Disease-Driven Poverty Traps in Rwanda

Matt Bonds, former postdoctoral fellow at Columbia's Earth Institute, reports on his experiences in Rwanda. I quote just one paragraph to give readers and idea, but you may want to read the entire thing.

If there is a single lesson I’ve learned from working on the ground with the MVP, it is that the problems addressed by the sustainable development community (disease, conflict, population growth, land and water scarcity, etc.) take a lot of intellectual work to comprehend in the West, but are often devastatingly obvious in much of the poor world. Certain debates (like those over trade-offs between economic growth and environmental conservation that pit economists against ecologists in the U.S., for example, or those over whether population growth is economically good or bad) can be highly misguided and often falsely dichotomous when applied to underdeveloped countries. In areas of extreme poverty, like parts of Rwanda, where nearly the entire population subsists directly off of its finite land holdings, economics is clearly driven by the relationships between people and their environment. People rely on fertile soils and reliable sources of water, while human population growth necessarily increases per capita consumption of resources. Aside from resource conservation and management, a critical part of the solution is a more diverse set of inputs (facilitated by free markets and trade), which is a paradigm too often decried as neo-liberal ideology. The most fundamentally important resource of all that social, political, and natural scientists of many stripes can agree on is healthy labor. This makes basic healthcare a particularly high priority for sustainable economic development.

Matt is an interesting guy. He got his PhD in Economics, then jumped over and got his PhD in Ecology, then got a prestigious postdoc with Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia. Now he's an assistant professor at Harvard, last I heard.