Westwood Debate 2009-10 Jacob Loehr

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NeoLib Good...........................................................................................................................................................1 Free Market Good..................................................................................................................................................2 Free Market Key to Innovation (1/2)...................................................................................................................3 Free Market Key to Innovation (2/2)...................................................................................................................4 Free Market Key to Democracy (1/1)...................................................................................................................5 Cap Good 1NC (1/1)...............................................................................................................................................6 Cap Good Impacts (1/2).........................................................................................................................................7 Cap Good Impacts (2/2).........................................................................................................................................8 Biotech DA 1NC (1/3)............................................................................................................................................9 Biotech DA 1NC (2/3)..........................................................................................................................................10 Biotech DA 1NC (3/3)..........................................................................................................................................11 Biotech DA Link Ext. (1/1)..................................................................................................................................12 Biotech DA Impact Ext. (1/2)..............................................................................................................................13 Biotech DA Impact Ext. (2/2)..............................................................................................................................14 A/T Biotech Bad (1/2)..........................................................................................................................................15 A/T Biotech Bad (1/2)..........................................................................................................................................16

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***Free Market Good***

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***Free Market Key to Innovation (1/2)***

1. Free Market principles are key to innovation.
Timothy Sandefur 2008 (Lead attorney in the Economic Liberty Project at the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics Innovation http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Innovation.html 2008) There are two common sayings about innovation. The first is that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. In a seminal work on innovation, economist Jacob Schmookler gave credence to this view when he compared the rates at which patents were issued with the amount of investment in new technologies. Schmookler concluded that innovation is driven almost exclusively by economic demand: people engage in innovation out of a belief that the economic returns will be greater than its costs.19 But some economists criticize his approach as overly simplistic, particularly for ignoring factors independent of economics that heavily influence how innovation happens.20 Mere demand for a new product or service is not enough to bring an innovation about. The other common saying holds that necessity is the mother of invention. But the reality is that leisure is the mother of innovation. In economic terms, surplus capital provides the necessary time and startup costs for implementing a new idea (see investment).21 Because a new product or service, or even a new social more, might not succeed, a potential innovator must assemble the resources to permit him to begin implementation without a guaranteed return on the investment. The ability to assemble and invest capital is therefore indispensable for innovation of any sort, and capital is available only when some people have enough wealth to permit innovators to spend their time thinking creatively.

2. Innovation is key to solving problems, which is key to cure disease, starvation and to disrupt normal social order.
Timothy Sandefur 2008 (Lead attorney in the Economic Liberty Project at the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California. The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics Innovation http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Innovation.html 2008) Defenders of innovation, whom Virginia Postrel calls dynamists,16 argue that innovation is essential for solving problems that impose significant social and personal costs. For example, humans lived with disease and starvation for most of recorded history, but technological advancement has led to cures for many of these diseases and improved the production of food, with beneficial consequences for a great many people. The introduction of labor-saving technology was essential to this process even though it initially caused disruption by costing the jobs of manual laborers. Moreover, some defenders of innovation point out that some of what opponents see as costs of innovation are in reality benefits . C. P. Snow, for example, argues in The Two Cultures that opponents of innovation tend to overlook the suffering of disenfranchised groups, or even to romanticize it. Postrel criticizes Leon Kasss views on medical science on these grounds, arguing that it is morally wrong to regard suffering and illness as essential parts of human experience that ought to be preserved.17 By contrast, defenders of innovation often see it as beneficial for innovation to disrupt social orders they see as unjust; in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, for example, Victor Hugo dramatizes the importance of the printing press in disrupting the unjust social order of the middle ages.18 As with social disruption, dynamists regard the economic disruption caused by innovation as a benefit to the consumer and as an important step in the pursuit of economic efficiency. In short, dynamists tend to favor innovation out of a humanistic concern for the survival and flourishing of individuals.

