SDI 2007 5 Week

1 Agriculture Neg

Agriculture Neg SDI Strategy Forum

Strategy Sheet (1/2) ...................................................................................................................................................3 Strategy Sheet (2/2) ...................................................................................................................................................4 Their 1AC (1/3) .........................................................................................................................................................5 Their 1AC (2/3) .........................................................................................................................................................6 Their 1AC (3/3) .........................................................................................................................................................7

Topicality ....................................................................................................................................... 8
T increase PHA isnt to make a new org. ...............................................................................................................9 T - Marketing isnt PHA..........................................................................................................................................10

Green Revolution CP.................................................................................................................. 11

Green Revolution CP 1NC (1/3)..............................................................................................................................12 Green Revolution CP 1NC (2/3)..............................................................................................................................13 Green Revolution 1NC (3/3) ...................................................................................................................................14 More Solvency to Green Revolution CP .................................................................................................................15 Green Revolution CP: No link to China heg DA.....................................................................................................16

Biotech Tradeoff DA................................................................................................................... 17

Biotech tradeoff 1NC (1/2)......................................................................................................................................18 Biotech Tradeoff DA 1NC (2/2)..............................................................................................................................19 Biotech DA - Small farmers oppose GM.................................................................................................................20 Biotech key..............................................................................................................................................................21 Biotech key..............................................................................................................................................................22 Biotech DA - Environment Impact..........................................................................................................................23 Biotech DA - Hunger Impact...................................................................................................................................24

Non US actor CPs........................................................................................................................ 25

Canada CP 1NC (1/1) ..............................................................................................................................................26 EU CP 1NC (1/1).....................................................................................................................................................27 WHO CP 1NC (1/1) ................................................................................................................................................28 China CP 1NC (1/2) ................................................................................................................................................29 China CP 1NC (2/2) ................................................................................................................................................30

On Case arguments..................................................................................................................... 31
No inherency ...........................................................................................................................................................32 Adv Takeout: Poverty..............................................................................................................................................33 Adv. Takeout: Poverty.............................................................................................................................................34 Adv Takeout: Environment .....................................................................................................................................35 Adv takeout: Environment.......................................................................................................................................36 Adv. Takeout: all other impacts...............................................................................................................................37 Solvency takeouts ....................................................................................................................................................38 USAID cant solve...................................................................................................................................................39 USAID cant solve...................................................................................................................................................40 Plan would not be successful...................................................................................................................................41 Aid for agriculture fails ...........................................................................................................................................42 Small farms dont solve ...........................................................................................................................................43 Small scale farming not sustainable.........................................................................................................................44 Cant solve farms too scattered.............................................................................................................................45 Large farms key .......................................................................................................................................................46 Large farms key .......................................................................................................................................................47 Small farms bad Bird flu.......................................................................................................................................48

SDI 2007 5 Week

2 Agriculture Neg

Disad Links .................................................................................................................................. 49

Spending DA link ....................................................................................................................................................50 PTIX links Plan popular .......................................................................................................................................51 PTIX links - Plan not popular..................................................................................................................................52 China Heg DA 1NC (1/4) ........................................................................................................................................53 China Heg DA 1NC (2/4) ........................................................................................................................................54 China Heg DA 1NC (3/4) ........................................................................................................................................55 China Heg DA 1NC (4/4) ........................................................................................................................................56 China DA Uniqueness .............................................................................................................................................57

Famine K 1NC............................................................................................................................. 58
Famine K 1NC (1/4) ................................................................................................................................................59 Famine K 1NC (2/4) ................................................................................................................................................60 Famine K 1NC (3/4) ................................................................................................................................................61 Famine K 1NC (4/4) ................................................................................................................................................62

SDI 2007 5 Week

3 Agriculture Neg

Strategy Sheet (1/2)

Probable advantages
Poverty environment Other !s

Plan texts
The United States federal government should create a marketing organization aimed at improving the sustainability of small farms in Sub-Saharan Africa to operate as part of USAID.

Tips:
This aff would probably be run in conjunction with another aff, so be prepared to debate about those too. For the strats, I think the china CP strat is the best. The solvency cards for china arent too bad, and the net benefit would be the china heg DA. For their US key warrants in the 1AC: Their Tupy and Preble 05 card (which is a US key card) does not say that solvency is impossible without the US. Instead, the card actually explains how the USs agriculture policies are what hinder itself from solving. Another actor would be able to solve. And read cards about how USAID would not be able to solve. For the different actor CPs, the evidence for Canada and China are the best. The T arguments are not that good; you shouldnt ever try to win on them. Also, I couldnt find a really specific link to the famine K. The one in the frontline is just a generic one, but I think that its relevant enough to the aff case. Also, the alternative to it is just reject.

