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The health emergency calls for a systems approach based on interconnectedness

With the health emergency engendered by the coronavirus, we need to look at systems that spread disease, and systems that create heath in a holistic, systems approach. A systems approach to healthcare in times of the corona crisis would address not just the virus, but also how new epidemics are spreading as we invade the homes of other beings. It also needs to address the co-morbidity conditions related to non-communicable chronic diseases that are spreading due to non-sustainable, anti-nature, unhealthy industrial food systems.

As we wrote in the manifesto Food for Health by the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture, we need to discard “policies and practices that lead to the physical and moral degradation of the food system while destroying our health and endangering the planet’s ecological stability, and endangering the biogenetic survival of life on the planet.”

We must now deglobalise the food system that is driving climate change, species extinction and a systemic health emergency. Globalised, industrialised food systems spread disease. Monocultures spread disease. Deforestation is spreading disease.

The health emergency is forcing us to deglobalise. We can do it when there is a political will. Let us make this deglobalisation permanent. Let us make a transition to localisation. Localisation of biodiverse agriculture and food systems grows health and reduces the ecological footprint. Localisation leaves space for diverse species, diverse cultures and diverse local living economies to thrive.

A wealth of biodiversity in our forests, our farms, our food, and our gut microbiome makes the planet and her diverse species, including humans, healthier and more resilient to pests and diseases.

The invasion of forests and the violation of species integrity are spreading new diseases

The Earth is for all beings. Protecting the rights of Mother Earth is a health imperative. Over the past 50 years, 300 new pathogens have emerged as we destroy the habitat of species and manipulate them for profit. According to the WHO, the Ebola virus moved from wild animals to humans: “The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission.” As New Internationalist reports, “From 2014-16, an unprecedented Ebola epidemic killed more than 11,000 people across West Africa. Now scientists have linked the outbreak to rapid deforestation.” 

As Professor John E. Fa of Manchester Metropolitan University, a senior research associate with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), asserts, “Emerging diseases are linked to environmental alterations caused by humans. Humans are in much more contact with animals when you open up a forest… You have a balance of animals, viruses and bacteria and you alter that when you open up a forest.”

The Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) is a highly pathogenic virus that spread from monkeys to humans through virus-infected ticks as deforestation shrunk the forest habitat of monkeys. “The KFD virus is a pathogen that has long existed as part of an established ecosystem in South Kanara [Karnataka, India]. Human modification of that ecosystem through deforestation caused the epidemic occurrence of the disease.”

The coronavirus has also come from bats. As Sonia Shah says, “When we cut down the forests that the bats live in, they don’t just go away; they come and live in the trees in our backyards and farms.” Prof Dennis Carroll of Cornell acknowledges that as we penetrate deeper into ecozones we do not occupy before, we create the potential for spread of infection. 

“Mad cow” disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), is an infectious disease caused by deformed proteins called “prions” that affect the brains of cattle. Cows contracted the disease when they were fed rendered meat of dead infected cows. When beef from infected cows was fed to humans, they were infected with the CJD. The prion is a self-infective agent, not a virus or bacteria. It illustrates that when animals are manipulated and their integrity and right to health is violated, new diseases can emerge.

Antibiotic resistance is growing in humans because of the intensive use of chemicals on factory farms. Antibiotic resistance markers in GMOs could also be contributing to antibiotic resistance. Horizontal gene transfer across species is a scientifically known phenomenon. This is why we have biosafety science and biosafety regulations like the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity and national biosafety laws.

Diseases are moving from non-human animals to human animals as we destroy the habitat and homes of wild species. We violate the integrity of species as we manipulate animals on factory farms and genetically modify plants through genetic engineering with viral promoters and antibiotic resistance markers.

The illusion that plants and animals are machines for manufacturing raw materials that become fuel for our bodies, which are also machines, has created the industrial agriculture and food paradigm, which is at the root of the explosion of chronic diseases in our times.

A toxic, industrialised, globalised food system is leading to an explosion of non-communicable chronic diseases

In the last few decades, non-communicable chronic diseases are spreading exponentially and killing people in millions. Toxins and industrial food systems are a major contributor to chronic diseases. Almost ten million people die from cancer annually. Every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, the second leading cause of death.

Diabetes, a metabolic disorder linked to diet, is the seventh leading cause of death. One point seven million people die annually due to diabetes complications that lead to blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, stroke and lower limb amputation.

The risks from infectious diseases like the coronavirus increase exponentially when combined with the co-morbidity of chronic diseases. The mortality rate of the coronavirus is 1.6%. If one has cardiac problems, it increases to 13.2%. With diabetes it increases to 9.2%. With cancer it is 7.6%. Governments need to take the WHO as seriously on cancer as they have done in the coronavirus epidemic.

The WHO’s IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) has identified glyphosate made by Bayer/Monsanto as being a probable carcinogen. This advice needs to be taken seriously. The corporate attack on IARC is contributing to the health emergency. It must be stopped. Thousands of cancer cases linked to glyphosate have been filed in US courts. In the cases of Johnson Edwin Hardeman, Alva and Alberta Pilliod, the courts have ruled in favour of the cancer victims. Governments need to ban chemicals that are causing harm. And they need to hold the Poison Cartel accountable and liable for the harm they have done.

My agriculture journey began with the Bhopal genocide that killed thousands when a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide leaked. This corporation is now Dow, which has merged with Dupont. The Poison Cartel that has created toxic diseases by pushing globalised industrialised agriculture is also Big Pharma. They spread disease and gain from it. Bayer is a pharmaceutical company and an agrichemical chemical selling toxic pesticides. Syngenta is a toxics company and, like Novartis, sells pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is using the health emergency to expand its markets and profits.