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***Free Market Key to Innovation (2/2)***

3. AIDS puts the world at risk for global extinction; innovation is key for the search for a cure.
Anton La Guardia 2000 (Writer for the Telegraph UK, July 10 2000 African president warns of extinction from Aids) THE president of Botswana issued a warning yesterday that his country faced catastrophe because of the relentless spread of Aids through Africa. President Festus Mogae said: "We really are in a national crisis. We are threatened with extinction. People are dying in chillingly high numbers. We are losing the best of young people. It is a crisis of the first magnitude ." As thousands of health workers and activists gathered in Durban, South Africa, last night for the world's 13th conference on Aids, figures showed that the disease is threatening to devastate the most economically active populations in many countries. Scientists say that the scale of the plague is comparable to the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century. Hundreds of Aids activists marched through Durban demanding that drug companies make anti-Aids drugs affordable in poor countries. They also urged Western governments to write off more third world debt to allow increased spending to try to contain the pandemic. In Botswana, one of the worst hit countries in southern Africa, more than a third of adults is infected with HIV . An American study estimates that life expectancy there, which reached 62.5 in 1990, could fall by more than half. A projection by the United Nations' joint HIV-Aids programme, Unaids, shows that two-thirds of boys aged 15 in Botswana today will die of Aids-related illnesses. Without success in restraining the infection, the death figure could rise to nearly 90 per cent. America has declared Aids to be a threat to its national security as it threatens to roll back decades of development and cause social breakdown in many countries. World-wide, more than 34 million people were infected with HIV at the end of last year, more than two-thirds of them in sub-Saharan Africa. After emerging in central and east Africa, Aids is now most intense in the south of the continent. In seven countries, all of them in southern Africa, one in five adults is infected with HIV.

4. Poverty increases the likelihood of terrorist conflicts.

Carlos Lozada, associate editor at Foreign Policy Magazine, 05/20 05, Does Poverty Cause Terrorism?, http://www.nber.org/cgibin/printit?uri=/digest/may05/w10859.html After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, politicians and policy experts drew a quick and intuitive line between terrorism and poverty. Much of the existing academic literature on conflict suggested that poverty increased the likelihood of political coups and civil war, so conflating terrorism with poor economic conditions seemed logical. Indeed, just a few weeks following 9/11, then U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick spoke out on the need to liberalize international trade -and thus reduce poverty -- as a means to fight terrorism.

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***Free Market Key to Democracy (1/1)***

1. Free market is key to preventing poverty and maintaining freedom
Milton and Rose Friedman, Nobel laureate economist, Newsweek columnist and presidential adviser, 1980, Free To Choose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p.55 The facts themselves are very different. Wherever we find any large element of individual freedom, some measure of progress in the material comforts at the disposal of ordinary citizens, and widespread hope of further progress in the future, there we also find that economic activity is organized mainly through the free market . Wherever the state undertakes to control in detail central economic planning reigns, there ordinary citizens are in political fetters, have a low standard of living, and have little power to control their own destiny. The state may prosper and produces impressive monuments. Privileged classes may enjoy a full measure of material comforts. But the ordinary citizens are instruments to be used for the states purposes, receiving no more than necessary to keep them docile and reasonably productive . Regulations make long term growth impossible and risk authoritarianism Milton and Rose Friedman, Nobel laureate economist, Newsweek columnist and presidential adviser, 1980, Free To Choose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p.57 The intellectual apologists for centralized economic planning sang the praises of Maos China until Maos successors trumpeted Chinas backwardness and bemoaned the lack of progress during the past twenty-five years. Part of their design to modernize the country is to let prices and markets play a larger role. These tactics may produce sizable gains from the countrys present low economic level-as they did in Yugoslavia. However, the gains will be severely limited so long as the political control over economic activity remains tight and private property is limited. Moreover, letting the genie of private initiative out of the bottle even to this limited extend will give rise to political problems that, sooner or later, are likely to produce a reaction toward greater authoritarianism. The opposite outcome, the collapse of communism and its replacement by a market system, seems far less likely, though as incurable optimists, we do not rule it out completely. Similarly, once the aged Marshal Tito dies, Yugoslavia will experience political instability that may produce a reaction toward greater authoritarianism or, far less likely, a collapse of existing collectivist arrangements.

