EBOLA = NEOLIBERALISM THAT IS LITERALLY BAT-CHIOT CRAZY CREATED CRISIS

“The Neoliberal Outbreak of Ebola” Interview of Rob Wallace by Anton Woronczuk on The Real News Network

Click for Source Interview and Text featuring on The Real News Network

DEFINITION: Neoliberalism = Essence of capitalism with the gloves off. Reduces barriers for foreign MULTINATIONAL companies to control land and production + Removes tariffs on these companies + Opens up local farmers to the onslaught of global competition. + Reduces investment in public health and in animal health.

FACT: The global economy with Multinationals putting pressure on resources like oil palm producers do that increases the interface between these bats and the humans that harvest them.

FACT: Neoliberalism increasingly exploits the forests to produce exported crops. The locals can no longer feed themselves and enjoy full employment. The locals are thrown out of work, and forced to find food for their families, which includes, increasingly, hunting animals in the forest.

FACT: NEOLIBERALISM unfortunately is destroying OUR Environment and completely ignores all the survival and health costs that accumulate — Extending to climate change, pollution, animal life and human life.

FACT: We run our NEOLIBERAL economy as if ecology doesn’t exist except as a source of resources which will last forever and provides everything we need, and economy built on simply supply and demand.

NEOLIBERALISM extends to mass unemployment in agriculture and people’s methods of survival.

NEOLIBERALISM considers Ecological and Enviornmental costs = External costs not paid for by the Multinational Corporations.

DEFINITION: External costs = Companies who produce these costs are able to externalize them onto the public, the taxpayer, and local governments.

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer whose research focuses on the ways agriculture and the economy imprint upon the evolution and spread of pathogens — evolution and spread of influenza, HIV/AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma herpesvirus, response to antivirals. Dr. Wallace is co-author of “Farming Human Pathogens: Ecological Resilience and Evolutionary Process”, published by Springer. He has been a consultant to the UN

ANTON WORONCZUK, TRNN PRODUCER: Causes for the Ebola outbreak usually center around poverty and insufficient health care systems, or cultural practices like burial ceremonies and the consumption of bushmeat.

But ignored is policy-driven changes in food production, forestry, and development by economic and political centers of global power.

Robert Wallace is a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Global Studies and writes a blog called Farming Pathogens. So, Rob, what does land use and other development policies reveal about the causes of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa?

ROBERT G. WALLACE, VISITING SCHOLAR, INST. FOR GLOBAL STUDIES, UNIV. MN: That question for MSM seems like from another planet since they the media has organized the narrative of Ebola in West Africa, leave out the most basic facts.

FACT: The Ebola outbreak began in villages across four districts in southeastern Guinea with Patient zero a two-year-old boy from a village north of Guéckédou, in Guinea Forest region.

FACT: Bushmeat appears a main conduit by which Ebola spills over into humans

FACT: The West Africa medical infrastructure cannot meet this emergency.

FACT: These 3 facts miss the real point – that Ebola has been circulating in the area for at least ten years with patients producing antibodies against Ebola for at least five years. So this notion of patient zero or a village misses these longer term larger structural issues in the emergence of Ebola.

FACT: Land use is very important to Ebola circulating in the West African area for a decade suddenly spilling over from animals — hosting reservoirs for Ebola — into humans and spreading.

WALLACE: It’s our contention that there has been a fundamental change in how the forest is being used that increased interaction between animals that harbor Ebola and humans.

FACT: Guinea Forest has long been farmed for hundreds of years, all sorts of crops — technically a kind of agroforestry — that has slashed and burned, and rotated various crops, followed by a forest recovery period allowing the soil to become enriched again.

WALLACE: However, in the last 30 years a fundamental shift has taken place in the whole entire region, with NEOLIBERAL commoditization of the crops that are being grown there. Since WW II, in Liberia established a open-door policy to Multinationals to conduct mining and logging and agroindustrial cropping.

NOTE: Firestone in Liberia goes back to 1925 and rubber plantations

WALLACE: Firestone was able to secure a million hectares throughout Liberia in order to tap rubber trees to produce tires. And they entrapped the Liberian government at the time into a loan structure that in essence made the government there beholden to the Firestone Company. And they have a 99-year lease that continues on, that was only renegotiated slightly in 1998. With Firestone Liberia has turned into something of a land rush for Multinationals — 33% of Liberia’s land is leased or owned by Multinationals + 15% of the land was given to these companies = 50% of Liberia is under Multinational control for resource production.

WALLACE: Imagine if 50% of the United States was given to foreign companies and it’s all being cut down — Deforested + Mines Opened + Land dedicated to growing monocultural crops = Massive fundamental impact on the ecology.

