Links I liked January 23, 2015
Some public/global health things that caught my eye today:
1. A visit to the most sickest town in America, a coal mining town in Virginia. Dear Republicans, pay for health care now and abandon “clean coal” or pay more later. It’s up to you. (The Atlantic)
2. How paid sick leave could boost American productivity. (CEPR)
3. Dealing with antibiotic resistance is going to take more than just technology. We can’t sit by and watch everything burn around us while we wait for new drugs to come down the pipe…. because they aren’t coming. (Project Syndicate)
4. I want to deny vaccine deniers. Generally speaking, I don’t like people who are willing to sacrifice kids for politics. Vaccine deniers stick together and increase risks for everyone. (WP) and this one, which puts it all into a nice picture for you. (WP)
5. Diseases without borders: ignoring the problem of piss poor health care in developing countries won’t help us from Jim Kim of the World Bank. (Project Syndicate)
Links I liked: November 26, 2014
Can African Countries Learn from North Korea’s Handling of the International Media? – An interesting perspective. He argues that African leaderships, rather than seizing crises as opportunities to draw attention and approval for their countries from Western donors, might actually benefit from clamping down on international media coverage, which often exploits and distorts the story. I’m thinking that the Ebola panic might have been averted if the media hadn’t picked up on the most freakish elements of the story, and focused rather on the mundane issues of poor public health care delivery.
Colonialism and development in Africa – “Most of Africa spent two generations under colonial rule. This column argues that, contrary to some recent commentaries highlighting the benefits of colonialism, it is this intense experience that has significantly retarded economic development across the continent. Relative to any plausible counterfactual, Africa is poorer today than it would have been had colonialism not occurred.” The authors, however, note the different contexts of colonialization and remark that results are mixed, but in general, the countries that have done the best (i.e. those which didn’t experience slavery) would be doing significantly better.
Stop Making Intellectually Disingenuous Market Arguments – “Shall we blame Twitter, trolls or bloggers? I am unsure of the underlying reason. But as we have seen far too, financial discussions seem to entail people arguing at cross-purposes. Bull-bear debates devolve into winning the argument at any cost. Previously, we had a true competition of ideas in the marketplace. Now, we have discussions that range between disingenuous and useless. The hunt for the truth has been replaced by the search for bragging rights.” Well, Barry, I don’t think you should limit your observations to only those talking about markets. It’s endemic now.
An autopsy review of sudden unexpected natural deaths in a suburban Nigerian population – “Sudden unexpected natural deaths accounted for 13.4% of all medico-legal autopsies. The male to female ratio was 2.1:1, and the mean age was 43.1 years ± 19.5 SD. Cardiovascular (28.3%), respiratory (18.2%), and central nervous system (12.6%) disorders were the major groups of causes. About 64.4% of cardiovascular deaths were due to hypertensive heart disease. Bacterial pneumonia, intracerebral haemorrhage, and breast carcinoma accounted for 34.4%, 60.0%, and 52.6% of respiratory, central nervous system, and cancer-related deaths respectively. Only 16.9% of cases occurred while the patient was admitted to the hospital.” Twice as many men are dying as women, they are dying of heart disease and the average age of death is 43, give or take 20 years. Time to move our focus over to chronic outcomes in developing countries. They are staring into a tidal wave of disease that’s going to break their health systems.
Economics Is a Dismal Science for Women – Wow. Just wow.
What if Godzilla came to Kenya?
This question has been bothering me for a while. While it’s obvious that Godzilla would only visit Japan and the US given that the US and Japan are the only countries which make Godzilla movies, I’ve long been puzzled as to why Godzilla would visit those two exclusively. Specifically, why doesn’t Godzilla visit poor countries? (Note: I realize that Godzilla is a good guy, but ask readers to remember that he didn’t start out that way)
Certainly, the environmental devastation in poor countries is as extensive as in wealthy countries (and perhaps moreso, given the lack of financial and political resources to measure it, let alone do anything about it), making Tanzania, for example, just as much a candidate for kaiju destruction as any other.
