Africa is underdeveloped because of parisites

http://ift.tt/1Mza0e1

Quote:

Stanford Assistant Professor of Medicine Marcella Alsan had always wondered why the mineral-rich African continent — with so many natural resources, diverse climates and arable land — remains so poor. She launched into extensive research while working on her PhD in economics and has now come up with an intriguing theory: A pesky parasite prevented many precolonial Africans from adopting progressive agricultural methods, a phenomenon that still impacts parts of the continent today. The tsetse fly has plagued Africa for centuries — having sent millions of people into the confusing stupor of sleeping sickness, while killing the cows and other livestock needed to plough their fields and feed their families. Alsan writes in a paper published in The American Economic Review that the tsetse fly, which today is found only in Africa, drove precolonial Africans to use slaves instead of domesticated animals for agriculture. This limited their crop yields and the ability to transport goods. “Communicable disease has often been explored as a cause of Africa’s underdevelopment,” writes Alsan, who is the only infectious-disease trained economist in the United States and a core faculty member of the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research. “Although the literature has investigated the role of human pathogens on economic performance, it is largely silent on the impact of veterinary disease,” she notes. “This is peculiar, given the role that livestock played in agriculture and as a form of transport throughout history.”

This seems to have a very strong correlation. I am interested in this.