Week 12

Im not sure if im totally on the right track ... so here goes.

Based on the film black gold and the case studies in chapters 13, 17 and 38 I believe the relationship between environmental sustainability, economic development and human health are that without all three of them changes you are trying to make are not going to work. I really am not sure what I am trying to say, but I think you can’t increase human health if you don’t better economic development and environmental sustainability.

In the case study chapter 38 “Medical Anthropology: Improving Nutrition in Malawi” they wanted to see if regular goat milk in a Childs diet would help with malnutrition. In order for this study to work and in order for human health to actually increase they first needed to find goats that could survive the Malawi environment and goats that could produce milk with adequate nutrition. After the succeeded in this task, they then needed to make sure the women would be able to take care of these cows. What I am trying to say is that if the anthropologist did not make sure the goat could live in the environment and produce adequate milk then human health would not increase. Without adequate health how would your economy develop? All three must have a relationship together in order to work.

Pretty much the same thing was talked about in chapter 17, “Malawi Versus the World Bank,” but in a different way. It was explained that when the world bank and IMF “began attributing problems in the economy to government subsidy policies, particularly with regard to commercial fertilizer” the people of Malawi were unable to keep adequate health. All types of subsides and price controls on all agricultural inputs and products were removed. This caused the people of Malawi to not be able to grow their crops causing the economic development and environmental sustainability to drop, along with their health.

Once again, the case study chapter 13 “forest development the Indian way” is very comparative with the other two case studies mentioned above. In this case study, the environmental sustainability is affected by economic development. In this case, because bulldozers, tractors and buildings took over the forest the environmental sustainability is being threatened. “By destroying the forest resources surrounding the Guaraní villages of the region, colonos set in motion a process that destroyed the native culture and society.” Because their land had been threatened and they could therefore no longer produce yerba mate leaves for sale and therefore were forces to plant cash crops, further destroying the forest. “the loss of game and poor crop yields exacerbated health problems.” Because their community’s economic development rose, their community was threatened causing a change of lifestyle and a introduction to disease.

The movie Black Gold, also shows the same results as these case studies. Because of the way the world market works the coffee growers are being screwed over. Coffee is the second most active traded in the market, and when the market is down they cannot sell coffee for very much. They sell their coffee for 12 cents where as we sell it for 230 dollars. What seems fair about that? While we are using them to see coffee in our country, they are becoming more dependent on emergency aid than ever before.

Applied anthropologists could assist in making sure these goals were brought about in the right way. Take chapter 38 for example, without the anthropologist making sure everything was understood in a correct manner and that no one would be affected in a harsh way the results would not have been as positive as they were.

I am not sure if I believe cultural survival is possible with economic development because when reading the case studies from conflict and conformity when economic development occurs, health problems also occur.