 Hello, everyone. I hope I'm audible. Oh, okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the webinar. My name is Sara Ansari. I'm a student studying MSc Development Economics at SOAS. Today's webinar is a part of a series organized by the Open Economics Forum and the SOAS Department of Economics, the Economics of COVID series. The Open Economics Forum is also a part of the Rethinking Economics Group. Before we get started, just some housekeeping. The webinar, as you all must know, is till 4 p.m. The first 25 to 30, 35 minutes would be for the speaker. You can post any questions you have in the chat box on the right-hand side of your screen. There's only one chat box, so I think it's fairly easy. The first 40 minutes of the question, I will be collecting all your questions and then we'll have an interactive Q&A session in the last 20-25 minutes of the webinar. You can also follow the social media links that are already on the chat box and use the hashtag, Economics of COVID, if you're tweeting about the event. What's an event without a good hashtag? Anything else that I'm forgetting? We have participants, obviously, from all over the world. I think it would be nice if everyone can mention where they are based in, where they are tuning in from. Today's webinar is on contemporary pathogens and the food system. The speaker for today's webinar is Professor Haroon Akram Lodi. He's a professor of economics and international development studies at Trent University, Ontario, Canada. His research focus has been on the political economy of agrarian change in developing countries, economic dimensions of gender relations, and political ecology of sustainable rural communities and livelihoods. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. The pandemic has obviously put into perspective the growth inequality in our current corporate food systems. And without further ado, I'll pass it on to Professor Haroon. Thank you very much, Sarah. I hope everyone can hear me, Sarah. Can you give me a thumbs up if you can hear me? Okay, good. So I want to start this webinar by thanking Alyssa and Sarah in the Department of Economics for inviting me to give this talk. I want to thank Sarah here for moderating it, because that's actually quite a significant task. Now, I've never given a talk in this format before, and I was debating about how best to do it. In the end, what I decided to do was write a text for this talk. And I started on Friday morning, and I finished yesterday morning. And that text is more than 8,000 words, so obviously I can't read it. And neither should I, because that would be quite boring, and we really don't have enough time in any event. So what I propose to do is to summarize the 19 key points that I try to make in this text. And if time starts to slip, what I'm going to do is speed up the summary of each point in order to get through the entire argument. We'll have to see how it goes, because as I said, I've never done a talk like this before. It's one of the reasons I'm not using slides. This is an experiment for me, as for probably many of you. So let's go through it. The first point to make is that the commonly held belief that the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged in the Hunan market in Wuhan, China as the result of an interaction between an animal and a human is just that. It is a belief. It is a hypothesis. It's very likely the virus passed through an intermediary animal. But the first recorded case of SARS-CoV-2 has been traced to a patient treated on the 17th of November in Hubei, who had no connection to the market whatsoever. At the same time, France's first case of the virus was treated on the 27th of December in a Parisian suburb. And so in this light, it's not surprising that the transmission vectors for the pandemic have not been definitively traced. And indeed, they're unlikely to ever be definitively known. However, the scientific consensus is that the virus most likely originated in bats. And given that bats live in close proximity to both domesticated and wild animals, this points to the possible importance of understanding the critical links between the emergence of new zoonotic diseases and the food system. Now, zoonotic diseases are human bacterial and viral infections that originate in animals and which cross the species barrier. Zoonotic transmission from animal to human is as old as settled agriculture. It's part and parcel of farming. The question, though, that needs to be asked is why has, as it has, zoonotic transmission accelerated in the 21st century? I argue in the full paper that the forces accelerating the emergence of zoonotics lie in the structural characteristics of the capitalist world food system. In the full paper, I define what I mean by capitalism and then assert that the capitalist world food system demonstrates these characteristics. It produces ever cheaper food that lowers the cost of reproducing labor, increases the rate of exploitation in the Marxist sense, and in so doing increases the rate of surplus value. It requires massive quantities of unpaid care and domestic work, three quarters of which is performed by women, which would have a market value in the trillions of dollars if it was monetarily valued. It also requires both capitalism's capacity to work through nature and nature's capacity to work through capitalism as new agricultural frontiers in terms of space, in terms of nature, in terms of labor, and in terms of commodification are enclosed, and as the unpaid work of nature provides the energy upon which the capitalist world food system operates. Yet it is also this very logic that has created a food system that operates, in the words of Wallace, Liebman, Chavez and Wallace, in their excellent COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital, as both propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origin migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international population centres. To understand this process, it is of central importance to understand the character of the food system. The contemporary capitalist world food system is dominated by global agri-food transnational capital, which is driven by world market prices and the financial imperatives of short-run profitability. It is characterised by the relentless food commodification process that underpins both broadening and deepening of supermarketisation, as well as the