A review of THE COMING PLAGUE: NEWLY EMERGING DISEASES IN A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE by Laurie Garrett, published in 1994. CHAPTER 7: N’ZARA: LASSA, EBOLA, AND THE DEVELOPING WORLD’S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL POLICIES
Twenty-six of the world’s most impoverished nations were in Africa
There was nothing unique about Sierra Leone. The lack of basic infrastructures, such as roads, schools, hospitals, shipping and supply routes, electricity, and telephone systems, was hobbling African development. Political instability and the corruption that seemed to go hand in hand with militarism and elitist oligarchic government were draining the lifeblood of once proud agrarian societies from Casablanca to Cape Town. The continent most ravaged by colonialism, resource exploitation, slavery, and cultural destruction was, as a result, now starving and dying of so many different infectious diseases that even sophisticated physicians often found it impossible to assign specific causes of death to their patients. Twenty-six of the world’s most impoverished nations were in Africa. In most of these countries, the daily caloric intake of the average person was below that considered essential to support health.
It was almost impossible to plan domestic economic development
While their populations exploded in size, national debts mounted, and political stability increased, the world’s poorest countries searched for ways to raise foreign exchange capital that would enable them to purchase essential goods for infrastructural development. Those nations that possessed mineral resources mined at a furious pace, selling the materials in exchange for strong foreign currencies or gold. The buyers for their goods were far better organized than were the scattered competing sellers. The buyers set the prices, and throughout the 1970s global pricing for most resources fluctuated wildly. The variation made it almost impossible for those countries to plan domestic economic development.
Investments in large-scale projects
The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and major foreign aid spenders on both sides of the Iron Curtain continued to fund and promote investments in large-scale projects such as enormous hydroelectric dams, international airports, and containerized shipping ports., having little or no ameliorating impact on the health of average citizens, and all too often worsened conditions, giving further advantages to the microbes. Among the cells of the body most dependent upon a source of nutrients are those of the immune system. As nutritional input declines, these vital cells literally run out of fuel, fail to perform their crucial disease-fighting tasks, or, in worst cases, die off. Eventually the immune deficiency can become so acute that virtually any pathogenic microbe can cause lethal disease.
The creation of export crop systems in pursuit of foreign exchange
The primary economic change in most of the world’s poor countries in the 1960s and 1970s involved the creation of export crop systems in pursuit of foreign exchange. The result was a decline in domestic food production and higher local market prices for grains, vegetables, dairy products, and meat. Noting that five corporations controlled 90% of all international grain sales, four corporations monopolized 90% of the world’s banana trade, and one multinational had cornered 80% of the global markets in corn, soy oil, and peanut oil, American critics Frances Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins warned that “multinational agribusiness corporations are now creating a single global agricultural system in which they would exercise integrated control over all stages of production from farm to consumer. If they succeed, they – like the oil companies – will be able to effectively manipulate supply and prices on a worldwide basis through monopoly practices.