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Feeding the end of the world: agribusiness, pandemics, and Anthropocene in Brazil

Dr Jean Segata
In the context of the Brazilian meat industry, a violent grammar, catalyzing asymmetrical relationships in highly unhealthy environments, operates behind an ideal of economic growth. The meatpacking plants that have invaded Brazil are based on often hidden ways of operating structures of inequality, such as poverty, racism and discrimination, which negatively impact the lives and well-being of human and non-human populations. Based on multispecies ethnography, the analysis proposed by Segata allows us to expand the idea of the affected population beyond human beings. Segata asks about our choices (or what we have available as a choice) or How is the way we eat fuelling the end of the world?
Jean Segata is Adjunct Professor of the Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Rio Grando do Sul (UFRGS) and is permanent staff of its Postgraduate Programmes of Social Anthropology and of the Social and Institutional Psychology. In 2018 he was Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University (USA). Currently he coordinates the Postgraduate Programme in Social Anthropology at UFRGS and is the PI of the Rede Covid-19 Humanidades Brazilian National Research Project.

Learning points

  • How does the logic of agribusiness relate to the Covid-19 pandemic from Segata’s perspective?
  • Why does the meat industry produce unhealthy ecologies?
  • Why is our way of eating fuelling the end of the world?

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