increasing oligopolisation of agrochemicals, food trading, food processing and food manufacturing. At the point of production, the dominant model of the capitalist world food system is the fossil fuel driven, large scale, linear flow through capital intensive industrial agriculture mega-farm. This produces through enclosures of land and multiple other resources, as well as the market imperative of cost competitiveness, an agrarian crisis for many small scale petty commodity-producing peasant farmers around the developing world, who face a simple reproduction squeeze, because costs of production are more than world market prices that they receive. A core market for the agro-food transnational capital of the capitalist world food system are relatively affluent global consumers in the developed and in the developing world, whose food preferences have shifted towards healthier, organic, green and safer products that have significantly larger profit margins. At the same time for the global middle class, the capitalist world food system is the mass production of very durable, highly processed food manufacturers that are heavily reliant on bad fats, high fructose corn syrup and sodium. The lower profit margins of highly processed food mean that significantly higher volumes of products must be shifted. In both these segments, the capitalist world food system fosters what Tony Weiss has called meatification, the increasing and highly uneven global consumption of meat that is high-screwed towards wealthier consumers. The capitalist world food system is thus predicated upon global human inequality. The capitalist world food system is sustained by states and most notably the huge farm subsidies allocated by the United States and the European Union to industrial agriculture. It's sustained by the international financial and development institutions that govern the global economy in their support of supermarketization and it's also sustained by big philanthropy, which finances much of the rich that deepens the capital intensity of the system. Now the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the capitalist world food system onto the precipice of a crisis. The networks of interconnected global food supply chains that run from farm to fork are designed to foster enhanced specialization across countries that is based upon lower unit labor costs and hence the highest rates of exploitation. However, a less understood byproduct of increasing monopoly control of a highly specialized food system is its vulnerability. The 2007 to 2011 global food price crisis demonstrated the vulnerability of the capitalist world food system to both changing supply and demand dynamics driven by financialization as well as the impact of unforeseen asymmetrical changes in the pattern of state intervention into both international and domestic agricultural and food markets. The monocropping and the lack of biodiversity that results from increased specialization is highly vulnerable to ecological shocks and also removes immune fire breaks that can potentially slow vectors of transmission. The reduced nutritional content found in modified cultivar genomes renders populations highly vulnerable to nutrient shocks and weakens the capacities of bodies to respond to unknown pathogens. The gendered and rationalized inequalities of the capitalist world food system, including the poor, women and children, those living in fragile or conflict affected states, minorities, refugees and the unsheltered can act to reinforce transmission vectors for pathogens among compromised populations. But the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated a vulnerability of the capitalist world food system that was perhaps far less readily apparent, but when you say it is really quite obvious that an economic system based upon the extraction of surplus labor from gendered and racialized workers requires gendered and racialized workers from whom to extract surplus labor. The lockdowns in the wake of the pandemic has led to the wholesale withdrawal of workers from the food system with critical implications for food supplies in the developed and in the developing countries. And this has created bottlenecks. The most glaring bottlenecks lie in the meatpacking industry in the United States, in Europe and in other countries of which much more can be said, but also a glaring bottleneck lies in the loss of migrant labor of which again much more can be said. Moreover, there's another dimension to the vulnerability of the capitalist world food system. Low income, gendered and racialized households disproportionately rely upon women incomes to sustain food provisioning, and yet it is women that are more likely to have lost jobs or to have lost income as a consequence of the pandemic. At the same time, in addition to the loss of income, the food system relies upon unpaid care and domestic work to put food on the plate and reproduce both biologically and socially the members of households. Here the COVID-19 pandemic appears to be exacerbating the gender division of labor with women's double burden increasing, particularly in homeschooling and in childcare even as women around the world have to strategize as to how to put food on the table in the face of reductions of incomes. As a result of this, there's been an understandable deterioration in women's mental health compared to that of men during the pandemic. There's also been a marked upsurge in gender-based violence directed at women and girls which has been documented across the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic is a gendered care crisis of proportions that have not been witnessed for three quarters of a century. In the developed countries the impact of the pandemic has been refracted through the specific vulnerabilities of developing country populations to the morbidity threat posed by COVID-19. This goes far beyond the obvious point of poorly functioning health systems and untreated medical conditions that threaten to strengthen the negative consequences of COVID-19. The majority of workers in developing countries work in the informal economy where wages are low, the terms and conditions of employment are poor and indeed where work can be both infrequent and unsafe. Workers in the informal economy need their jobs in order to be able to access an entitlement to food but the impact of the pandemic has been to either close informal businesses