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***Cap Good 1NC (1/1)***

1. Neo-Liberalism IS Capitalism
Hans Christian Andersen 2005 (Writer for Political Affairs Magazine, Neo-Liberalism Is Capitalism And Imperialism of Today) Neo-liberalism is inseparable from globalization and from the capitalism of today. It is a combination of extreme exploitation, some times in new forms; it is a combination of domestic political, economic and ideological pressures, backed up by international pressure and military force if necessary. Globalization is generally presented as an inescapable process (nearly as a natural phenomenon) leading to greater competition (which is regarded as a positive phenomenon), welfare improvements and the spread of democracy around the world. But globalization is the international face of neo-liberalism . A worldwide strategy of accumulation of capital in an alliance between the ruling class of the United States of America and other centres of the developed capitalist world and locally dominant capitalist groups. The neo-liberalists are talking about 'more market and less state'. But in reality neo-liberalism is a systematic exploitation of the governments and the peoples in especially the poorer and the poorest countries in the narrow interests of finance capital and the trans-national companies.

2. Capitalism = human rights

Kim,7 (Anothony B, researches international economic issues with a focus on economic freedom and free trade at The Heritage Foundation, The Heritage Foundation: Economic Freedom and Human Rights, http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx? ARTID=28311) Economic freedom is essentially about ensuring human rights. Strengthening and expanding it guarantees an individual's natural right to achieve his or her goals and then own the value of what they create . Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate economist who has made considerable contributions to development economics, once noted that "Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity for exercising their reasoned legacy."[2] People crave liberation from poverty, and they hunger for the dignity of free will. By reducing barriers to these fundamental human rights, forces of economic freedom create a framework in which people fulfill their dreams of success. In other words, the greater the economic freedom in a nation, the easier for its people to work, save, consume, and ultimately live their lives in dignity and peace. This relationship is well documented in the Index of Economic Freedom, published annually by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal, which measures economic freedom around the globe. The Index identifies strong synergies among the 10 key ingredients of economic freedom, which include, among others, openness to the world, limited government intervention, and strong rule of law. The empirical findings of the Index confirm that greater economic freedom empowers people and improves quality of life by spreading opportunities within a country and around the world. As Chart 1 clearly demonstrates, there is a robust relationship between economic freedom and prosperity. People in countries with either "free" or "mostly free" economies enjoy a much higher standard of living than people in countries with "mostly unfree" or "repressed" economies.[3] Citizens in nations that are built on greater economic freedom enjoy greater access to ideas and resources, which are the forces that let "all of us exchange, interact and participate" [4] in an increasingly interconnected world. Access, another form of freedom that has practical promise, is an important transmitting mechanism that allows improvements in human development and fosters better democratic participation. A new cross-country study, recently commissioned and published by the FedEx Corporation, measures the level of access that a nation's people, organizations, and government enjoy in comparison to the world and to other countries. The study looks into trade, transport, telecommunication, news, media, and information services in 75 countries

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***Cap Good Impacts (1/2)***

1. Environment A. Cap is key to the environment mindset shifting toward environmental ethics
Deavenport, CEO of Eastman Chemical Company, 98 Earnie. "Economic Growth Can Protect Global Resources." Opposing Viewpoints: Global Resources. Ed. Charles P. Cozic. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Simply put, the key to sustainable development is cost-effective risk management , and that is what I want to talk about today. But first, let me explain the principle of cost-effective risk management. The role of risk and how to manage risk are the focal points in the current struggle to reform and remake the environmental regulatory framework in the United States. The U.S. chemical industry championed the use of risk management and its key elements of risk assessment, risk prioritization, costbenefit analysis, and peer review of scientific data as a way of improving the U.S. environment and increasing its standard of living through a strong economy. We view the principle of risk management as a common sense process for allocating scarce financial, human, and natural resources to activities that can provide the most benefit at the least cost to society. We are also firm in our belief that we have a moral obligation to future generations to protect and use our limited resources wisely. Without such an obligation, the goal of sustainable development cannot be achieved. Although we today cannot define the needs of tomorrow's generations, we can work together to make certain that future generations are not limited in their choices when it comes their time to forge their own destiny. Choices leading to a healthy environment and social equity will be theirs for the making if our generation will commit to the principle of cost-effective risk management and obligate itself to a strong world economy. A Change in Attitude And we are making great progress. For more than 25 years now, industries worldwide have been going through a generational change in attitude toward the environment. Environmental ethics are now an integral part of our business strategies, and we have developed cleaner, energy-efficient processes that manufacture products that are healthier, safer, and more environmentally responsible. In the U.S., we have now reached the point with this shift in attitude that leading-edge environmental technology no longer resides with government, but resides now with the business community. Out of this change is emerging a new and modem environmental model. This new model is replacing the old U.S. "command and control" model because society is recognizing that industry, with its advanced technologies, can provide a cleaner environment at a lower cost than government can provide. Unlike the command and control model, this new model is based on the fact that, when individual consumers are provided with truthful and accurate information in an open and free marketplace, they will make an educated and moral choice that will simultaneously lead to economic prosperity, environmental improvement, and social equity. This emerging model is also based on the principles of risk management that, when applied in a free market, lead to economic efficiencies, which in turn lead to an improved environment and an ever increasing standard of living. Studies show that as a nation becomes more economically efficient through industrial specialization and open trade, per capita income increases. And as personal income increases, environmental quality and social well-being improve. According to the World Bank, an annual per capita income of $5,000 is the threshold at which a society will choose to make environmental improvements, and usually does.

