Coronavirus leveller for overburdened planet?
Subsistence fishermen on the edges of Cape Town’s two oceans are being squeezed into dire economic hardships in the wake of the outbreak of the contagious Covid-19 phenomenon in Hubei province, China.
This change in fortunes for those harvesting the saltwater crustaceans is mainly due to the fact that 90% of rock lobsters caught along these shores are exported to the Sino people and consumed by them in vast quantities.
A few years ago I questioned a restaurateur at Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront complex as to why this delicacy was so expensive in its own home-grown area.
The red tide was blamed then and all other sorts of environmental catastrophes, shortages and excessive local demand excuses were bandied about, without a mention of the lucrative lobster export trade being plied with the second biggest economy in the world.
Today I learnt on BBC Africa that, thanks to the outbreak in China, containers full of these live lobsters are now being stockpiled in the hope the virus will disappear into thin air and things will return to normal.
I can only hope these crayfish survive their incarceration — or is that quarantine?
Otherwise they should be released back into the ocean so as to regroup and sustain themselves as crustacean populations for future generations also to enjoy.
I feel for the local seafaring men and women who now get a pittance for their daily catches thanks to the bottleneck that has arisen in the supply to the huge Chinese market.
Air carrier companies are now mothballing or putting into storage recently purchased mega aeroplanes on the back of losses projected to run into $106bn (R1.6-trillion) over the next six months to a year.
Could the Maxijet grounding by Boeing due to navigational instrumentation faults on take-off have been a portent of what is to come in this highly-skilled, lucrative worldwide airline industry?
Our travelling ambitions are surely on hold for the foreseeable future, if not forever, as it would be foolhardy to go to Vietnam and Cambodia, the next tick on our bucket list, with this coronavirus monster on the loose among all humans.
In SA social media is abuzz with our legendary humorous takes on any issue, be it race, politics, economics, crime, death or locust plagues.
Some are not amused at the lighter take on a potentially deadly virus doing the rounds and dragging the world economy down to 2008 fiasco proportions.
Nature has a way of correcting overpopulation of any species here on earth.
Humans are not exempt from this reality.
Of course we rely on human-made antidotes, yet even in our best research and medical endeavours, if nature unleashes her toxins, viruses and plagues there is just so much mankind can do to remedy the situation.
In the end nature decides on a reprieve or not.
Can this world withstand and sustain a population explosion of seven billion people, as we have today?
We feed the soil, our animals and humans poison in the hope of producing whatever we need to survive.
No studies have been done to test how many humans, animals, insects and fish in the natural state would be able to maintain the status quo as it has been over aeons now.
And so humans populate and build at will, and see how the precarious equilibrium the world is axised on can cope, going forward as mankind.
Humans always burn their fingers first and then react after the fact.