or dramatically reduce their turnover, both of which have increased unemployment, constrained access to food and in the process presented a new threat to the food security of hundreds of millions. The International Labour Organization has estimated that half the global workforce, around 1.6 billion people, face a threat to their livelihoods as a result of the pandemic. The International Food Policy Research Institute has estimated that 150 million people around the world are a threat of falling back into poverty because of the pandemic, largely because of lost incomes. And this is also the case in the rural economy, which is where I work, where rapid surveys of rural wage workers have reported dramatic drops in the availability of work, whether on-fields or in non-agricultural rural activities caused by a marked reduction in labour hiring. Moreover, even if we are able to get work, rural wages have dramatically dropped cutting incomes. In this light, it's not surprising that rural households relying on wage labour have reported eating less, have reported eating less healthily and have also reported a marked rise in indebtedness, which is mainly the acquisition of debt to meat expenses on basic needs such as food. At the same time, lockdowns have forced hundreds of millions of newly unemployed urban workers to migrate back to the villages from which they originate so that they can attempt to resume farming and construct some kind of livelihood. This creates the preconditions for significantly increased competition over land, other scarce resources in the countryside, which could have important gender dimensions as the bulk of returning migrants or men while farming has become an increasingly female activity across the developing countries. And it should be noted that urban rural migration back to the countryside establishes a transmission vector that could spread the virus into rural populations that are particularly vulnerable because of extraordinarily weak healthcare systems. It's also very important to reflect upon the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the provision of care. In the absence of adequate health system coverage across Asia, Africa and Latin America, when workers fall ill, women within the home take principal responsibility for caring for them. In order to do so, women have to withdraw at least some of their time from labor in income-generating activities, which in rural areas may be in food production, which has implications for production and productivity, or may be in rural-wage labor, which has implications for incomes, or may be in petty trading, which also has implications for income. As Deborah Johnson has so cogently demonstrated, the HIV AIDS crisis in sub-Saharan Africa has demonstrated the extent to which the need for caring labor within the home during a medical emergency results in reduced access to food within the home because of less time being available to work in farming by women and hence lower incomes of women. Thus, even though the pandemic is generating unemployment and lower wages for those who rely upon rural-wage labor to construct a livelihood, for farming families affected by the virus, it is possible that labor shortages will emerge within small-scale petty commodity-producing peasant farms which reduce their incomes and their access to food as women's time is reallocated from food production into care. It's also important to note the macroeconomic consequences of the pandemic. Most developing countries rely upon exports of commodities and non-traditional agricultural exports which have collapsed in the wake of the pandemic, and these exports are used to pay for food imports. As developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, are net food-importing countries, the loss of foreign exchange from these exports will impact upon their exchange rates as well upon their ability to import food, which will in turn impact upon inflation and the debt position of developing country governments. It will also affect the government's fiscal position. And it's also important to recognize that these macroeconomic consequences will refract through the demand compression that will take place as a result of cuts in real wages and hence cuts in purchasing power arising from the pandemic. Of course, we're aware of the outcomes of the capitalist world food system. It creates a planet of which Raj Patel, most famously called the stuffed-in-the-starved, in which at least 60% of the global population is in some way malnourished, whether as a result of under-nutrition or a result of over-nutrition. And that malnourishment has a well-established comorbidity with the virus tithing the pandemic. Moreover, the impact on climate change fostered at least in large part by the capitalist world food system. Not only are the biophysical foundations of global farming undermined, but also the social consequences of climate change place stress on human populations. Now, it is true that there appears to be no direct link between climate and the pandemic, but it is also very likely that the social implications of the increased vulnerability of rural populations because of climate change may act as a vector for disease emergence and transmission. But what I really want to emphasize here is that the capitalist world food system has laid the structural foundations to facilitate the transmission of novel zoonotics. And this operates through two dimensions. The ongoing marginalization of small-scale petty commodity producers and the ever-expanding remit of industrial agriculture. So let me look at both in turn, starting with small-scale petty commodity producers. As industrial agriculture has spread in the 21st century, small-scale petty commodity producers, many of whom are women, have become marginally marginalized. They have been pushed off the land and they have been pushed out of markets by industrial agriculture. And they have responded to this marginalization in one of two ways. First, small-scale farmers have had to move because of marginalization. They've moved to less cultivable, often forested areas where they encroach upon wilder habitats, putting in place a possible channel through which animal viruses can be transmitted to humans as forest disease dynamics enter peri-urban settings. Secondly, some small-scale farmers have diversified production into more lucrative higher-value products that when commodified