Modeling how and why aquatic vegetation removal can free rural households from poverty-disease traps

Molly J Doruska, Christopher Barrett and Jason R Rohr

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Infectious disease can reduce labor productivity and incomes, trapping subpopulations in a vicious cycle of ill health and poverty. Efforts to boost African farmers' agricultural production through fertilizer use can inadvertently promote the growth of aquatic vegetation that hosts disease vectors. Recent trials established that removing aquatic vegetation habitat for snail intermediate hosts reduces schistosomiasis infection rates in children, while converting the harvested vegetation into compost boosts agricultural productivity and incomes. Our model illustrates how this ecological intervention changes the feedback between the human and natural systems, potentially freeing rural households from poverty-disease traps. We develop a bioeconomic model that interacts an analytical microeconomic model of agricultural households' behavior, health status and incomes over time with a dynamic model of schistosomiasis disease ecology. We calibrate the model with field data from northern Senegal. We show analytically and via simulation that local conversion of invasive aquatic vegetation to compost changes the feedbacks among interlinked disease, aquatic and agricultural systems, reducing schistosomiasis infection and increasing incomes relative to the current status quo, in which villagers rarely remove vegetation. Aquatic vegetation removal disrupts the poverty-disease trap by reducing habitat for snails that vector the infectious helminth and by promoting production of compost that returns to agricultural soils nutrients that currently leach into surface water from on-farm fertilizer applications. The result is healthier people, more productive labor, cleaner water, more productive agriculture, and higher incomes.

Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.17384 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Modeling how and why aquatic vegetation removal can free rural households from poverty-disease traps (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2401.17384

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().