But what would happen? First, were Godzilla appear on the shores of the coast of Kenya, he’d (is it male?) have to plow through the port of Mombasa. Godzilla may be destructive, but he’s known to follow standard immigration procedures. He’d meet little resistance, given Kenya’s lax border protection. At the worst, he’d be asked to pay $50 to stay for three months.
Mombasa isn’t a big town, so he’d be over the island and into the country in a matter a seconds, though he might consider a pleasant break on the beach. After finally eradicating Kenya’s terror problem and quashing any ideas of Mombasan separatism, he’d stroll to the Mombasa highway and lumber up to Nairobi, where the real action could start.
In contrast to Japan and the US, Godzilla would find the response by the local military to be tepid at best. A few planes might buzz around aimlessly and a couple of tanks might lob some rounds at his legs, but the military, lacking any incentive to loot cell phones or liquor would probably simply slink away in short order. Response from the African Union or the UN would be slow coming, as they’d have to wait to see if the media reacted with sufficient outrage to warrant action. The US would most certainly refuse to be involved in anything other than a support role.
Godzilla would plod through Nairobi and lay waste to the City Centre in a matter of seconds. It would be like a child stepping through a grandmothers flower garden. He’d probably quickly become bored, lacking much to topple over outside of a few unfinished apartment buildings and maybe a mall here and there. If he were after human destruction, he might take a few steps through Kibera, where he’d certainly kill a half a million people in the space of a single Godzilla breath.
After an anti-climactic fight in Nairobi, he’d have to take a break in Karen to consider what to do next. Maybe he’d move on to Kampala? Or regret his decision and move back to India? It’s hard to say.
The human costs would be incredible. A couple of million people would likely die immediately, the majority of which would be poor given the incredible density in slums like Kibera and their inability to properly evacuate from the city. The sleep inducing traffic jams are unavoidable even under normal circumstances. A manic run for the countryside by all of Nairobi would only make things worse but squatter settlements and slums would reappear within days.
In the long term, however, Godzilla’s destruction of Kenya might pay off. Massive amounts of funding would appear from a number of international sources to rebuild Nairobi’s devastated infrastructure. The Chinese would appear and immediately start rebuilding the highway system from scratch using cheap imported labor. The Americans would set about reconstructing Kenya’s likely devastated military and ports. The British would dump money into overhauling Nairobi’s failing sanitation system, long due for replacement. Kenya would get an infrastructural reboot.
On the other hand, real estate speculators would flow in like flies on roadkill, hoping for a payoff once Kenya’s economy got back on track. Where real estate prices would have crashed immediately following the destruction of Nairobi, leading to a cheap scramble for land, the current real estate boom soon again be underway. Domestic investors would now have even less incentive to develop Kenya’s manufacturing sector and the economy would hobble along as it did before.
Given the political chaos following Godzilla’s destruction of the central government, Chinese investors would grab as much agricultural land as possible, citing “gifts” of highways and football stadiums further entrenching China’s increasingly overbearing presence in the country.
In essence, Kenya, as independent state, would cease to exist.
It might be the case, however, that the destruction of Kenya’s cities might finally sway the Kenyan citizenry away from tribal politics and toward a truly democratic state. People can, and do, often surprise us, but this would be a hard, hard road given that most of the reconstruction would not be democratically determined, but rather orchestrated by World Bank and UN technocrats and Chinese land grabs. It’s clear that Kenya’s self interested leaders would do nothing to stop it.
So, conclusion? Kenya would win big in improved infrastructure, but lose big given the resultant political weakness. In the long term, Kenya might regain some of it’s political footing given improvements in the domestic economy, but it would take decades and a lot of political will to make this happen.