can be easily sold in nearby markets. In a commodity economy, two ways of dealing with market imperatives is to expand the commodity frontier or to deepen the commodification of that which was not previously widely commodified. This has been the root of some small-scale petty commodity producers marginalized by industrial livestock and this can create pathways through which new pathogens emerge. Four small-scale livestock farmers marginalized by industrial livestock production. One form of higher-value products that they could shift towards are animals that were once caught and eaten for subsistence and which have not been traditionally bred in captivity to be sold as food. Snakes, turtles, beavers, mallard ducks, a host of supposedly wild quote-unquote animals. These commodities can then be supplemented by higher-value domesticated animals that are not traditionally eaten as food but for which a food market does exist, things like dogs and cats. This indeed is the very logic of the market imperatives of the capitalist world food system that marginalized small-scale livestock producers should move into niche markets which markets exist and which industrial agriculture is not exploiting. Yet the commodification of wild animals raised in captivity can create the opportunity for pathogens to cross from non-traditional farmed animals to livestock and from there to humans. And indeed, when farmers raising non-traditional farmed animals are successful in exploiting the opportunities afforded by market imperatives, this creates incentives to increase the scale of their activity which amplifies the possibility of zoonotic transmission. This has been a well-established route for which small-scale farmers unable to cope with Chinese industrial livestock production have crafted livelihood strategies. On the other hand, industrial livestock breeds its own diseases like swine flu and avian flu and concentrated are animal feeding operations and on factory farms. Moreover, these farming methods significantly enhance the virulence of the viruses that emerge from factory farmed pigs and poultry before they cross from animal to human. The enhanced virulence is because modern animal farming significantly weakens the resistance of animals to pathogens even as the massive application of antibiotics to combat pathogens contributes to antibiotic resistance, cumulatively exacerbating the problem of new pathogens. As Rob Wallace has so cogently put it, big farms make big flu. So industrial agriculture and the survival strategies of small-scale petty commodity producing peasant farmers lay the groundwork for which new virulent pathogens emerge while producing and distributing food in ways that can weaken the resistance of highly unequal populations to new pathogens. The food insecurities and malnutrition created by the food system render large swathes of the global population more susceptible to new diseases, while inequalities in work and inequalities in care place stresses on gendered and racialized populations and most notably those that rely on rural labour markets as principal sources of their income. The climate crisis then only serves to reinforce these structural tendencies. Clearly, the conditions by which the capitalist world food system operates serves to simultaneously multiply and amplify threats to global health. In other words, there is a co-morbidity between COVID-19 and the capitalist world food system. Mike Davis has put it this way, quote, capitalist globalization now appears to be biologically unsustainable, unquote. By way of conclusion, one of the hallmarks of contemporary capitalism in an era of neoliberal globalization is the way in which it has not only increased the reserve army of labour, but has also expanded the global ranks of the relative surplus population. The COVID-19 pandemic goes beyond these two contemporary hallmarks to demonstrate a central pathology of contemporary capitalism. It's reliance on what Frederick Engels called social murder. Engels' understanding of social murder rested on three conditions that he witnessed in Manchester in the early 1840s. The first condition was that those that died were at the bottom of a highly unequal society. We see this today. The second condition was that those that died did so because of the terms and conditions by which capitalism operated. We see this today. The third condition was that those that died did so because of the lax and difference of those in positions of economic, political, and social power. We see this today. Social murder has always been integral to the operation of capitalism, but nowhere has this been more starkly revealed than in the morbidities arising out of the capitalist world food system and embodied through COVID-19. Thank you. And I apologize for speaking like this without slides, but it was an experiment. Thank you, Professor Haroun. Yeah, indeed, I mean, it's an experiment for all of us. But, yeah, the first question we have from Malik Indias Ahmad. He says that the present pandemic has shifted the focus from economic development to health development and developing countries are more likely to confront negative domestic growth. So they have put in place finance and providing substantial assistance to marginalised people. He asks, what do you reckon has to be the responsibility shift of the international community to support these pandemic waves? Okay, thank you, Malik, for the question. I would approach this question in a number of ways. Let us start with your premise that the impact of the pandemic has been to shift the role of the state from a focus on economic development to a focus on the development of better functioning health systems. So that certainly is the case that developing country governments have shifted some resources into weak health systems. We always have to remember that one of the causes of these weak health systems around the developing world has been the economic austerity that has been produced in many countries as a consequence of following policies dictated by international development institutions across Asia, Africa and Latin America, and in particular withdrawal of spending from social sectors in the 1980s and the 1990s. Much of that spending did not recover during the course of the 21st century. So the need to shift spending into health is a direct consequence of austerity measures that arose out of structural adjustment and