COVID-19 has exposed the racialized nature of food systems, but also
potentially grants opportunities to build anew. Maywa Montenegro
explores a series of breakdowns, from fractured supply chains to
uncontrolled infection among essential food workers, among Black, Brown,
and Indigenous communities scythed through by the virus along old
grooves of race and class oppression. She traces the likely origins of
COVID-19 to spillover sites forged by agroindustrial expansion into
forested regions where pathogens spring free and infect humans.
Industrial animal agriculture drives these ecological changes that
incubate future outbreaks. Pandemics have their roots in the violent
separation of communities from their territories, seeds, knowledge and
wealth. Racism enables such theft as fundamental to capitalist
expansion. To tackle pandemics and food injustices, Montenegro calls for
an abolitionist agroecology. No anti-capitalist alternative can ignore
the racism that is central to transnational food system. Scholars
including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Mariame Kaba have
argued that although abolition is frequently seen as an oppositional
strategy -- to eradicate, for example, prisons and police -- abolition
is equally propositional. An abolitionist agroecology cracks open
multiple possibilities that respond to the exigencies of a pandemic
planet -- there is no 'normal' to which we can safely return.
