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Large-scale pig farming, responsible for swine flu.

Recent reports have tracked “patient zero”, and discovered he is a four year old boy from the state of Veracruz, Mexico. His name is Edgar Hernandez and he lives in La Gloria, a settlement near Granjas Carroll (Caroll Farms), a 15,000 hog facility. Anyone familiar with industrial agro-production can imagine the sanitary threats of these facilities, including water pollution from pig excrement, proliferation of flies, etc.

So, ignoring names (because this factory in Veracruz is not remotely the only one of its kind in Mexico, nor the US, in Europe or elsewhere) we can see once again that human “misfortune” is directly rooted in environmental degradation, poor law enforcement, shaming social practices and our total unawareness of where our foods and goods come from.

These are all parts of the same problem: the scale of our activities. Megalopolis like Mexico City require that huge amounts of food and goods be brought in from abroad. No small- scale local farm can feed a population of nearly 20 million, so large- scale farms need to be called for the task. The capital needed to build the infrastructure also comes from abroad: foreign investors, or big-city tycoons – even governments. To reduce the production costs, animals are cramped and cheap labour (with no health insurance) is hired. Finally, the animals are slaughtered and transported to manufacturer facilities in huge- CO2 emitting trucks.

To make things worse, the inhabitants of big cities are ever more disconnected from the rural and natural environments where their foods and goods come from. Traffic, fashion, TV, entertainment and the industrialized society’s way of life take just too much time to wonder where the cotton of your jeans comes from, or whether the bananas you buy at the supermarket were imported from a different country (emitting more CO2 from transport), or if your meat were originally calves raised in the now-deforested jungles of southeast Mexico (once healthy and biodiverse wilderness).

We should not be panicking about the swine flu – which has killed less people than car accidents so far-but about the things we are doing to our environment, our societies and ourselves. As in all other problems, “look for the root of the problem” seems to be the best way out. Well, if we know where the problem comes from, our actions can’t be described as ignorance but negligence.

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