poverty reduction strategies, very often formulated by the World Bank in conjunction with the international monetary. The second dimension to the answer is this notion of economic development. And here Malik, I would question the extent to which many developing country governments are actually, shall we say, serious about economic development versus being serious about enriching the pockets of the elites within those countries. I can always remember a reflection that was made to me several years by Barbara Harris White at the University of Oxford when she compared India and China and she put it very, very nicely. She said, the Chinese ruling class is serious about economic development for the population. The Indian ruling class is not serious about economic development for the bulk of the population. And I think this is very important to really focus upon. That in age of soaring inequalities across developing countries, what we see is that development is not about an economic development for the many, but an economic development which enriches the few even as the many get further marginalised. Now, in terms of the response of the international community, it's extremely disquieting that when you look at the response of the World Bank, for example, the president of the World Bank, David Malpass, gave a speech in late March or early April. I forget the date on the World Bank's response to the pandemic. It is true that the World Bank has freed up significant resources to be allocated towards healthcare systems to work against the pandemic. But these resources have been conditional upon economic reform and market liberalisation. In other words, further austerity is part and parcel of the economic reform package, which the World Bank and the IMF appear to be supporting as countries work their way through the pandemic and come out the other side. You know, there's an old saying that you should never not take advantage of the opportunities afforded by a crisis. The 2008 to 2011 global food price crisis was a huge opportunity for global elites to continue the restructuring of global agriculture. The current pandemic is also a huge opportunity for global elites to continue to deepen economic austerity at the expense of those that are marginalised. And the thing about the role of the World Bank, of course, is we have to remember the significant bilateral development agencies, like the United Kingdom's Department for International Development or the United States' Agency for International Development or the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. They largely follow the approach taken by the World Bank as unfortunately does the development directorate of the European Union. So if the World Bank is going to promote increased austerity and market liberalisation, this is how I would expect the international community to respond in terms of their assistance to developing countries. We have another question from Jonathan, who wants to add what the structures of an alternative food system look like that slow down and also possibly reverse the acceleration of zoonotic viruses. Okay, that's a huge question which would take an entire seminar and a lot more to get through, but I do delve very briefly into it in the paper. And I would highly recommend for you a recent paper published by the Transnational Institute by Walden Bellow called COVID-19 and Food Sovereignty, Jonathan, available online. One of the drivers of the pandemic has been the industrialisation of agriculture, as I've tried to suggest, and this has turned agriculture into a linear flow-through process in which the historical way in which agriculture operated as a cyclical process of regeneration has been broken down and prized apart. In order to try and reduce the possibility of zoonotic transmission, I would argue that we have to return to a more cyclical process in agriculture and that more cyclical process in agriculture is particularly demonstrated in a model of production which we call agroecology. Agroecology is a farm production methodology which is predicated upon the minimisation of external inputs, the reliance upon maximal amounts of locally sourced farm inputs. It's predicated upon working with landscapes rather than homologising landscapes. It's predicated upon supplying local food for local markets at prices which reflect costs of production because food that is produced for local markets has to meet local dietary and food preferences. Agroecology around the world takes many forms in many different places, but if we look at the way we would think about agroecology being a building block of an alternative food system, that alternative food system would be built upon something which the global transnational agrarian movements call food sovereignty. A system which is based upon peoples and nation states has far greater ability to determine who controls, who produces food, the terms and conditions by which that food is produced and the knowledge available to consumers around the food that they are consuming. A food sovereign system is one which would see a resuscitation of extensive state regulation of agricultural and food systems, unlike the deregulation that we've seen since the agreement on agriculture came into force in 1995. A system in which there would be an elimination subsidies going to industrial agriculture and a redirection of state support towards climate cooling farming systems rather than farming systems which warm the planet. There's a huge literature on food sovereignty to which I have contributed a small amount and food sovereignty as a political concept it should be noted is not one without contradictions, but it does offer a way of thinking about an alternative food system which the global peasant movement La Via Campesina has tried to articulate on a world scale for more than two decades. It's a political concept which serves as the foundation for the social movements needed to create some kind of an alternative. There have been quite a few questions on food sovereignty. Brian asks, to what extent do you think we will see a shift to localised food production and domestic food chains post the pandemic? I really think that that is an absolutely central question. And I must say the job of political economy is not to forecast the future. The job of political economy is to understand what is going on. So how the pandemic plays out in the shifts in the food system I