The first cluster of the novel coronavirus infection was found in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a wet market in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei province of China. This virus quickly spread to the rest of the world, claiming an unbelievable 250,000 deaths by May 2020, as per WHO estimates. Despite much frenzied politics on the lab origin of the deadly virus, there is substantial evidence from research published in the Lancet Journal as well as the International Journal of Infectious diseases post May 2020 about a wet market being the epicentre of the pandemic. Yet, notwithstanding these epidemiological findings, just a site visit to this wet market, which has remained closed for almost a year now, can display its potential hazard to human health and biodiversity on a scale much bigger than what has ever been imagined by a civilized community that has stuffed meat in its burgers without much thought. Yet nations, international communities and disaster management authorities across the world are failing to ban wet markets, wherein emerge deadlier viruses threatening to eliminate a much larger section of the human race every time it strikes.
What are these wet markets? These are food markets where animals which roam the jungles are captured for the sale of their exotic flesh in, as Peter Singer in his latest book Why Vegan? aptly calls them, “hell on earth”. These are mostly found in China, Japan and a few East Asian countries where millions of live animals are brought from far-off places, crammed in cages so mercilessly that they suffer severe injuries even before they are brutally pulled out for a customer, skinned, scraped and filleted in front of them, with blood and excreta oozing from their helpless shuddering bodies, filling up the market floor. Such a shameful and barbaric demonstration makes it hard to believe that constitutional governments around the world have anything to do for preventing the oppression of the voiceless weak by the mighty Homo sapiens. The impudent lack of policy at the country level and the equally disturbing insolence of global health institutions are also a shocking revelation that governments still cannot prioritize source-based policies to mitigate future pandemics.
UN Biodiversity chief Elizabeth Maruma Mrema had called these markets an “important risk factor” for the pathogenesis of the coronavirus and demanded stricter control upon them to prevent future pandemics. From UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s views on this to the clearer and more direct demand made by Anthony Fauci, the US government’s chief immunologist and head of health policy on Covid-19, several big names have called for a global shutdown of wet markets. On a morning television show, Fauci said, “It boggles my mind how when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface, that we don’t just shut it down. I don’t know what else has to happen to get us to appreciate that…because what we’re going through right now is a direct result of that.” Most experts have stressed in favour of the scientific evidence showing that most coronavirus strains like MERS and SARS have a zoonotic origin or origin in an animal host before being transmitted to humans. Wet markets have been potential catalysts to the fatal spread of this killer virus. The Head of Forensics at the Wildlife Conservation Trust, Mumbai has also reiterated that the wildlife trade is directly linked to zoonotic diseases and fatal viruses, yet there is no international convention or UN Resolution against such wet markets.
Is action to bring a ban on wet markets so difficult? Considering the global economic contraction and commercial collapse during the pandemic, a ban on wet markets seems to be a softer remedy than encountering another pandemic. Wet markets are destination points for global wildlife trade, which is a multi-billion business of poaching and trading in endangered species. According to a startling finding in a December 2020 report prepared by the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the international legal wildlife trade has increased by 500 percent in value since 2005 and 2000 percent since 1980. Equally astounding is the business of illegal trade running onto an annual cost of a staggering $1 trillion to $2 trillion as per the World Bank Report of 2019, over and above a profit of $23 billion as per UNEP estimates.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) regulates, prevents and conserves wildlife trade and trafficking through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wildlife, fauna and flora (CITES). Since biodiversity depends on an animal-enriched forest, a drastic fall, as seen in wildlife, is attributed to the shrinking of dense forested areas, throwing them open to massive poaching and trafficking. Such wildlife trafficking is thriving even in India despite a tough Wildlife Protection Act 1972 and a Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) which has failed in enforcement. It is heartrending to see everything which is prohibited and illegal picked up for sale through wildlife forest mafias and supplied to flourishing restaurants in Wuhan and many other wet markets.
India may not have the kind of wildlife wet market as Wuhan, but wet markets are in abundance wherever poverty and a lack of regulations coexist. I still recollect Delhi-based animal activists rising up against the Srinivaspuri (Delhi) wet market in 1986 when the police-traders nexus had turned the entire three kilometre road into a stench-filled diseased area, so much so that the activists had to carry drums of phenyl to throw on the freshly slaughtered animal bodies to prevent their transfers to other locations. I also recollect the day in 1997 when the casual evening walk of a resident near Yamuna nurseries opposite Mayur Vihar, again in Delhi, exposed a packed contingent of several barn owls which were about to be transported, a few of them hanging upside down to provide a few drops of the oily saliva sold as an aphrodisiac in markets not known even to the police (if this can be believed). In the 1990s, a single live barn owl could fetch around Rs 15,000 to a primary poacher for its nails, beaks, flesh and claws, but its cost in the international market, as shared by the Wildlife SOS which rescued these owls, could go as high as Rs 1 lakh or more. The legendary reporting in the State of India’s Environment 2017, prepared by the non-profit Centre for Science and Environment for almost three decades, highlights the continuance of a 52 percent spike in poaching and wildlife crimes between 2014 and 2016, despite all the rosy statistics displayed in the annual reports of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The report further writes that by the end of 2016 alone over 30,382 wildlife crimes and mortality were recorded. And this is only what was caught by the authorities—the underhand trade and smuggling of endangered wildlife and biodiversity assets to wet markets go much beyond these numbers. International health experts from WHO, UNEP and the biodiversity conservation bodies at the United Nations should have gone a step further than their demand for a permanent ban on wet markets and insisted on a mandatory sanction on countries which continue to shame human civilisation by turning their eyes away from these barbaric wet markets.
The matter here is much more serious than a loss for forests or mankind. The human race stands aghast, incapable and impotent to answer the question which has inspired the title of Peter Singer’s book: do animals other than man suffer? It is a question of inter-generational and intra-generational equity and justice in which this cosmetic civilisation which is cumulatively expanding in knowledge and has learnt to abhor ‘racism’ and ‘human trafficking’ as human rights violations and international crimes, but wittingly practices ‘speciesism’ with its eyes wide shut. Wet markets today remain the crudest and most perilous form of racism, like a leftover from the slave trade of the Asia Minor of early centuries.
By 16 February 2021, there have been 108,822,960 confirmed cases of Covid-19 including 2,403,641 deaths—does mankind need any other reason to ban wet markets beyond this fact that is highlighted on the WHO dashboard? Or as Fauci said, “What else has to happen to get us to appreciate that ban?”
The writer is president, NAPSIPAG Disaster Research Group, and a former Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. The views expressed are personal.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) regulates, prevents and conserves wildlife trade and trafficking through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wildlife, fauna and flora (CITES). Since biodiversity depends on an animal-enriched forest, a drastic fall, as seen in wildlife, is attributed to the shrinking of dense forested areas, throwing them open to massive poaching and trafficking. Such wildlife trafficking is thriving even in India despite a tough Wildlife Protection Act 1972 and a Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) which has failed in enforcement.