Academics as iconoclasts…
This struck me this morning while reading a post on Chris Blattman‘s development blog where he refers to Harvard academic, Matthew Stephenson’s anti-corruption blog:
But as long as folks having this conversation feel free to engage in armchair psychoanalysis of others’ motives, I’ll throw out my own hypothesis about why so many academics in the blogosphere are drawn to the anticorruption-is-a-Western-obsession-that-doesn’t-matter-much-for-development canard: academics (and I speak as a member of the tribe) enjoy feeling like iconoclasts willing to speak uncomfortable truths to power. And in the development field, a certain type of academic particularly enjoys attacking anything that the major institutions (World Bank, U.S. government, OECD, etc.) seem to be for. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself – a contrarian cast of mind is often conducive to questioning received wisdom and pointing out contradictions, self-serving justifications, and the like. But in this case, I think it’s lazy and counterproductive.
Well, yeah, it’s usually lazy and unproductive. As a member of the tribe, I feel vindicated. I find that too many academics aren’t as concerned with bettering to world so much as making themselves feel good about themselves by following a political script. If we’d worry more about pragmatics and less about ideology, we might be able to help make the world a better place.
What I’m reading now March 23, 2014
Well, it should really be, what I was reading two weeks ago, but… details, details….
The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
Note, however, that I do not share the views of uninformed cynics, which laugh at the “folly of development” and the evils of foreign aid indiscriminately. Easterly is often propped up by cynical opponents of foreign aid as a spokesperson for why we shouldn’t be given money to poor people, or by Ron Paul style non-interventionists who are quick to dismiss anything the United States does outside it’s borders, not to suggest at all that the United States alone is responsible for development. To me, and call me stupid, the issue is far too complex to boil down to a black and white view of a few self satisfied cynics. Debates over what works and what doesn’t work in development are far more interesting to me than debates of whether development is “good” or “bad.” But… I digress…
Easterly argues that what’s missing from the picture is the guarantee of true democratic rights, that is, legal restrictions on the powers of government. The reason democracy is faulty in Africa, is that most African governments equate democracy with merely having elections, when, in fact, democracy is a function of checks on the ability of government to stifle opposition and the guarantee that citizens are fully protected under the law. He is absolutely right. The structures of African governments (in general) were initially constructed to support a colonial model, which guaranteed that power would be held by a privileged (white) few. However, post-independence, few governments have made substantive changes to the ways in which they govern, despite having had, in most cases, nearly 50 years to do so. Easterly lays blame with development organizations, which offer highly technical solutions to basic problems, but are weak-kneed in demanding that governments work to guarantee basic rights to their citizens.
While I agree that democracy is about more than just having elections, and agree that basic rights must be guaranteed in order to have a free state, I wonder if he gets so caught up in the grand academic thought process, and misses some of the details. His treatment of Asia is quite limited, for example. There, most governments achieved their developmental goals without guaranteeing the rights of citizens and sometime achieved them under incredibly authoritarian and sometimes brutal one party systems. While I don’t think that the end of development is worth the means of authoritarian brutality, it must be pointed out that many governments (for example, South Korea and Taiwan) only loosened their grip after they had an educated middle class which demanded increased freedoms and rights (see the work of Ha-Joong Chang and Joe Stiglitz for a reasonable treatment of the subject). While Africa and Asia are two very different places, any discussion of development has to include both.
Easterly makes me feel good, though, in his preface. Mentioning anywhere that markets are good things in a discussion of development will have one branded as a rabid right winger, which is just a pathetically myopic view (or merely a by-product of total ignorance). The tired argument of market vs state which dominates political discussions in the US (and elsewhere) is merely a distraction from the real argument we should be having, which is over rights vs. non-rights. Are rights being protected or not? Is there proper representation or not? You can have any type of free market system you like or even a heavy welfare state, but if the guarantee of basic rights to free speech, assembly, expression and representation aren’t there, you don’t have a democracy and you probably don’t have continued development of the type that matters most.
But, I’m not a political scientist, and could easily rant on aimlessly for hours to no end whatsoever.
