The COVID-19 crisis is revealing a basic contradiction at the heart of capitalism. On the one hand, we have learned that this virus is itself a product of our capitalist agricultural system. As Rob Wallace and coauthors argue, the conditions for virus transmission are rooted in our propensity to clear-cut dense, wild forests — often the reservoirs of viruses themselves — and replace them with homogenous plantation ecologies like palm oil or livestock operations with one species of animal crowded together.

As they put it:

the entirety of the production line is organized around practices that accelerate the evolution of pathogen virulence and subsequent transmission. Growing genetic monocultures — food animals and plants with nearly identical genomes — removes immune firebreaks that in more diverse populations slow down transmission.