For the past 40 years, the Chinese government has promoted the wild animal trade as a form of rural economic development. But the industry ground to a halt this winter when it came to light that the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan likely originated in a wet marketwhere throngs of customers shop for live animals held in cramped quarters.
When this connection emerged in January, the government ordered a freeze on the sale and consumption of wild animals, which was stiffly enforced700 people were arrested for violations in the first two weeks of February. On February 24, the government initiated a permanent ban with a decree titled Comprehensively Prohibiting the Illegal Trade of Wild Animals, Eliminating the Bad Habits of Wild Animal Consumption, and Protecting the Health and Safety of the People.
But will the ban simply drive a long-thriving trade underground? The ultimate solution, of course, is to reduce demand by changing cultural norms around eating wild animals, which had become fashionable as a sort of conspicuous, thrill-seeking display of wealth among a subset of the upwardly mobile. Aili Kang, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Asia program, believes COVID-19 may finally provide sufficient motivation to do so.
Chinese people don’t want to touch any wild animal food at the moment, so the traders have no market, she says.
Conservationists have also leapt at the opportunity to advance their battle against the global wildlife trade, which is driven largely by China, where rare and endangered species are trafficked as both medicine and luxury food. The Wildlife Conservation Society has created a series of infographics to educate the public about the connection between wildlife trafficking and pandemics, and leaders in the field have waged a media blitz.
Since January 15, I’ve done nothing but talk to people about COVID-19, says Chris Walzer, executive director of WCS’s Health Programs.
Zoonotic diseasesthose that make the leap from animals to humans, from HIV and Ebola to SARs and COVID-19appear to be on the rise. The wildlife trade is partly to blame, but any activity that puts people in close proximity to wild animals harboring diseases, for which humans are unlikely to carry immunity, poses a risk.
The destruction of natural habitat is another factor in pandemic risk, since it upends traditional, and relatively stable, relationships between people and wildlifethose of indigenous groups, for exampleand initiates new human-animal dynamics that result in unanticipated outcomes. In developing countries, logging, mining, agriculture and other forms of intensive resource extraction on previously wild lands increasingly thrust wildlife and people into contact, while shifting cultural norms change the ways that wild animals are consumedthe growth of urban bushmeat markets in Africa, for example.
The root of today’s problem began in the late 1970s, when China embarked on an unusual agricultural experiment of wildlife farming. The country had passed through two decades of severe economic distress, including famine and food shortages, under Chairman Mao Zedong’s communist rule. As part of sweeping rural reforms, the collective farming system was abandoned.
While the ultimate goal was to liberalize and industrialize the agricultural economy, the weakened state had little money to invest in scaling up livestock production. Instead, farmers were encouraged to collect wild animalsrats, civets, snakes, bats and othersand breed them for home consumption and commercial markets.
Wet markets have been the source of a variety of zoonotic diseases, including, most recently, COVID-19, which spread from horseshoe bats to humans, most likely through pangolins, a scaly armadillo-like creature that are considered a delicacy in Asia.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, though, interest in these foods appears to be rapidly diminishing: a survey of almost 100,000 Chinese conducted in the midst of the Wuhan outbreak found that nearly 97 percent of respondents opposed eating wild animals, up from about 50 percent in the 2014 study.
Wild animal markets are still present in other Asian countries, though some nations are following China’s lead. To reduce this trade further, notes Kang, new economic opportunities must be created for the rural poor, whose livelihoods are linked to the wet markets and the nation’s 20,000 wild animal breeding operations, a $20 billion industry.
We need to help those people figure out a solution, says Kang.
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