Politics in West Africa – Sir Arthur Lewis (1965) – Sir Arthur Lewis was a Nobel Prize winning economist from St. Lucia. He wrote this fantastic little book on the state of West African politics following independence in 1965. It’s just as relevant now as it was back then. His scathing criticism of authoritarian African governments and the multitude of missed opportunities for development for African countries were both timely and eerily prophetic. I’m particularly drawn to his criticism of viewing Africa through a Marxist lens, pointing out that, outside of a few foreign corporations, there are few true capitalists and that the plentiful nature of land compromises efforts to commodify it, and thus create a European style, class based system. He also points out the problems with the one party state, pointing out that the one party state was often created by force following independence, rather than consensus. In fact, the nature of the independence movements themselves compromised the creation of true constitutional democracies, which guarantee the rights of the minority. Independence movements were created to topple minority rule. Great book.
Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan
The Violence of Financial Capitalism (Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series)
What will replace the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015? Will the UN’s new benchmarks finally include the private sector?
The Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight developmental benchmarks which the world should achieve by 2015 are set to expire. Though there have been many gains, most notably in the worldwide reduction of extreme poverty since 2000, successes between countries remain uneven. Many people are wondering what set of policy recommendations will come next.
I’m reading “A Framework for Sustainable Development,” a document from the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which aims to bring together a number of experts from a variety of fields with the goal of developing partnerships and creating innovative solutions to new developmental problems.
The Solutions Network mobilizes scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable-development problem solving at local, national, and global scales. This Solutions Network accelerates joint learning and helps to overcome the compartmentalization of technical and policy work by promoting integrated approaches to the interconnected economic, social, and environmental challenges confronting the world. The SDSN works closely with United Nations agencies, multilateral financing institutions, as well as other international organizations.
The document suggests the creating of 12 thematic groups, each of which will bring experts and institutions together to work on specific problems. These include themes such as macroeconomics, health, sustainable industry, oceans, forests and governance, among others. They all address very real problems the world is facing that will require the collective knowledge of a variety of stakeholders to successfully solve.
The last group struck me:
Redefining the Role of Business for Sustainable Development (synthesis of ideas, including from the other Thematic Groups, on how business in key sectors
can contribute to sustainable development; ways for business and financial markets to internalize externalities such as environmental damage and support a shift
towards the polluter pays principle; management of non-sustainable “stranded assets” as part of a shift to a socially and environmentally sustainable economy)
It’s interesting that the private sector seems to be almost an afterthought. This, or course, follows a general pattern. Policy groups and NGOs often take an adversarial approach toward business. The MDGs adressed nothing regarding the private sector and business development. The “thematic group” here, doesn’t really appear to wish to engage with private business at all, apparently offering a top down approach to dictating how business should participate.
This is a grave mistake. Though it is entirely true that many of the world’s greatest environmental challenges are directly attributable to capitalist activities, pushing the private sector to the margins is no way to engage multinationals in working toward a sustainable future. If businesses can’t be convinced (rightly) that the long term health of the planet and the equitable development of human resources is in their long term interest, then they will continue on a path of destruction. Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that the private sector is a monolithic entity. Private businesses are a varied in intent and practice as NGOs.
Pharmaceuticals to treat malaria, HIV and TB don’t appear out of nowhere and despite the role of the public sector in encouraging and supporting basic research to create life saving drugs, governments are in no position to bring such innovations up to scale and market them successfully.
Even stranger to me, is that a list of themes that allegedly purport to deal with global welfare would not include business development in developing countries. Rapidly urbanizing and dynamic countries in Sub-Saharan Africa faces unique challenges to bringing people out of poverty, one of which is the development of domestic economies. Lack of access to capital, a paucity of banking services and regulatory handicaps keep African entrepreneurs from growing and potentially improving the lives of everyone involved. Again, the MDG’s did not address the problem of business development. Here again, we see the same pattern.
