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Focus
Top photo credit: Jonathan E. Twining
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The Worst of Both Worlds: Politics and Poverty in the Balkans Valerie J. Brown Abstract
The Balkan region has a grim history in terms of environmental health. Obedience to imperatives to develop heavy industry, factory farming, and militarization led to pollution of air, water, and food by heavy metals, radioactivity, pesticides, and fertilizers. Yet the benefits of modernization and technological sophistication, such as a higher standard of living and progressive health care, have largely eluded these nations. In this sense, they embody the worst of both worlds, suffering from both diseases of industrialization and those of rural poverty. The crumbling of communist governments has left the Balkan countries in great confusion. Reduction in public health funds, shortages of medicine and food, poor working conditions, and the consequences of poverty and war are causing death rates to rise. Respiratory health is considered by many experts to be the region's worst environmental health problem, primarily because of tobacco consumption and very poor air quality. The environmental health impacts of the last spring's bombing and refugee exodus in the former Yugoslavia and Albania are still being debated.
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