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***Cap Good Impacts (2/2)***

B. Cap helps the environment the market creates systems to lower pollution.
Payne, Asst. Prof of Political Science @ University of Louisville, 95 Rodger A. Payne. (Assistant professor of political science at the University of Louisville. He is director of the Grawemeyer Award in Ideas Improving World Order and a past recipient of a Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in International Peace and Security.) Freedom and the Environment. National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University Press. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_democracy/v006/6.3payne.html#authbio. 5) Open markets. All democracies have had market-based economic systems; it therefore seems reasonable to consider any potential [End Page 48] advantages of markets when assessing the "green" characteristics of democracies. Such consideration seems particularly apposite when one recalls that many of the ardent environmentalist critics of democracy named earlier have cited its emphasis on private property and open markets as a grave shortcoming. In fact, however, capitalism is not the cause of environmental degradation. After all, nonmarket economies have exploited the environment quite ruthlessly, and mounting evidence indicates that some businesses in open economies are finding strong incentives to protect the environment. Additionally, democratic governments are increasingly utilizing market incentives to address ecological problems . The key question is how to account for the diffused environmental costs ("externalities") of economic activity. To begin with, green consumerism can reshape corporate conduct by offering incentives for environmentally sound business practices. An increasing number of consumers are "voting with their pocketbooks" and thereby successfully urging business to take responsibility for reducing waste and pollution. For example, McDonald's, responding in part to schoolchildren mailing styrofoam sandwich containers to its executives , revamped its product packaging and modified its "waste stream" in conjunction with recommendations offered by an environmental organization. Germany and other states have developed standardized labeling symbols so that consumers can identify and purchase products that are less harmful to the environment. Nonetheless, the future influence of green consumerism is at best unknown, and could be limited by a variety of informational complexities. 15 Much more importantly, the marketing of environmental goods and services is becoming a major industry, and some enterprises are seeing the economic advantages of reducing waste and increasing operational efficiency. Corporations can profit from selling preventive and cleanup technologies and information to other businesses. This is already a large and growing source of world trade. For instance, while West European nations, Japan, and the United States together traded about $20 billion worth of pollution-control devices in 1990, just two years later Germany alone was trading more than that amount. Domestic environmental transactions offer an even larger market. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) calculates that its member states individually spend between 0.8 and 1.5 percent of GDP on public and private pollution abatement and control. The overall total approached $250 billion in 1992, and could shoot up by half again by 1997. 16

