Development a bitter pill

Although not specifically about Cambodia, this AFP story based on research by the Asian Development Bank underscores the price of development. With new roads and jobs and prosperity comes drugs and prostitution and crime.

Massive Asian Development Bank lending to the region’s transport sector may be helping drive the spread of AIDS across the world’s most populous continent, the bank said in a study released Thursday.

It cited 16 percent prevalence rates of the HIV virus that causes AIDS along one particular transport route in southern India, compared with less than one percent nationwide.

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The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said that construction, especially large infrastructure projects, draws a large influx of men into rural areas, and along with attracting cash, boosts the demand for sex.

Commercial sex work and the trafficking of drugs and humans, particularly women and girls for sex work, also follow major construction projects and transport routes, the study said.

“Better roads bring many benefits but also increase risks through greater mobility and connectivity,” the ADB said.

“Mobile people, especially ‘mobile men with money’ are more likely to engage in risk behaviours such as unprotected sex with casual partners and sex workers, and drug use,” the Manila-based lender said.

Cambodia is booming. And along with that prosperity is surely to come a stack of social problems the country is ill-equipped to deal with.