It was interesting that the tone of a document, A NEW GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP:ERADICATE POVERTY AND TRANSFORM ECONOMIES THROUGH SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT written by leaders of two developing countries, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and and Dr Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia (well, David Cameron’s in there, too), would be so different from the UN’s Framework:
3. Transform economies for jobs and inclusive growth. We call for a quantum leap forward in economic opportunities and a profound economic transformation
to end extreme poverty and improve livelihoods. This means a rapid shift to sustainable patterns of consumption and production–harnessing innovation, technology, and the potential of private business to create more value and drive sustainable and inclusive growth. Diversified economies, with equal opportunities for all, can unleash the dynamism that creates jobs and livelihoods, especially for young people and women. This is a challenge for every country on earth: to ensure good job possibilities while moving to the sustainable patterns of work and life that will be necessary in a world of limited natural resources. We should ensure that everyone has what they need to grow and prosper, including access to quality education and skills, healthcare, clean water, electricity, telecommunications and transport. We should make it easier for people to invest, start-up a business and to trade. And we can do more to take advantage of rapid urbanisation: cities are the world’s engines for business and innovation. With good management they can provide jobs, hope and growth, while building sustainability.
The UN’s new development framework clearly has Jeff Sachs at the helm and certainly the group intends to influence policy. But policy without the acknowledgement and inclusion of the private sector, both on a macro and micro level, is doomed to fail.
Are we living in the age of protest?
It’s possible.
A working paper from the Initiative for Policy Dialogue tracked all protests from 2006 to 2013. The authors classified each protest according to the types of grievances and causes of outrage, the profile of demonstrators, size and the nature of opposition.
They found that protests are becoming more common worldwide and larger in size. The largest protests in human history (one exceeding 100 million people) have occurred in the past six years.
Increases in frequency are consistent across all types of protests, including economic justice, failure of political representation, rights and global justice.
Full on riots are fortunately few (only ~10% of all protests), but arrests and state violence are common. The biggest offenders include Iran, Russia, the US, Canada and Cameroon.
Developed countries account for the lion’s share of protests and the authors noted increased levels of “soft repression” in the form of surveillance and profiling.
More encouraging, they found that 37% of protests result in some kind of political change. These gains were mostly in the areas of political, legal and social rights. Global issues and economic justice, however, appear the most difficult areas to achieve change. No surprises here. These problems are vastly complex, entrenched, include numerous players and not easily solved.
I’ve written before on the issue of food prices and protest in South Africa and other authors have found similar trends in the Middle East. While the grievances of protesters often has little to do with food or issues of daily living, I’m wondering how economic pressures might be stimulating conditions favorable to demonstration. No doubt, we might look to solving the worldwide problem of volatile agricultural commodity prices and food availability.
Most interesting are the ubiquitous calls for “real democracy” or adequate representation of the populace in political matters. Policy makers would do well to respond to this simple and obvious call for inclusion. If not, we will see further unrest and potentially more violence and instability.
Apparently, “the Aid Debate is Over.” We Can All Go Home Now.
I was just checking out Bill Easterly’s (author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
Yet again, Easterly uses Jeff Sachs as his academic punching bag. Sometimes I wonder if those two really just like each other a great deal, but go to great lengths to hate on each other in public.
I’m somewhat interested in his derisive tone towards technology:
Jeffrey Sachs’ formula for ending poverty was appealingly simple. All the problems of poverty, the famous Columbia University economist argued, had discrete technological fixes. Bed nets could prevent malaria-spreading mosquito bites. Wells could provide clean water. Hospitals could treat curable diseases. Fertilizer could increase yields of food crops.
Through a recent book on Sachs by Nina Munk (author of: The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty
Sachs’ technical fixes frequently turned out to be anything but simple. The saga of Dertu’s wells is illustrative. Ahmed Mohamed, the local man in charge of the effort, discovers that he needs to order a crucial part for a generator that powers the wells. The piece takes four months to arrive, and then nobody knows how to install it. Eventually a distant mechanic arrives at great expense. A couple of years later, Munk returns to find Mohamed struggling with the same issues: The wells have broken down again, the parts are lacking, and nobody knows how to fix the problem.
