At what geographic scales does agricultural alienation amplify foodborne disease outbreaks? A statistical test for 25 U.S. states, 1970-2000

Abstract

AbstractThe modern economy is driving multiple environmental and social crises across the globe. Capital accumulation externalizes the myriad damage associated with commodity production to ecosystems, labor, public health, and governments across jurisdictions. A growing literature shows multinational agriculture, a major sector of the economy, plays a fundamental role in disrupting the ecological cycles upon which communities across the globe depend. We report here one of the first statistical tests of such an ecosocial rift. We used geometric morphometrics to characterize a parameter space in agricultural alienation across nature, human welfare, and industrial appropriation for 25 U.S. states, at five-year increments between 1970 and 2000. The first two relative warps of the analysis reproduce the long-documented shift in and out of the 1980s farming crisis. We found the crisis left the U.S. food system in a new configuration, with commodity crops replacing cropland pasture, greater farm debt load, overcapitalized inputs, and a relative decline in on-farm wages. To determine if such a shift had an epidemiological impact, we tested whether salmonellosis and shigellosis—two foodborne pathogens for which national incidence data across the study period were available—regressed against historical changes in this alienation space across geographic scale. The second relative warp for shigellosis showed a multivariate relationship with the alienation space, but significance failed to withstand a Bonferroni correction. The partial warps and Procrustes residuals of temporal trends in the alienation space likewise exhibited limited predictive capacity for outbreak size. In part these results may reflect sampling artifacts. Data availability limits both the number of years sampled and the variety of diseases tested. Nevertheless, our analyses demonstrate that metabolic rifts associated with specific modes of production can be rigorously investigated.