C. Warming will cause mass starvation.

AFP, November 22, 7 (p. lexis) An agrarian crisis is brewing because of climate change that could jeopardise global food supplies and increase the risk of hunger for a billion poorest of the poor, scientists warned Thursday. South Asia and Africa would be hardest hit by the crisis, which would shift the world's priorities away from boosting food output year after year to bolstering the resilience of crops to cope with warm weather, they said. Rice, the staple for billions of people, is most vulnerable to global warming, said Dyno Keatinge, deputy director general of research at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. "It is the world's most consumed crop and it makes everything else pale in comparison," Keatinge told reporters in Hyderabad, southern India, where the research institute has organised a conference on the impact of climate change on farming. "We have the opportunity to grow other crops that are more resistant to higher temperatures such as sorgum and millet, but changing people's food habits is very difficult, he said. The rice yield could fall "very quickly in a warmer world" unless researchers find alternative varieties or ways to shift the time of rice flowering, he added, demanding governments allocate more money to research. Environmentalists and agricultural scientists are mounting pressure on governments to act quickly to stem carbon emissions responsible for climate change, ahead of next month's global summit in Bali, Indonesia. They also want bigger budgets to combat damage already done and cope with risks into the future. According to the crop research institute, one billion of the world's poorest are vulnerable to the impact of climate change on agriculture -- from desertification and land degradation to loss of biodiversity and water scarcity. India accounts for about 26 percent of this population, China more than 16 percent, with other Asian countries making up 18 percent and sub-Saharan Africa the remainder. "Climate change will generally reduce production potential and increase the risk of hunger," said Martin Parry, co-chair of the InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore. "Where crops are grown near their maximum temperature tolerance and where dry land, non-irrigated agriculture predominates, the challenge of climate change could be overwhelming, especially on subsistence farmers," he said.

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***Biotech DA Link Ext. (1/1)***

Manufacturing scarcity and naturalizing the market are key to biotech development
Birch, Research Fellow working for the Center for Public Policy for Regions, Neoliberalism studies, 2006
(Kean, University of Glasgow, Journal of Genomics, Society and Policy, Vol. 2, No. 3, The Neoliberal Underpinnings of the Bioeconomy: the Ideological Discourse and Practices of Economic Competitiveness, http://74.125.93.132/search? q=cache:OLzYKo7NXKMJ:www.hss.ed.ac.uk/genomics/vol2no3/documents/KBGSPVol2No32006.pdf+bioeconomy+government+intervention&cd=6&hl=en&ct=cln k&gl=us&client=firefox-a, RG)

scarcity produces markets and that such scarcity has to be manufactured where it does not already exist. If we accept Polanyis argument on this point then we can show that the practice of the bioeconomy produces scarcity through the demarcation of aspects of the world (eg, biology, genetics) as economic domains that can be incorporated into existing markets or as new markets perhaps with unique characteristics. However, this manufacture of scarcity has to be legitimated in terms of both social value (ie, societal relations) and market value (ie, economic calculation) in a continual process that naturalises both the current and previous value status.86 In this sense the policy discourse around the competitiveness of the bioeconomy exists to naturalise the past investment of energy and resources into new genetics and the continuing investment that is being made . In this case the naturalisation of the past investment naturalises the present investment, which, in turn, naturalises the positing of future potential.87 In which case, what are the implications of these discourses and practices for the bioeconomy and, are they detrimental to technoscientific
The policy decisions and their repercussions above illustrate the basis for the theoretical claim that development?

Government control and regulation kills biotech innovationincreases costs, creates monopolies
NCPA, National Center for Policy Analysis, 2004 (Regulation promotes biotech monopolies, says experts, references Who Created This Monster?, Henry I. Miller, June 10, http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=151, RG) Many of biotech's travails can be traced back to two decades of unwise strategic decisions by individual companies and by the trade association itself -- the Biotechnology Industry Organization. When researchers and producers of biotech products asked the government to regulate them back in the 1980s, and government agencies were only happy to oblige. The industry pushed for a regulatory framework to ostensibly placate biotech opponents and consumers leery of biotech foods, says Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko. However, the industry has admitted that excessive regulation keeps out competitors. More than that, it has created an unintended domino effect for the industry: Heavy U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policies have made trials on gene-spliced organisms 10 to 20 times more expensive than on plants modified with more conventional techniques. Excessive regulation has created the framework for various "pseudo-crises" that scare consumers and rile anti-biotech activists, such as the story of Monarch butterflies allegedly killed by pollen from gene-spliced plants . Farmers have become reluctant to plant gene-spliced crops and food processors are reluctant to use them. Indeed, the biotech giant Monsanto is abandoning plans to introduced gene-spliced canola into Australia, due to concerns by consumers and environmental activists. Mendocino County, Calif., voters have approved a referendum that prohibits the sale of gene-spliced wheat.

