A Stitch in Haste

Late last week, President Bush, as part of his and the G8's lip service to "helping Africa" (the only real way to help Africa would be to effect regime change across the continent and establish market-based democracies throughout the region, but that won't happen anytime soon), pledged greater anti-malaria assistance:

"America will bring this anti-malaria effort to at least four more highly endemic African countries in 2007 and at least five more in 2008. In the next five years with the approval of Congress we'll spend more than $1.2 billion on this campaign," Bush said in a speech to the Hudson Institute.

This is a good excuse to revisit an earlier post of mine that tiptoed into what I have since learned is an extremely heated debate about malaria and DDT.

I blogged the following:

One eco-freak activist bureaucrat places warm fuzzy feelings ahead of science (and economics) and 50 million people die of malaria. So much for being "environmentally friendly."

The "eco-freak activist bureaucrat" was EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus back in 1971 after the Silent Spring mania. Ruckelshaus single-handedly banned DDT in the United States. For details see my link above.

To clarify, there is no global ban on DDT; it is banned in the U.S. and other countries, but not globally. To the extent that my blog implied otherwise, I apologize.

Some environmental and pro-Africa activists like to refer to this inaccurate inference (and in my case I truly do mean "inference" and not "implication" — it was not my intention to deceive my readers) as the "DDT Hoax Meme."

Advocates of the DDT Hoax Meme claim that, since DDT was not banned globally, it cannot be blamed for any increase in malaria deaths over the past 30 years. The real reason for the persistent malaria crisis isn't the lack of DDT, the Hoax Meme crowd will tell you, but rather poverty, which of course requires, not DDT, but money — especially Western money.

And as Africa recaptures headlines, and malaria recaptures human lives, the DDT Hoax Meme is gaining popularity, with chants of "DDT isn't really banned, so don't blame malaria on that" increasingly parroted by activists. Even Tyler Cowen has recently embraced the DDT Hoax Meme, linking favorably to not one but two Tim Lambert posts endorsing the Meme.

There's just one problem: The DDT Hoax Meme is itself a hoax.

There are in fact significant constraints on the use of DDT globally, including intense pressure from the developed world, NGOs and private donors against its use. Stated differently, far less DDT is being used than would be but for the pressure by non-malarial nations and environmentalist patrons not to use it.

For example:

Of the roughly 100 countries where malaria is endemic, only 23 now employ DDT to fight the disease. And that is frequently the fault of aid donors who help to finance the battle against malaria.

In the early 1990s, for example, the United States Agency for International Development stopped the governments of Bolivia and Belize from using DDT. In Madagascar, the United Nations Development Programme tried to persuade the government to replace DDT with Propoxur, a less effective pesticide. To its credit, Madagascar refused. In Mozambique, both NORAD, the Norwegian development agency, and SIDA, its Swedish counterpart, said that they could not support the use of DDT, as it was banned in their own countries. That the problems of a desperately poor malarial country in Africa might be somewhat different from those of wealthy, non-malarial Scandinavia seems not to have occurred to them.

Twenty-three out of one hundred. The term "de facto ban" would not be inappropriate.

More:

Facing pressure from environmentalists, the [South Africa] national malaria control programme abandoned DDT in favour of more expensive pyrethroid insecticides in 1996. Within three years, pyrethroid resistant A funestus mosquitoes invaded KwaZulu-Natal province, where they had not been seen since DDT spraying began in the 1940s. Malaria cases then promptly soared, from just 4,117 cases in 1995 to 27,238 cases in 1999 (or possibly 120,000 cases, judging by pharmacy records).

As for Lambert, his lengthy posts seem to boil down to the following thesis: First, since some DDT advocates, either intentionally or negligently, misled people about a global DDT ban, any other arguments they make are to be dismissed outright for lack of credibility. Second, since there are other (far more expensive) pesticides and (far less efffective) techniques such as mosquito nets, why bother to re-evaluate the use of DDT or revisit the claims made by Rachel Carson and William Ruckelshaus?

The answer is of course: 50,000,000 (or however many it really was) dead of malaria since DDT was banned limited. That's why.

As economists like to say, boundary solutions are almost never optimal. DDT won't solve the malaria crisis single-handedly. But neither will alternative pesticides or mosquito nets. The nations of Africa should be left free to use whatever combination of techniques they think best to fight this scourge, without pressure or condescension from non-malarial nations, and certainly not from environmental activists to avoid "politically incorrect" solutions.

POST SCRIPT: There's another issue regarding the use of DDT, namely the rise of resistant mosquitoes. Quite frankly, I've seen so many "statistics" from both supporters and opponents of DDT that I honestly don't know whom to believe. What I do know is that the African and other malarial nations should be left alone to make their own decisions about the pesticide, with no outside warm-fuzzy-feeling pressure from governments of non-malarial nations or from do-gooder environmentalist activists.

Hat tip to Bilious Young Fogey. Other thoughts on the DDT Hoax Hoax at Crumb Trail.

For a fresh fisking of Silent Spring, see this Spiked article. For background on the global malaria crisis, see Malaria Foundation International (funded, incidentally, by the United States government and the pharmaceutical industry, not the chemical/pesticide industry).