Unintended Consequences

When the so-called swine flu threatened Egypt (land of the Pharaohs), the government decreed that all pigs would be destroyed. Of course there was no epidemiological basis for this. It was really just a convenient ploy for further marginalizing an already degraded group of tribal Coptic Christians living in the mountains above Cairo.

It turns out these pig-herders, known as zabaleen (“garbage collectors”), are the recyclers of Cairo—perhaps the noisiest city on earth, now also one of the most putrid. Many of the zabaleen are descendents of poor farmers, displaced from their land for a combination of environmental and political factors, who came to Cairo in the 1950s. They turned to garbage collection because Muslims consider it unclean. By hand-sorting, the zabaleen have successfully recycled up to 85 percent of the garbage they collect.[1] Until recently, the organic waste was fed to their pigs.

But without their pigs to feed, the zabaleen don’t have much incentive to remove food waste from the ubiquitous street-corner piles of it. Without a functioning alternative strategy, the food waste rots in the streets.[2] There seems to be a lot of it.

Everybody loses: the pigs are dead, the zabaleen deprived of a crucial part of their livelihood, the streets of Cairo stink. Of course there’s no impact on the spread of H1N1 or any other infectious disease, except perhaps to worsen conditions that increase their impact and spread them further—so perhaps there is a winner after all, if you consider the pathogens. With respect to the delicate and severely stressed ecology of a human settlement such as Cairo, it seems all of this demands a more rational sort of attention.