Easterly then moves on to use Sachs “failures” to criticize the current trend in development which uses small targeted programs which lend themselves to easy evaluation and implementation. People will often work on localized water development programs, or experiment with ways to help small farmers. Behavioral economists will attempt to use cash incentives to get parents to send their children to school. The thinking is that if projects are too big, they become unwieldy and impossible to properly implement.
Easterly believes that development should come from releasing countries from the shackles of bad policy. If the economic policy of a country is too intrusive or bureaucratic to allow the market to function properly, the policy should be changed.
We can now see that aid and development are two distinct topics that should each have their own separate debates. If today’s development economists talk only about what can be tested with a small randomized experiment, they confine themselves to the small aid conversation and leave the big development discussion to others, too often the types of advocates who appeal to anecdotes, prejudice, and partisanship. It would be much better to confront the big issues, such as the role of political and economic freedom in achieving development.
I mostly agree with Easterly’s position. The problems of poverty are mostly problems of the market. Even within Kenya, for example, high value companies must follow a Kafkaesque bureaucracy to do business, following 10 procedures and taking an average of 32 days from initial application to license. To put it in perspective, in the States, you’ll have to jump through 6 hurdles and it will take you five days. In developed countries, that’s considered extreme. In New Zealand, there’s only one step and it takes all of four hours.
Setting up a fruit stand may be easy, but profits slim, business slow and tax revenues are impossible to collect. Setting up a new wage paying transport company to move massive amounts of fruits from producers to markets efficiently is a bigger bureaucratic challenge, though the long term benefits are massive. Reducing the number of gatekeeper would go a long way to allowing these industries to grow.
However, aid and social programs are not ineffective. Though Easterly loves to beat up on Sachs, painting aid with a broad brush is unsatisfying. Sure, the water pump in one village may break, parts may be difficult to obtain and expertise hard to find when things go wrong, but the simple fact is that some people are getting water where they couldn’t before. Internationally funded distributions of bed nets have reduced malaria incidence and mortality all across the continent. There are a lot of kids alive today who would have died a decade ago.
Naively, I measure social progress through dead kids. There’s no way to measure the level of devastation that families feel when children needlessly die and the negative impacts on society and development are vast. Anything which keeps kids from dying is a good thing.
My view is that the macro and micro level development strategies need to work in tandem. Bed nets need to be distributed and water pumps provided. Aid programs which increase access to capital and training need to be strengthened. Evaluation of programs will be important to insure that waste is minimized and report successes. But we also need to see the end of unnecessary regulatory hurdles which do nothing but foster corruption and hamper the ability for countries to develop their market sectors.
Aid programs and market oriented regulatory reform developing countries will insure that short term problems are ameliorated and insure long term sustainability of current gains. While probably patently obvious, a combination of these two strategies will go a long way toward improving the public health and making sure that kids don’t die.
Steve Irwin’s Daughter and the “Threat” of Overpopulation
A few days ago, a friend posted a link to an article about a thought piece written by 14 year old Bindi Irwin, daughter of the late television personality Steve Irwin.
Bindi was tasked with writing on why she chose to pursue wildlife conservation as her life’s work. Instead, she went on a rant on what she believes the most pressing problem facing humanity today: overpopulation.
Here’s what she wrote:
An average of 150 people is born. Every. One. Minute. This means, every day approximately 489,600 people are born.
How can the poor have any improved lifestyles with more people to share fewer resources?
These are alarming figures as earth only has so many resources and cannot keep up with our ever growing population.
Now, I’m not saying that there is any one answer. This is an extremely delicate topic and one certainly not to be taken lightly. I’m just suggesting that perhaps this is an issue we should start discussing as a society.
Maybe family planning is one solution. Some women don’t get the freedom of choosing whether they want many children or not. Surely when these women are living on $1.00 a day it would be easier to feed 5 children than 10.
