Global health and development communities lack sustainable, cost-effective, mutually beneficial solutions for infectious disease, food, water, and poverty challenges despite their regular interdependence worldwide1–7. Here, we show that agricultural development and fertilizer use in west Africa increase the devastating tropical disease schistosomiasis by fueling the growth of submerged aquatic vegetation that chokes out water access points and serves as habitat for snails that transmit Schistosoma parasites to >200 million people globally8–10. In a randomized control trial where we removed invasive submerged vegetation from water points, control sites had 124% higher fecal Schistosoma reinfection rates in schoolchildren and lower open water access than removal sites without any detectable long-term adverse effects of the removal on local water quality or freshwater biodiversity. The removed vegetation was as effective as traditional livestock feed but 41-179 times cheaper and converting the vegetation to compost yielded private crop production and total (public health plus private benefits) benefit-to-cost ratios as high as 4.0 and 8.8, respectively. Thus, we provide an economic incentive – with important public health co-benefits – to maintain cleared waterways and return nutrients captured in aquatic plants back to agriculture with great promise of breaking poverty-disease traps. To facilitate targeting and scaling of this intervention, we lay the foundation for using remote sensing technology to detect snail habitat. By offering a rare, profitable, win-win innovation for food and water access, poverty, infectious disease emergence, and environmental sustainability, we hope to inspire the interdisciplinary search for other planetary health solutions11 to the numerous and formidable, co-dependent global grand challenges of the 21st century.