Pandemonium: Courting Chaos Through Agriculture

A Book Review by Frances Willick

After reading Andrew Nikiforuk’s latest book, you may vow never to eat meat again. For that matter, you may decide to give up eating fish and vegetables too, as well as drinking water, and breathing air. Pandemonium: Bird Flu, Mad Cow Disease, and Other Biological Plagues of the 21st Century is an alarming catalogue of threats to the survival of life as we know it on the planet.

Nikiforuk covers the hot-topic menaces to livestock industries such as avian flu, BSE, and foot-and-mouth disease. He exposes the dangers of walking in the woods, where Lyme disease, tick-borne encephalitis, and West Nile Virus lurk. Hospitals, he writes, are breeding grounds for the lethal methicillin-resistant staphyloccocus aureus (MRSA), and C. difficile, and are vectors for disease transmission, as evidenced by the spread of SARS. In our fields and forests, stem rust, fusarium head blight, potato blight, and the mountain pine beetle are consuming crops and trees.

As Nikiforuk tells it, diseases, viruses, bacteria, and fungi are crossing international borders and species boundaries. They are mutating and adapting to our tardy and panicked control measures, staying always one step ahead of government, medicine, and industry. They are, Nikiforuk believes, poised to wreak havoc on business as usual. But business as usual, he argues, is precisely the problem.

Nikiforuk fingers globalization and its corollary of industrial food production as the main culprits. The worldwide movement of manufactured goods, livestock, feed, and humans, has spread once-endemic diseases to new continents.

Nikiforuk suggests that the import of contaminated feed from Asia started Britain’s foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in 2001. The concentration of stock dealers and the long-distance transport of livestock to slaughter facilities spread the virus throughout the UK. The world’s animal feed supply relies on raw materials of grain, legumes, and rendered animal protein imported from all over the globe. With its known contaminants of bacteria, antibiotic growth promoters, and fungal mycotoxins, Nikiforuk points out that animal feed is an obvious entry point for pathogens in the human food supply.

Factory farming conditions make livestock more susceptible to disease and allow it to spread quickly once it is established, Nikiforuk argues. Since the crowded chickens inside high-density buildings are not exposed to wild species, their inexperienced immune systems are not able to fend off viruses such as avian flu. Human intervention in the form of vaccines simply causes viruses to mutate and produce new strains.

Genetic uniformity puts livestock, crops, and farms at risk, too. Nikiforuk points out that one-fifth of the world’s bird population are genetically uniform broiler chickens, and that we are nutritionally and economically dependent on just a few varieties of wheat, corn, rice, barley and soybeans. He argues that the elimination of local landraces and genetic diversity in favour of high-yielding homogeneity concentrates our food security into a small and vulnerable handful of food sources.

The subject matter of Pandemonium is alarming enough, but Nikiforuk unnecessarily emphasizes its emotional impact with a sensational writing style. Perhaps it is an effort to give the book a wider appeal, but his reference to a bacterium as a “serial killer,” his comparison of broiler chickens to “desperate Hollywood housewives,” – “the most drugged denizens on the planet,” and his suggestion that during the impending chaos humans will resort to cannibalism are just plain irritating. However, with over 3000 sources used in his research for the book, Nikiforuk’s style must be excused for the sake of the comprehensive and important content.

Pandemonium is a morbidly compelling book. Nikiforuk unflinchingly holds up a mirror to what he believes is our precarious grasp on health, economic stability, and social cohesion, and he predicts a miserable future.

Nikiforuk does, however, toss out a lifeline. An appendix entitled “A Canticle for Local Living” suggests 32 ways that individuals can create an alternative to the future he presents in the rest of his book, including a return to local, organic, small-scale food production and distribution. After 265 pages of doom and gloom, this optimistic four-page “canticle” comes as a relief.


Frances Willick is a Consultant for the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada. Please send comments or questions by phone to 902-893-7256 or by email to oacc@nsac.ca.


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Posted October 2007