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***Biotech Good Impact Ext. (1/2)***

1. A. Biotech solves AIDs
US Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics Career Guide to Industries: Pharmaceutical and medical Manufacturing http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs009.htm Dec 20 2005 The pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing industry has produced a variety of medicinal and other health-related products undreamed of by even the most imaginative apothecaries of the past. These drugs save the lives of millions of people from various diseases and permit many ill people to lead normal lives. Thousands of medications are available today for diagnostic, preventive, and therapeutic uses. In addition to aiding in the treatment of infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, influenza, and sexually transmitted diseases, these medicines also help prevent and treat cardiovascular disease, asthma, diabetes, hepatitis, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. For example, antinausea drugs help cancer patients endure chemotherapy; clot-buster drugs help stroke patients avoid brain damage; and psychoactive drugs reduce the severity of mental illness for many people. Antibiotics and vaccines have virtually wiped out such diseases as diphtheria, syphilis, and whooping cough. Discoveries in veterinary drugs have controlled various diseases, some of which are transmissible to humans. Advances in biotechnology and information technology are transforming drug discovery and development. Within biotechnology, scientists have learned a great deal about human genes, but the real work translating that knowledge into viable new drugshas only recently begun. So far, millions of people have benefited from medicines and vaccines developed through biotechnology, and several hundred new biotechnologically-derived medicines are currently in the pipeline. These new medicines, all of which are in human clinical trials or awaiting FDA approval, include drugs for cancer, infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, neurologic disorders, and HIV/AIDS and related conditions. Many new drugs are expected to be developed in the coming years. Advances in technology and the knowledge of how cells work will allow pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing makers to become more efficient in the drug discovery process. New technology allows life scientists to test millions of drug candidates far more rapidly than in the past. Other new technology, such as regenerative therapy using stem cell research, also will allow the natural healing process to work faster, or to enable the regrowth of missing or damaged tissue. There is a direct relationship between gene discovery and identification of new drugsthe more genes identified, the more paths available for drug discovery. Discovery of new genes also can lead to new diagnostics for the early detection of disease. Among other uses, new genetic technology is being explored to develop vaccines to prevent or treat diseases that have eluded traditional vaccines, such as AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and cervical cancer.

B. Extinction
Muchiri 2000 [Michaei Kibaara Staff Member at Ministry of Education in Nairobi, Will Annan finally put out Africas fires? Jakarta Post, March 6, LN] The executive director of TJNAIDS, Peter Pint, estimated that Africa would annually need between $1 billion to $ 3 billion to combat the disease, but currently receives only $160 million a year in official assistance. World Bank President James Wolfensohn lamented that Africa was losing teachers faster than they could be replaced, and that AIDS was now more effective than war in destabilizing African counties. Statistics show that AIDS is the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing people killed in warfare. In 1998, 200,000 people died from armed conflicts compared to 2.2 million from AIDS. Some 33.6 million people have HIV around the world, 70 percent of them in Africa, thereby robbing countries of their most productive members and decimating entire villages. About 13 million of the 16 million people who have died of AIDS are in Africa, according to the UN. What barometer is used to proclaim a holocaust if this number is not a sure measure? There is no doubt that AIDS is the most serious threat to humankind, more serious than hurricanes, earthquakes, economic crises, capital crashes or floods. It has no cure yet. We are watching a whole continent degenerate into ghostly skeletons that finally succumb to a most excruciating, dehumanizing death. Gore said that his new initiative, if approved by the U.S. Congress, would bring U.S. contributions to fighting AIDS and other infectious diseases to $ 325 million. Does this mean that the UN Security Council and the U.S. in particular have at last decided to remember Africa? Suddenly, AIDS seen as threat to world peace, and Gore would ask the congress to set up millions of dollars on this case. The hope is that Gore does not intend to make political capital out of this by painting the usually disagreeable Republican-controlled Congress as the bad guy and hope the buck stops on the whole of current and future U.S. governments conscience. Maybe there is nothing left to salvage in Africa after all and this talk is about the African-American vote in Novembers U.S. presidential vote. Although the UN and the Security Council cannot solve all African problems, the AIDS challenge is a fundamental one in that it threatens to wipe out man. The challenge is not one of a single continent alone because Africa cannot be quarantined. The trouble is that AIDS has no cure -- and thus even the West has stakes in the AIDS challenge. Once sub-Saharan Africa is wiped-out, it shall not be long before another continent is on the brink of extinction. Sure as death, Africas time has run out, signaling the beginning of the end of the black race and maybe human race.

