overflowing, dammed by the crispy legacy of last summer’s amassing of untamed verge growth, then across two lush green meadows, then you climb a stile at a gap in a high hedgerow and the path crosses a field of what was, prior to harvest, wheat. Without its crop, the substrate is exposed. It is remarkably gravelly, a mixture of grey and bright browny red, and seems to be either a puddle or bone dry. I am curious about this particular field because it stands in contrast to its rich, warm, buzzing neighbours. It feels hard, colourless and lifeless. Despite its singular yield, it feels dead. Its location and soil might suggest that it *should* be pasture, but with repeated heavy chemical application it has an arable crop squeezed out if it. The lively, chocolatey brown, humus-filled, worm-inhabited topsoil layer that is bursting with life over the hedge has here been killed off and washed away down the field drains.
This is a microcosm of a worldwide phenomenon - the industrialisation of our food system and its ownership by agribusiness. Forest has been felled, pasture ploughed and hedgerows torn out to make way for large scale monocultures whose crop is usually sold as a commodity, not food. Shed farming of livestock, fed on soy grown in a cocktail of fertilisers and pesticides and exported from where the Amazon once was, results in genetically similar animals. Diversity and complexity is being actively stripped out of the system, the very characteristics that hold pathogens - including viruses such as Coronavirus - back.
Where there is diversity, there is no particularly virulent strain that will do such far reaching damage as there is no life form for it that dominates to such an extent, unlike in a vast field of near identical genetically engineered seeds. Not unlike these vulnerable seeds, we too have become easy targets since most of us have been removed from the landscape and exposure to its bacterial life. We do not get the opportunity to develop immunity antibodies.
So these pathogens, that should be marginalised close to source, are being regionalised and then entering global networks to create global pandemics. This is why we are in a pandemic cycle that will intensify in tandem with the intensification and concentration of our world food system.