The protection that governments give to the Poison Cartel must go. Instead, governments at all levels must work with citizens and communities to create poison-free food and farming that promotes people’s health with the same force with which they have taken action on the coronavirus.

We need to get chemicals that have created a health disaster out of the food system.

Governments need to follow the advice of the UN and the WHO on all health-related issues with the same enthusiasm they have shown with the coronavirus.

The high costs of treating new chronic diseases

The Food for Health manifesto summarises the high costs of treating new chronic diseases that have grown exponentially in the last two decades with the spread of industrial food and farming through globalisation. Some of the most significant data in this regard, as presented in the manifesto, are outlined below:

“Already in 2012, a study quantified the impact on health and costs related to the damage resulting from exposure to 133 pesticides applied in 24 European countries in 2003, equivalent to almost 50% of the total mass of pesticides applied in that year. Only 13 substances, applied to three classes of crops (grapes/vines, fruit trees, vegetables) contributed, according to this survey, to 90% of the overall health impacts due to a loss of about 2,000 years of life (corrected for disability) in Europe every year, corresponding to an annual economic cost of 78 million euros. In 2012, a survey was published that assessed the costs of acute pesticide poisoning in the state of Parana, Brazil, concluding that the total cost of acute pesticide poisoning amounts to $149 million each year. That is to say, for every dollar spent on the purchase of pesticides in this state, about $1.28 is spent due to the costs externalised by poisoning.” (….)

To come up with more recent data and come closer to the European reality, we can turn to research assessing the burden of diseases and costs related to exposure to endocrine disruptors in Europe: a panel of experts evaluated with “strong probability” that every year in Europe 13 million IQ points are lost due to prenatal exposure to organophosphates, and that there are an additional 59,300 cases of intellectual disability. Since it has been estimated that each point of IQ lost for prenatal exposure to mercury is worth about €17,000, we can assume similar costs for those caused by organophosphorus.

The health consequences of maladapted modernity, driven by commercial food systems are currently being experienced in epidemic proportions across the world. Apart from premature death and prolonged disability, diseases resulting from nutritionally poor diets are forcing people to seek expensive health care, which is often unaffordable. Commercial health care systems are beneficiaries of these modern epidemics, by offering technology intensive and high cost tests and treatments for health disorders that could and should have been easily prevented through good nutrition and a healthy environment. The merger of Bayer and Monsanto implies that the same corporations who sell the chemicals that are causing diseases also sell pharmaceuticals as cures for the diseases they have caused.”

And it is the planet and people who bear the burden of disease.

While industrial globalised agriculture that is destroying the forests and the biodiversity of our farms is justified as feeding the world, 80% of the food we eat comes from small farms. Monoculture farms produce commodities, not food.

Industrial globalised agriculture is a hunger and disease-creating system. It has spread diseases related to toxins and is destroying the small farms that feed us by trapping farmers in debt and driving them to suicide. This disease-creating, unhealthy food system is subsidised by our tax money, first by providing subsidies for production and distribution, and then making people pay for the high costs of healthcare.

If we add the subsidies and health externalities of industrial, globalised food systems, we realise that neither the planet nor people can continue to bear the burden of this disease-creating, industrial, globalised food system.

Ecological agriculture free of chemicals needs to be part of the rejuvenation of public health. Unlike industrial farms, small farms take care of people’s health, especially when they are chemical-free, organic and biodiverse. We should direct all public funding to support agroecological farms and local economies as part of a health system.

Through biodiversity and organic matter in the soil, we grow more nutrition per acre, and our plants are healthier and more resistant to diseases and pests. Returning organic matter to the soil also heals the broken carbon and nitrogen cycles, which are driving climate change. Healing the planet and healing our bodies are interconnected processes.

We need biodiversity intensification and rewilding of our farms, not chemical and capital intensification. Biodiversity creates cultures and economies of care, including care for the health of the Earth and her people. All species have their right to ecological space and freedom to evolve, and all humans as part of the Earth have a right to access chemical-free biodiverse food.

Biodiverse organic systems need to become central to the public health solutions to the health emergency we are witnessing. Biodiversity of the mind must replace the monocultures of the mechanistic mind that see life’s diversity as the enemy to be exterminated. India’s greeting “Namaste” has gone global in times of the coronavirus. The significance of “Namaste” is not separation but a deeper unity that connects us all. “Namaste” means “I bow to the divine in you.” It signifies an interconnectedness in which we are part of a sacred universe where everything is permeated by the divine for the benefit of all, the exclusion of none.

This is consciousness of oneness and unity we need to cultivate in these times where a small virus has connected us across the globe through disease and panic. Let not the social isolation required in a health emergency become a permanent pattern of separation, destroying community and social cohesion. Let not the closure of local markets and farmers markets become a permanent closure to create a future of farming without farmers in the Bayer/Monsanto vision, and fake food that destroys our health while billionaires extract profits from the currency of life.

We need each other and the Earth in our rich diversity and self-organisation to create resilience in times of emergency, and to regenerate health and well-being in the post-coronavirus world.

The corona crisis creates a new opportunity to make a paradigm shift from the mechanistic, industrial age of separation, domination, greed and disease, to the age of Gaia, of a planetary civilisation based on planetary consciousness that we are one Earth family. That our health is One Health rooted in ecological interconnectedness, diversity, regeneration, and harmony.