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***Biotech Good Impact Ext. (2/2)***

2. A. Biotech solves bioterror
Maurer 7 Stephen M. Maurer, J.D. Director of the Goldman School Project at the University of California, Berkeley on Information Technology and Homeland Security LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION BIOSHIELD HTTP://LIFEBOAT.COM/EX/BIO.SHIELD 2007 The new realities of terrorism and suicide bombers pull us one step further. How would we react to the devastation caused by a virus or bacterium or other pathogen unleashed not by the forces of nature, but intentionally by man? No intelligence agency, no matter how astute, and no military, no matter how powerful and dedicated, can assure that a small terrorist group using readily available equipment in a small and apparently innocuous setting cannot mount a first-order biological attack. With the rapid advancements in technology, we are rapidly moving from having to worry about state-based biological programs to smaller terrorist-based biological programs. It's possible today to synthesize virulent pathogens from scratch, or to engineer and manufacture prions that, introduced undetectably over time into a nation's food supply, would after a long delay afflict millions with a terrible and often fatal disease. It's a new world. Though not as initially dramatic as a nuclear blast, biological warfare is potentially far more destructive than the kind of nuclear attack feasible at the operational level of the terrorist. And biological war is itself distressingly easy to wage. It would be more cost effective if those funding the BioShield set specific goals and gave prize money to the people/organizations that accomplished them than simply funding research without such goals. We propose that we take the measure of this threat and make preparations today to engage it with the force and knowledge adequate to throw it back wherever and however it may strike. It is time to accelerate the development of antiviral and antibacterial technology for the human population. The way to combat this serious and ever-growing threat is to develop broad tools to destroy viruses and bacteria. We have tools such as those based on RNA interference that can block gene expression. We can now sequence the genes of a new virus in a matter of days, so our goal is within reach! We call for the creation of new technologies and the enhancement of existing technologies to increase our abilities to detect, identify, and model any emerging or newly identified infective agent, present or future, natural or otherwise we need to accelerate the expansion of our capacity to engineer vaccines for immunization, and explore the feasibility of other medicinals to cure or circumvent infections, and to manufacture, distribute, and administer what we need in a timely and effective manner that protects us all from the threat of bioengineered malevolent viruses and microbial organisms. Time is running out.

B. The impact to bioterrorism is extinction

Steinbruner 98 John D. Steinbruner, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution, Biological Weapons: A Plague Upon All Houses, FOREIGN POLICY n. 109, Winter 1997/1998, pp. 85-96, ASP. Although human pathogens are often lumped with nuclear explosives and lethal chemicals as potential weapons of mass destruction, there is an obvious, fundamentally important difference: Pathogens are alive, weapons are not. Nuclear and chemical weapons do not reproduce themselves and do not independently engage in adaptive behavior; pathogens do both of these things. That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit. Nobody really knows how serious a possibility this might be, since there is no way to measure it reliably. Before the first atomic device was tested, there was genuine concern that such an explosion could ignite the Earth's atmosphere. American physicists were able to provide a credible calculation that proved the contrary. It would be comparably important to establish that no conceivable pathogen could kill a substantial portion of the entire human population, but current scientific knowledge simply cannot support such a determination. If anything, the balance of uncertain judgment would probably have to lean the other way.

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1. Biotech is inevitableChina and India
McConnell 07 - USINFO Staff Writer [Kathryn McConnell, Asia Seen as Next Focus of Agricultural Biotech Production: India, China, Vietnam take the lead in research,
expert says, 16 February 2007, pg. http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2007&m=February&x=20070216144428AKllennoCcM6.266421e-02]edlee