WALLACE: That exploitation of resources releases pathogens as part of the ecology.

WALLACE: Guinea, where the first outbreak occurred, has only recently joined that kind of EXPLOITIVE land use in the Guinea Forest and industrial production.

WORONCZUK: How does that change the disease spreading rates?

WALLACE: Scientists concluded there are three bat species that are in all likelihood the reservoir of Ebola ranging from deep in the Congo westward to Guinea and Liberia — the western edge of these bats’ traditional habitat. These BATS have been traveling in the forest for thousands of years, and in all likelihood at times have spread Ebola into other animals, including gorillas and chimps.

WALLACE: But when Multinationals cut into the forest the bats adapted to change for survival transferring from one source of food to another. Bats are very smart and when the forests were cut down simply decided to go where another Crop — that companies raised — They have a affinity/love for palm oil that’s increasingly used worldwide — An explosion in the market for oil palm — now grown in countries around the world. Guinea participated in this industrialization of palm oil the last few years. The bats
love palm oil fruit and the trees provides them protection and wide spaces between the trees permit them to fly from their roosting sites to their foraging areas. So bats were attracted to oil palm as the forest were cut down to grow more and more oil palms — Increasing the interface between bats with Ebola and humans harvesting the oil palm — More likely to get bit. Examples with other viruses, the Nipah virus, in Bangladesh, in which the bats urinated on the actual palm that the humans and some animals subsequently harvest — an issue with bushmeat — One means by which Ebola can be transferred — But bushmeat is a distraction from the larger picture of EXPLOITATION OF LANDS IGNORING ECOLOGY.

FACT: The global economy with Multinationals putting pressure on resources like oil palm producers do that increases the interface between these bats and the humans that harvest them.

WORONCZUK: This palm oil production is not for the LOCALS internal consumption.

WALLACE: Right. The causality extends beyond local villagers to the matter of deforestation and changing the way the forest is being expropriated and used. And that, in turn, changed the way the various animals and humans are interacting with each other. So NEOLIBERALISM is an important part of Ebola story than any local culinary practices.

DEFINITION: Neoliberalism = Essence of capitalism with the gloves off. Reduces barriers for foreign MULTINATIONAL companies to control land and production + Removes tariffs on these companies + Opens up local farmers to the onslaught of global competition. + Reduces investment in public health and in animal health.

FACT: Neoliberalism increasingly exploits the forests to produce exported crops. The locals can no longer feed themselves and enjoy full employment. The locals are thrown out of work, and forced to find food for their families, which includes, increasingly, hunting animals in the forest.

WORONCZUK: NEOLIBERALISM explains why this isn’t front and center in the mainstream media, because it’s really an indictment of global financial institutions.

WALLACE: Very much so. Many public health researchers receive benefits for not talking about this possibility — They are directed by Multination’s prime goals if they want to be funded and honored in the neoliberal power structure — SADLY the entire world is engaged in this kind of neoliberal globalization.

WALLACE: Putting the onus of the emergence of a pathogen that could potentially kill masses of people on NEOLIBERALISM is indeed a serious indictment of the most basic practices of our civilization.

WORONCZUK: Let’s finish on something you wrote on your blog post titled “The Palm Oil Sector”. “The shock of Ebola may clear many a head of the illusions that we can continue to mystically externalize the costs of separating ecology and economy.”

Can you elaborate on that point?

WALLACE: We run our NEOLIBERAL economy as if ecology doesn’t exist except as a source of resources which will last forever and provides everything we need, and economy built on simply supply and demand.

FACT: NEOLIBERALISM unfortunately is destroying OUR Environment and completely ignores all the survival and health costs that accumulate — Extending to climate change, pollution, animal life and human life.

NEOLIBERALISM extends to mass unemployment in agriculture and people’s methods of survival.

NEOLIBERALISM considers Ecological and Enviornmental costs = External costs not paid for by the Multinational Corporations.

DEFINITION: External costs = Companies who produce these costs are able to externalize them onto the public, the taxpayer, and local governments.

WALLACE: Multinationals consider Ebola an external cost they can ignore in the course of razing the forest to produce commodity palm oil, and a pathogen with the potential to kill MASS POPULATIONS.

FACT: NEOLIBERALISM is a kind of economy we can no longer engage in that tries to separate ecology from economy or economy from ecology.

WALLACE: ECOLOGY AND ECONOMY are two things that interpenetrate with each other, and we can’t separate them out. We have to move toward more of an economy that can integrate the effects of our production on and consumption on local an d worldwide ecologies.