Fahim Amir - Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It)

Just two years ago I wrote in the original German edition of this book, Schwein und Zeit, that because of fear of the swine flu, risk algorithms were dictating the occupational and social lives of people in the pork industry. Now, since the appearance of the novel coronavirus, people all over the world have had to adjust to biosecurity rules.

The fever of the COVID-19 disease was preceded, however, by the fever of the neoliberal reforms and free-trade agreements of the 1990s. The market radicalism associated with these reforms restrained government, which in many countries meant more poorly equipped public health care as well as a general reduction in government regulations in such sensitive sectors as food quality, livestock farming, and meat processing. The profit-driven exploitation of different standards of labour law and environmental protection was made incrementally easier. Thus, for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 made it possible for US investors to set up industrialized hog farms in Mexico. Not long afterwards, in 2009, the swine flu emerged there.

In post-Maoist China, on the other hand, poultry farming was one of the first economic sectors to be opened to market mechanisms. But in the 1990s, major corporations pushed more and more small producers from the market. As a consequence, many farmers shifted to local species or unusual breeding lines. Among these were the wild geese that played a role in the bird flu outbreak of 2005. Similarly the rural poor were pushed to wild animals like bamboo rats, pangolins, or civet cats; the latter are considered the original hosts of the SARS outbreak of 20022003.

In many parts of Africa, the flesh of wild animals is called bushmeat. Today bushmeat, which is associated with the occurrence of HIV and Ebola, is once again very much on the rise. Thanks to the roads that were originally built for mining and lumbering, hunters are pushing deeper and deeper into the forests. The increased hunting, consumption, and sale of bushmeat can in part be traced directly back to the collapse of small-scale fisheries. This was caused by industrial-scale overfishing by China, South Korea, and the European Union, and the ensuing collapse of fish populations along the African coasts. Moreover, the distinction between wild meat and conventional meat is less and less economically meaningful, since the wild-food sector is increasingly being formalized worldwide and is being capitalized by sources similar to those in industrial production.

All these processes and contexts drop out of view when, in media reports about a virus marked as Chinese, attention is focused on seemingly extravagant culinary preferences and exotic wet markets. At least the latter are public, while what goes on in Western slaughterhouses is usually withdrawn from public view. In the West, people like to invoke the local market and the small farm to illustrate contemporary ideas of the good and beautiful life. Within the self-righteous gaze on others, these ideas have rapidly transformed into the dystopian visual vocabulary of pandemic imaginations. To point out these sorts of connections between society, history, economy, everyday culture, and politics, without which neither nature nor the role of animals can be conceived, is one purpose of this book.