Growing Food, Feeding Disease: Primary Sector Specialization and Malaria Incidence in Less‐Developed Countries

Despite decades of decline in global malaria rates, trends are beginning to change; in the last few years, progress has stalled and even reversed in some places. The ever‐increasing scale of land transformation is likely a factor in contributing to this shift in global malaria progress, as recent research makes links between activities such as agriculture, timber harvest, and aquaculture to mosquito vectorial capacity. We combine these insights with political economy perspectives from sociology to understand the larger structures that facilitate the disproportionate concentration of primary sector activities in poorer countries. We predict that less‐developed countries with increasing economic specialization in the primary sector will have heightened incidence of malaria over time. We employ a two‐way fixed effect panel regression analysis of 72 malaria‐endemic countries from 2002 to 2019. Our results confirm our predictions. This study brings to light the large‐scale forces that lead some countries to specialize in economic activities that serve to enhance malaria vulnerabilities.