would not want to predict. What would be possible to identify however is two paths by which the food system could shift in the wake of this pandemic. It is possible that there would be a shift towards more nationally oriented food systems. These nationally oriented food systems would be one supply chains are reduced. There would be a greater shift towards more self-sufficiency in food production. And therefore the role of global trade in the food system would be reduced. Currently four fifths of the world's population receives some part of their nutrition from imports. So we rely upon imports and over a quarter of the food produced in the world crosses national borders. So a more nationally oriented global food system would see those figures coming down. However, a more nationally oriented food system is compatible with either having industrialised national agriculture or more food sovereign national agriculture. It's perfectly easy to see how in the United States or here in Canada you would see a deepening of industrial agriculture propelled by the state in order to increase the role of capital in farming under the argument that you need this to feed the national economy. The fact that this is untrue is a side point entirely. So in order for a more nationally oriented food system to emerge there has to be social movements actively grappling with the state and with agri-food transnational capital to foster the emergence of more food sovereign localised food systems. And the thing about this of course is that the physical distancing which is a result of the pandemic actually makes social mobilisation all the more difficult. It makes organisation all the more difficult. So how this social movement emerges is something which is entirely unclear as we move to the next stage of this crisis. It also has to be said however that the pandemic could lead to further globalisation of food system not the retreat towards nationalism in food systems. And that further globalisation is one in which much of the financial press is trying to articulate a vision of more markets of more global capital that the way in which the food insecurity is generated by the pandemic are dealt with is by further globalisation of the food system. And certainly if we look back to the 2007-2011 global food crisis the result of that crisis was not a retreat to more nationally oriented agro-cultures. It was in fact a further globalisation of the food system over the course of the last decade. Finally I would note that the internationalisation of the food system, the further internationalisation of the food system, is not necessarily one in which industrial agriculture would predominate. Food sovereignty is an internationalised food system. It is not one which is predicated upon a closure of borders and the ending of international trade in food. This patently does not make sense. There are far too many countries in the world which have not applied whatsoever and must import their salt. And so they require food trade to get essential micronutrients for their populations. So food sovereignty and food trade are not incompatible. Food sovereignty and food trade requires a different kind of trade relationship than that which we see in the current capitalist world food system. Again, moving towards a more food sovereign food system on a world scale requires the power of social movements to propel it forward. And it's very difficult to see physical distancing measures generate in the kind of social movements necessary for this to emerge. I want to just conclude by stressing the role of political economy is not to predict. The role is to understand what's going on to think through what might happen but not to say this is what's going to happen. We're not magicians. You talked about physical distancing impacting the measures required for food sovereignty. I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing or not. It asks whether there's any scope for migrant farmers to be able to cooperate or unite with other farmers or labour groups during this time. So we have more of a rural urban all-slash-global-local food system emerging. I mean, Sunwan, thank you for this question. This is a really important question because it certainly is the case that in the developed countries, for those people that have read about the impact of the pandemic on the food system, the issue of the role of migrant labour has been brought to the fore. You've seen situations in which Ukrainians can no longer move to Poland, in which Romanians and Bulgarians are having trouble getting to the United Kingdom into Ireland, Jamaicans are having trouble getting to Canada, Central Americans are having trouble getting into the United States, migrant labour from Paraguay is having trouble getting into Spain. We also, however, when we talk about migrant labour, have to recognise that not all of this migrant labour is crosses international borders. In India, of course, huge quantities of migrant labour go across the north of the country every year in search of work. And most major food producing countries in the developing world have huge movements internally of migrant labour when it comes time for harvests. So the role of migrant labour, who are particularly susceptible to low wages, highly insecure work, very poor working conditions, and also terms and conditions of employment, which allow them to be removed from where they're working at a moment's notice. The role of migrant labour in the global food system is particularly pernicious and needs to be highlighted. Now, the scope for migrant labour to cooperate because of physical distancing is limited. But it's not just because of physical distancing. Migrants later labour's scope for cooperation in the food system is limited by the very insecurity of the terms and conditions of their employment. And because this is the threat we face on a daily basis, organise and be removed from the place where you're working. And if you're a migrant labourer that's crossed borders, what that means is organise and you'll be shipped from the Niagara Peninsula back to the Caribbean. That's all that's going to happen. You'll lose your income, your household will lose its income, your community will lose its income. But not only that, many migrant labourers do this over long periods of time. So you lose this source of income that you relied upon over years, in some cases over decades, you're