Now, I’m inclined to forgive her, as she was only 14 at the time of writing, but as a public figure, she’s fair game to be raked through the coals like anyone else.
Moreover, her basic view is not uncommon in any political circle: The world is facing a crisis because poor people are having too many kids and we need to stop it. A view that I find incredibly reprehensible. Here’s why:
1. The irony is incredible
It is true that population growth is highest among the poorest of the poor of the world. It is also true that extremely wealthy regions like Japan and Europe are facing the spectre of population shrinkage, and that population growth in North American is flattening.
It is also true that wealthy regions like Europe, Japan and the USA are consuming the lion’s share of resources and belching out copious amounts of pollution. The rural poor in Africa subsist on domestically produced corn grown on their own land often without pesticides, fertilizers and machinery (since they can’t afford it).
Moreover, they are good recyclers. They are reusing the first world’s trash. They wear our clothes, use our electronics and drive our cars and recycle all three when they reach the true point of no return (which is a long, long road).
Though I question whether the archaic agricultural methods in Africa are truly environmentally friendly, we do need to ask ourselves, who is really threatening the health and welfare of the earth here?
2. Bindi, like many people, displays an incredible ignorance as to what the true problems of developing countries are.
Poor people in developing countries (yes, the one’s who make all the kids) often eat what they produce. Developing countries themselves, lacking trade linkages and cash, often subsist only on what they can produce domestically. Thus, rather than being a drain on the world’s resources, as Bindi would suggest, they are most self-sufficient (though lacking as a result).
Environmental degradation usually occurs because, since households are producing their own food, agricultural practices are inefficient. They don’t rotate their crops. They don’t irrigate properly so that they have to over plant crops and take up more space. Inefficient regulating bodies and weak governments fail to manage water resources properly.
Most salient, is that poor countries (at least in Africa) are caught in a trap where they have trouble selling agricultural products between regions and across borders.
If Kenya experiences a drought, it can’t just import food from Zimbabwe because 1) there is no history of trade between Zimbabwe and Kenya and 2) the transportation infrastructure doesn’t exist. In the States (and Europe) we have solved the problem of trade linkages and the movement of goods which, in large part, explains why we are so wealthy. We are able to diversify our risks and there is no more risky venture than growing crops.
The problem isn’t too many kids, but a failure of development.
3. Bindi fails to recognize the agency of Africa and Africans
In another news story, she was quoted as saying that 7 year birth control implants should be provided for 11 year old children in developing countries.
“There’s such a thing as seven-year-implants, so if you had a girl that was 11 years old and gave her the seven-year implant she wouldn’t be able to have kids until she was 18.”
Of course, I am all for expanding access to birth control, family planning and women’s health resources in developing countries. Actually, I support expanding access to these things all over the world. Women, being in charge of birthing children, should be allowed to choose whatever path is right for them without interference.
I feel that what Bindi is suggesting (assuming she has any idea what she is suggesting) is that women not be given a choice at all. She’s suggesting state interference in reproductive affairs in countries. It’s always been interesting to me that, in conversation, China’s one child policy (which, minus the loss of a public sector job, really amounts to a tax on children) gets maligned so heavily in the States, but people have no qualms at all about forced sterilization and forced birth control for Africans. (Note: Bindi did not suggest forced sterilizations.)
Of course, forced sterilizations do happen in America, Kenya and Namibia.
To me (and seemingly me only), the message behind Bindi’s suggestion that 11 year olds be given seven year implants seems to be that Africans can’t take care of their own affairs. Even in development and public health circles, many people are of the opinion that Africans are incapable of taking care of themselves. I disagree. After colonization, independence, civil wars, decades of crushing structural adjustment failures, prolonged negative economic growth and failure after political failure, African countries are zooming back.
Kenya’s government restructuring and ratification of a new constitution following one of the worst and most violent elections the world has ever seen should be proof that Africans can take care of their own affairs.