Washington -- The next decade of research in crops improved by biotechnology will include a major role for the rapidly increasing number of projects in Asia, according to the head of a leading agricultural research institute. Countries in Asia increasingly are investing in agricultural biotechnology research aimed at helping them meet their growing needs for food, feed, fiber and fuel, said Clive James, chairman of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).ISAAA is a nonprofit international network based at Cornell University in New York with centers in the Philippines and Kenya. Biotech crops, also known as genetically modified crops, increasingly are being grown in and approved for import by Asian countries, James said in a recent interview with USINFO. The researcher, recently back from visiting several countries in Asia, said acceptance is strong among farmers in such countries as India, China, Pakistan, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and the Philippines where traditional crops often are destroyed by insects or harsh environmental conditions. These farmers stand to benefit financially from increased harvests due to genetic improvements that make certain crops resistant to insects and because such crops need fewer applications of insecticides, James said. "The development of biotechnology will be a major development for all of agriculture" as scientists look for ways to improve a variety of crops that also effectively will be able to counter soil erosion and conserve moisture, James said. Plants with genes conferring some degree of drought tolerance, which are expected to become available in approximately 2010 or 2011, will be particularly important for developing countries as drought is the most prevalent and important constraint to increased crop productivity worldwide, he said. India is emerging as a key biotech leader in Asia, surpassing China for the first time in the number of hectares planted with biotech seed, James said. In 2006, India tripled from the previous year the area it planted in biotech cotton, its first commercialized biotech crop. India now has a total of 3.8 million biotech hectares while China has 3.5 million such hectares. The other countries in the top eight in of terms of number of hectares devoted to growing biotech crops are: the United States (54.6 million hectares), Argentina (18 million), Brazil (11.5 million), Canada (6.1 million), Paraguay (2 million) and South Africa (1.4 million), according to an ISAAA report on the global status of biotech crops released in January. After cotton the next main crop to be commercialized in Asia likely will be "golden rice" -- rice enhanced with vitamin A, which is important for vision and the respiratory, urinary and intestinal tracts, James said. Vitamin A deficiency can lead to children becoming prematurely blind. China, the largest investor in Asia in biotech research, is expected to spend $200 million on biotech in 2007. "China has made a clear decision to invest in biotech because it doesn't want to be dependent on other countries for food, fiber or fuel," James said.

2. But US Key A. US spillover

Taylor 2 Taylor, Senior Fellow and Director of RFFs Center for Risk Management, 02 (Michael R., Resources for the Future, A nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank located in Washington, DC that conducts independent research - rooted primarily in economics and other social, American Patent Policy, Biotechnology, and African Agriculture http://www.rff.org/rff/Documents/RFF-RPTPatent-Exec-Sum.pdf) The U.S. government's stances on biotechnology and patents invite such an inquiry. U.S.-based companies and researchers generate much of the world's innovation in plant biotechnology. The U.S. government is a strong advocate of developing biotechnology for the needs of not only U.S. farmers, but also farmers in developing countries. 10 The U.S. patent system has enthusiastically embraced plant biotechnology by issuing thousands of patents, and the United States generally champions strong patent protection worldwide, favoring international adherence to the stringent U.S. model. It is thus important to explore how U.S. patent policy might be changed to harmonize U.S. positions on patents, biotechnology, and the need for progress in developing-country agriculture, thereby enhancing both food security [*325] of developing countries and broad U.S. foreign policy interests. It is particularly important and timely to address these questions as the "development round" of trade negotiations launched by the World Trade Organization ("WTO") at Doha unfolds with heavy emphasis on agriculture, and as the international debate heats up about the role of intellectual property in development. 11

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B. Only US biotech solves--industry
Kowalski 2 Kowalski JD at University of California at Davis 02 (Tara Kowalski, International Patent Rights and Biotechnology: Should the United States Promote Technology Transfer to Developing Countries?, Loyola of Los Angeles International & Comparative Law Review, Winter 2002, 25 Loy. L.A. Int'l & Comp. L. Rev. 41) Developing countries currently lack sufficient access to biotechnology in two respects. First, they do not have an adequate quantity of biotechnology to address their needs. Second, developed countries, which conduct most biotechnology research and development (R&D), create products for developed markets. Therefore, most current biotechnology does not address problems that are unique to developing countries. The United States is currently the world leader in both the production and consumption of biotechnology. 24 U.S. international patent filings demonstrate its dominance in the area of biotechnology R&D. 25 In the first half of the 1990s, the United States held priority of 63% of international biotechnology patents and 59% of the most highly cited biotechnology inventions. 26 Federal grants and private industry are the two primary sources of funding for biotechnology R&D in the United States. The United States provides more funding for biotechnology R&D than any other government in the world.