out. So there's a huge disincentive for migrant labour to organise. What is possible, however, is that terms and conditions of employment can be improved by national governments which welcome global migrant labour and which recognise the extent to which migrant labour takes place within countries. The scope for national intervention in labour markets remains very significant. And here what we've seen, for example, in Canada is a very marked shift towards promoting measures to regularise the employment status of migrant labour and to ensure that migrant labour benefits from the same emergency benefits that are available to Canadians who are resident within the country. So the role of social movements is to pressure governments into improving the terms and conditions by which migrant labour is working in the countries in which they're working. It is towards improving the pathways to which migrant labour gains rights of residence and hence rights of regularisation. That's a role not just for social movements, of course, but it's also a role for trade unions, for political parties. This is a movement on which those struggling for food sovereignty have to focus their energies on because migrant labour is the weakest link within food systems. There are quite a few questions on migrant labour. Someone asked, what threats to restrictions on movement of migrant agricultural labour close to food security in Global North? You talked about India and the migrant labour in India. They are not being allowed to even cross state borders and are dying of hunger rather than COVID. If I can extend the question a bit, what difference do you see in the Global North versus the Global South's reaction to this? In the Global North, the inability to bring in migrant labour creates a huge bottleneck for the operation of farming and thus a huge bottleneck for the food system. But it also creates a huge bottleneck in processing as well because migrant labour is not only employed in the food producing regions of Georgia or the Carolinas in the United States and incidentally it should be noted that when the United States government imposes restrictions on the movement of illegal migrant labour in the United States the sector of business which speaks out most strongly against these restrictions in the United States are farmers because they need that illegal migrant labour to work in the fields to pick the food that Americans eat. But it's not just on the farm. If we look at the seizures in the American meat supply chain migrant labour works very heavily in meatpacking. Meatpacking is very dangerous, it is unsanitary, it is low paid, it is highly insecure but at the same time because of the increasing monopolization of the meatpacking system in the United States with just four companies controlling the vast bulk of the abattoirs that are used in the United States what you see is that the outbreaks of the pandemic which are particularly pronounced in meatpacking facilities both in the United States, in Canada and in Western Europe outbreaks of the pandemic shut down those meatpacking facilities and threatened to clog up the entire system you face a situation in which a representative of capital the president of Tyson Foods, John Tyson, says that saying that the food system is at a crisis point because of the crisis in meatpacking arising out of the pandemic so the crisis on the possibility of food security within the developed countries is in theory quite severe but what I can say is that what I would fully expect is that developed country governments will see their way around this in order to ensure that migrant labour populations still are able to flow into the developed countries in order to pick food and to process food if you accept the proposition that I made of social murder as being a contemporary feature of capitalism which is particularly illuminated by the pandemic then the issue really is to what extent would capital care if people die as a result of migrating into centres of food production why should they, more people will come the situation in the global south is different it is true as Sarah has said that in many places people are unable to even cross state lines and they rely upon crossing state lines to work at harvest time as migrating within states is extremely important in the facility of households to construct livelihoods and those households unable to cross state lines face hunger what we see here is something analogous to what Amartya Sen wrote about when he wrote about the Bengal famine food couldn't cross provincial lines at the time current state lines that this inability of resources to cross these arbitrary frontiers resources which could be food resources which could be people this inability to cross those frontiers threatened the lives of those who were marginalised what I do see is once again borders opening up because most developing countries are facing either a hunger crisis or a food crisis will opt to ameliorate the food crisis and that would have an impact on a hunger crisis if we take the case of India, if you accept what Barbara Harris White said that the Indian ruling class doesn't really care about development for the masses they don't really care if migrants cross boundaries and die as long as food is harvested so that they can eat so I would expect borders to open up in developing countries as well the World Bank has forecast that food supplies in sub-Saharan Africa will decline as an immediate consequence of this pandemic this is largely because of a decline in female labour because females have to allocate time for care rather than time to work on the farm in the rest of the world forecasts for food production remain pretty well the same and this isn't at a time when global food supplies are an all-time high so if COVID-19 leads to food insecurity it is not as a consequence of a lack of food production because food is there it would lead to food insecurity because of the loss of purchasing power among those that require having money in order to be able to claim an entitlement to food we are running a bit short on time so I'll try to somehow make the questions shorter Hester asks do you see the pandemic accelerating the research and development of artificial meat and fish production and its production concentrated in a very small number of corporations in rich countries that's a very interesting question it is certainly the case that