A Recipe for Disaster: Globalised food systems, structural inequality and COVID-19

15 April 2020. A dialogue between Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and agrarian justice activists from Myanmar, Palestine, Indonesia and Europe.

In Big Farms Make Big Flu, a collection of dispatches by turns harrowing and thought-provoking, Wallace tracks the ways influenza and other pathogens emerge from an agriculture controlled by multinational corporations. Wallace details, with a precise and radical wit, the latest in the science of agricultural epidemiology, while at the same time juxtaposing ghastly phenomena such as attempts at producing featherless chickens, microbial time travel, and neoliberal Ebola. Wallace also offers sensible alternatives to lethal agribusiness. Some, such as farming cooperatives, integrated pathogen management, and mixed crop-livestock systems, are already in practice off the agribusiness grid.

• Rob Wallace author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and co-author of Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm.
• Moayyad Bsharat of Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), member organization of La Via Campesina in Palestine.
• Arie Kurniawaty of Indonesian feminist organization Solidaritas Perempuan (SP) which works with women in grassroots communities across the urban-rural spectrum.
• Sai Sam Kham of Metta Foundation in Myanmar.
• Paula Gioia, peasant farmer in Germany and member of the Coordination Committee of the European Coordination Via Campesina.

Related:
8 April 2020. Multi-media A video recording of a webinar on the likely global impacts of the economic fallout from the Coronavirus and how we might be better prepared than the 2008 economic crisis to put forward progressive solutions.

• Professor Jayati Ghosh, award-winning economist Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Author of India and the International Economy (2015) and co-editor of Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, 2018.
• Quinn Slobodian, associate professor of history, Wellesley College. Author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018)
• Walden Bello, author of Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (2019) and Capitalism’s Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity (2013)

• Lebohang Liepollo Pheko, Senior Research Fellow of Trade Collective, a thinktank in South Africa that works on international trade, globalisation, regional integration and feminist economics

Related:
1 April 2020. Recording of a webinar TNI on the global dimensions of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and how social movements could respond.The panel featured the following guests:

• Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond (2017)
• Luis Ortiz Hernandez, public health professor in UAM-Xochimilco, Mexico. Expert on social and economic health inequities.
• Benny Kuruvilla, Head of India Office, Focus on the Global South, working closely with Forum For Trade Justice.
• Mazibuko Jara, Deputy Director, Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education, helping to coordinate a national platform of civic organisations in South Africa to confront COVID-19.
• Umyra Ahmad, Advancing Universal Rights and Justice Associate, Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), Malaysia This webinar was co-sponsored by Alternative Information and Development Centre, South Africa and Focus on the Global South/Asia.