Of course, it turns out that Bindi Irwin is loosely aligned with the nationalist and anti-immigration group, the Stable Population Party. A faux environmentalist group, their intro speaks for itself:
INTRODUCTION: BETTER, NOT BIGGER
The Population Party is a sustainability party with a major focus on the everything issue – population. A stable and sustainable population will help create a better quality of life for all Australians, present and future, and provide a positive example for the rest of the world.
Australia’s population is currently growing by over 1000 people per day. That adds up to over one million people every three years – the size of Adelaide! It’s no wonder Australia’s quality of life is being degraded.
From a population of 23 million today, under Liberal/Labor/Greens policies we are on target for 40 million by 2050 – and rising! We say let’s slow down and stabilise at around 26 million by 2050.
In a finite world, more people means fewer resources per person, leading to poverty and conflict. Australia’s finite natural resource base is the true source of our wealth – not our rapid population growth that both dilutes and erodes it. To meet the huge costs of population growth, Australia is using finite and non-renewable resources that should be saved for our children and grandchildren.
The Cure for Malaria is Development: A Controversial Notion?
I think not. I’ve just returned from a meeting of malaria researchers in Basel, Switzerland. The meetings were excellent. It is rare to have such a wide showing of malaria experts in one place, talking about nothing but malaria.
The meeting was notable for what was included, namely excellent presentations on vaccine development, subsidies to increase access to medications, malaria elimination programs in less than talked about parts of the globe (Bhutan, Turkmenistan, PNG), and the paucity of research on Plasmodium vivax.
The meeting was also notable for what it did not include, namely global economic determinants of malaria.
To me, malaria is 100% a disease of poverty. Where poverty is low, malaria is low. This is true globally, as well as within still malarious countries. The graph to the right shows the relationship of country level GDP with the estimated number of malaria cases per 100,000 in 2006. Though accurate data on the true number of cases is difficult to obtain for developing countries for a host of reasons, the trend should be clear. More money equals less malaria.
Is this because on better funding for malaria programs? After all, wealthier countries are able to put more resources into prevention, mosquito control, and treatment. Sure, I think this is partially the case. It has to be said, however, that malaria was eliminated from the United States without modern medicines and insecticide treated bednets, cornerstones of current malaria control strategies. Though DDT was instrumental in helping to control malaria transmitting mosquitoes in the US, the truth is, the bugs are still here.
Malaria deaths around the world are down. It is also the case that worldwide development is up. The economies of developing countries are improving, record numbers of people are moving out of entrenched poverty and, while within country inequality is increasing, global inequality is decreasing. Personally, I think the relationship between development and malaria is no accident at all.
What strikes me, is that this topic was hardly mentioned last week. I brought it up a couple of times, but, unfortunately, scientists are hesitant to move out of their comfort zone, and wish to give it little thought. Talk of politics or economics produces blank looks in scientists trained in microbiology or entomology. I’m sure its the same on the other end. Certainly, the current research is important, helpful, relevant and should be continued. However, I don’t think that we, as scientists, should stick our heads in the sand and willfully ignore the bigger picture.
Malaria will be eliminated not through fancy pharmaceuticals and ever improved bednets, but through the increase in access to employment, market economies and remunerative opportunities. Malaria will be eliminated through the elimination of entrenched poverty, the expansion of free education, reductions in gender inequities and improved nutrition. In my opinion, these were the true factors which led to the elimination of malaria from the US, Europe, Japan. Granted, there are climatic differences between those countries and sub-Saharan Africa, but P. vivax, a cold weather malaria, was also fully eliminated.
People I spoke with sort of waved their hands and acted as if there is nothing we can do about these global and economic problems. I disagree, of course. Policy makers look to scientists for answers (though they make ignore what they don’t like). Endless bednet trials that only marginally expand on previous research do not do much to ameliorate the structural factors which keep people in poverty. Research which explores those big picture factors, however, could have vast benefits.
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