this so-called plant-based meat which I think Hester you're very rightly calling artificial meat much better phrase has grown astronomically and it's interesting to note that some of the producers of artificial meat in the United States have seen the best stock market performance in the first quarter of 2020 of any actors in the food system there has been a huge ratcheting up in demand for artificial meat over the course of the past four months as well as a huge ratcheting up in the share price of artificial meat producers in the course of the past four months so will it lead to an increase in the role of these alternatives again I must stress I'm not in the business of prediction I'm in the business of trying to understand but what I would talk about when I think about understanding is this firstly there is absolutely no doubt that the capitalist world food system is based upon exploiting new markets that's precisely what the raising of formally wild animals in confined livestock operations is about it's about exploiting new markets and artificial meat is a new market capable of being exploited as Schumpeter would have said this is about the creative dynamics of a capitalist economy so I would fully expect these markets to be more fully exploited and to grow over time in part because part of the way in which the capitalist economy operates is to create demand for products and that creation of demand for artificial meat products we have seen remarkably grow over the course of the last 18 months particularly as they rolled out into the American fast food sector so that you can go into your fast food provider and get artificial meat but that rolling out of fast food sorry of artificial meat into the fast food sector also points to another aspect of this artificial meat craze which is very important to highlight and that is artificial meat is ultra processed food and as an ultra processed food it bears many of the same negative health consequences that we see in other ultra processed foods produced by food manufacturers in the capitalist world food system in particular it is extraordinarily heavy in sodium and because it's so heavy in sodium it is really not very healthy for you as it is currently formulated all one has to do is look at the ingredients on a packet of artificial meat I took a photograph of it about six weeks ago because the list of ingredients font size four is huge demonstrating the extent to which these artificial meats have to be recognized as ultra processed and as ultra processed foods have the same negative health consequences that we see of other ultra processed foods in the health system so it is as I've said true that the market for these artificial meats have gone up it is true that we would expect producers to exploit these market opportunities but these should be seen in their current guise they could transform into something else but in their current guise as ultra processed foods and as such should be treated incredibly carefully by those that care about the food they put into their bodies just one last question since we've already reached the four PM mark there are quite a few prediction based questions so I'll avoid those Merush asks what can we learn from previous global food price crisis experiences that's a good question to end on Merush but I think I've actually already kind of addressed it in my comments if we look back at the most recent global food price crisis that's the one of 2007 to 2011 when food prices reached astronomical heights we can see some of the things that we might expect to happen if the current global political and economic order remains as it is so in 2007 to 2011 what we saw very rapidly was a reassertion of the need for market based solutions to deal with the global food price crisis this was very explicitly put forward by the United States under Secretary of State for international affairs at the US Treasury under the second Bush presidency in 2007 he argued that in order to deal with the food price crisis there was a need to keep borders open so that food trade would flow there was a need to complete the Doha round of international trade negotiations there was a need to direct subsidies towards more efficient food producers if we think about that kind of solution in 2007 to 2011 that is a solution which is designed to promote the further industrialization of global agriculture in the wake of that period and indeed in the 2010s that is precisely what we saw I think that unless populations mobilized against the industrial food system on a far more sustained scale than they have done in the past 20 years this is highly likely to be the response of populist governments seeking to generate support amongst electorates cheap food is central to the operation of a capitalist food system but cheap food is also necessary for populist governments to claim that workers' wages are buying more and for most populist governments cheap food is industrial food so for populist governments I would see a reassertion possibly again I don't like to predict of industrial and agricultural models and the only way that can be precluded is by reasserting the power of social movements to confront this juggernaut and this requires that as Eric Holt Jiménez has once said that food movements unite that movements of eaters in the global north align themselves with movements of protesters in the global south to create a global movement for food system transformation something which I would say is a necessity if we are not going to face both the emergence of new pathogens and a deepening of the climate crisis that is all the questions we have time for unfortunately but in case you have any further questions or your question wasn't answered you can keep the conversation going on our social media links but we'll have more of these webinars I mean we have webinars chatting until June I think the next one is on the 18th of May it's on COVID-19 effects on black communities with Nina Banks from Bucknell University and Justin Frans thank you so much Professor Haroun for this it was incredibly insightful thank you to the Open Economics Forum and SOAS for organizing this and as I mentioned in the chat box the recording will be available as soon as possible on both the Facebook page and the SOAS website Professor Haroun, any concluding comments? No, no I don't have any, thanks very much Thank you and hopefully see you on the 18th of May