In the past, government planners thought that economic development and process provided many benefits and that it should be a universal goal for all societies. Social advantage of progress is defined as living in high standards with greater security, better health, and high incomes. Traditional cultures were seen as a small sacrifice for such great advantages. Tribes did not want to take part in the progress but the government pressured progress to tribes to gain their resources. The consequences were deaths of millions of tribal people, loss of land, and the right to follow their own way of life. The benefits that the tribal people were told were only illusionary and resulted in the loss of control of resources.
One of the problems was that progress, measured by the standard of living, was an ethnocentric concept that lacked cultural relevance. In tribal cultures, government welfare, health program, education, number of doctors and number of hospital beds do not actually play a part in the quality of living. Yet, the powerful governments thought that these factors are what would help islanders live the high standard of living, while the islanders knew it would not.
Instead of measuring progress from the level of standard of living, it should be questioned and established based on whether if the process would satisfy the physical and psychological needs of the population. A society with high rates of malnutrition and crime and polluting the environment to the point that threatens continuing generation of life is better described as the lower standard of living than another society with none of these problems. From the extensive research of the anthropologists, data proved that self-sufficient tribe's standard of living was lowered in the process of progression. Although those who promoted change and improvements may have meant it with good intentions, it caused the people to fall into poverty, longer labor, poor health, social disorder, overpopulation, loss control of environmental resources and destruction of traditional culture.
With growing population, there was an increasing number of illness as economy developed. Critics argued that the number may have increased due to better health monitoring as tribes became more developed, but there was a similar case in controlled data from Polynesia. Medical Research Council of New Zealand and the World Health Organization researched relationship between health status and development, which concluded that the more an islander takes the lifestyle of the west, the more they were prone to disease.
Economic success introduced imported food, a large amount of sugar and salt which caused the Islanders to become vulnerable to heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. When the preexisting order of the tribe was disturbed, even with the government's attempt to bring back order, there was a dramatic disorientation in the social and economic condition. The traditional population has adapted and grown immune to the specific diseases, but as newcomers populated, they had to spread to areas with new pathogens that they were not immune to. Detribalized individuals who moved to rural areas to seek employment. Usually, in urban centers, there were infectious diseases spread through crowding and poor sanitation. Stress, malnutrition caused health problems and were faced diet-related problems.
Tribal people had specific traditional diet they are adapted to, to meet their nutritional needs and generally don’t change unnecessarily. However, with the idea that food from powerful countries is better, they preferred to eat less nutritious exported canned food over their own nutrition rich food they can find at home, because of the outsiders’ advertisement of the high status of the products.
Change in diet happens when self-sufficient people have to now find wage labor in order to meet their needs of resources, they are unable to secure traditional diet and instead work and pay for less nutritious food. Healthy balanced diet was switched to the food with lower nutrition and increase in carbohydrate and refined sugar. As tribal people shifted diet to processed food, there was a dramatic number of malnutrition, dental problem, and other diet-related disorders. Nutrition is such a sensitive science, that even when the government tried to introduce supplementation programs to meet necessary needs the tribes deprived of, it caused another unexpected health problem.
Before, tribal people had healthy polished teeth, whereas in industrialized societies dental problems were common. Weston Price went off to different areas and studied what caused normal, healthy teeth. From areas he had studied in, showed examples of how tribal people without western adaptation had perfect teeth, and those who were adapting to the newly introduced diet had a terrible dental problem. It is also observed that the following generation had similar dental problems.Tribal people were aware of this problem and tried to prevent the new diet from making its place close to their people. However, the government managed to establish a store that made the new food more available. Deficiency in protein was on the rise as they were adapting to the new economic patterns. Protein-rich food was substituted with empty calorie food and was often forced to decrease the number of nonproductive members, like children, to meet necessary nutrition needs for the productive people. Mental illness was observed in children due to malnutrition in Africa in Latin America, due to abnormal brain development and brain damage. People may say that hospitals and medical clinic will eventually bring down the number of illness due to the new diet. However, population growth and health problems from unplanned economic changes will not likely to provide proper medical treatment.
Progress also threatens the ecosystem that tribal people kept balanced for resources. Plants had irregular cycles, involvement in the market related to resource depletion because the new economy required greater productivity than its natural limit. Rainforests in Brazil turned into a desert in 50 years. Developing nation did not bother with the environmental problem until it became a worldwide concern in the early 1970s.
Tribal people had to go through sacrificing their culture and resources from the pressure of government to progress. Changing self-efficient people into money dependent labors while their health and resources were being tragically plummeted. The government tried attempting to help reduce the damage, but in the end, nothing really helped the tribal people. The gap between the rich and poor is growing as the population continuously increases, environmental pollution, and uneven distribution of wealth. Tribal people are now in second-class citizens, discriminated by the dominant society when before, they did not have to worry about such things. Traditional cultures and social controls were sacrificed in the process of modernization, and stirred imbalance to the family living under the major economic change; all unfair disadvantages from the pressure of process, that could have been avoided if the Tribal people were just left alone.