SDI 2007 5 Week

4 Agriculture Neg

Strategy Sheet (2/2)

Different strategies you could use:
STRAT 1 Case, DA, DA On case Spending DA China DA the whole frontline isnt included in this, but its in the china heg DA file. Right now, you should use the generic links. I couldnt find a specific enough link. Strat 2 Case, CP, DA On case advantage, solvency takeouts US fund Green Revolution CP China heg DA Strat 3 Case, CP, DA On case advantage, solvency takeouts Green Revolution CP, no funding Spending DA or china heg DA Strat 4 Case, CP, DA On case advantage, solvency takeouts China actor CP China heg DA Strat 5 Case, K On case - Advantage takeouts and solvency takeouts Famine K

SDI 2007 5 Week

5 Agriculture Neg

Their 1AC (1/3)

CONTENTION ONE IS THE STATUS QUO: 1. Small farms are failing due to the international agricultural market system. T.S. Jayne, Professor, International Development at Michigan State, D. Mather, Assistant Professor, International Development at Michigan State, and E. Mghenyi, graduate student, Michigan State University, 2005, ,
http://www.ifpri.org/events/seminars/2005/smallfarms/sfproc/SO3_Jayne.pdf

The prevailing international agricultural trade policy.the international supply and price effects of multilateral trade agreements.

2. Assistance means development assistance Maisel. 2006. Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Clinical Program, Florida International University College of Law (Peggy,
THE ROLE OF U.S. LAW FACULTY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: STRIVING FOR EFFECTIVE CROSS-CULTURAL COLLABORATION. Pg. 10. http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=peggy_maisel. )

The term assistance is important to understand .promotion of development or modernization in Third World nations.

3. Clean water, agriculture, and nutrition is public health assistance Angyal professor of English and Environmental Studies 89 (Andrew, Lewis Thomas, p 89, AG)
Thomas would like to see the combined resources .America before the advent of modern medicine.

Contention 2 is Harms Advantage 1 is Poverty 4. Small farms are the only way to solve poverty- absent increasing market access to small farms, current massive corporate domination against small communities will continue to destroy any type of person food sovereignty. Laura Carlsen, director of the IRC Americas Program, October 25, 2006, "The World Needs its Small Farmers,", http://americas.irconline.org/am/3641

In many countries, the guarantors of food suppliessmall farmers.restore the emphasis where it should beon the small farmers.

5. Small farms are key to genetically diversified food 3 reasons James K Boyce, Department of Economics & Political Economy Research and Environmental research at the University of Massachusetts, July 2004, A Future for Small Farms? Biodiversity and Sustainable Agriculture. Political Economic Research Institute, ideap/wp86.html
Around the world, it is generally small farmsSimilarly, Maori weavers in New Zealand recognize more than 80 distinct varieties of flax (Shand, 1997, p. 11, citing Heywood, 1995).

6. Biodiversity has been shown to double yields- also it prevents mass crop loss due to prevention of problems like disease. Mae-Wan Ho, Professor of Biophysics at Catania University, and Lim Li Ching, Professor of Government at Hamilton College and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution, June 15, 2003, A GM-Free Sustainable World,
www.indsp.org/ISPreportSummary.php

Empirical evidence from a study conducted since 1994 shows hybrid monocultures and 40% greater than glutinous monocultures

SDI 2007 5 Week

6 Agriculture Neg

Their 1AC (2/3)

7. The biodiversity gained from small farms is key to prevent extinction. James K Boyce, Department of Economics & Political Economy Research and Environmental research at the University of Massachusetts, July 2004, A Future for Small Farms? Biodiversity and Sustainable Agriculture. Political Economic Research Institute, ideap/wp86.html
There is a future for small farmsor the spotted owls found in the ancient forests of the northwestern United States.

8. Poverty is a form of structural violence that is equivalent to an ongoing nuclear war against the poor; it is also the root cause of all other violence James Gilligan professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence, and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence. Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes. 1996. P. 191196

The deadliest form of violence is poverty. for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.

9. Without increased agriculture war is inevitable. International Herald Tribune, June 17, 1999, Jimmy Carter, First Step Toward Peace Is Eradicating Hunger,
http://www.ifpri.org/2020/newslet/nv_0999/nv0999j.htm

Why has peace beena reminder that investments in agricultural research today can cultivate peace tomorrow.

Advantage 2 Environment 10. There is a laundry list of reason current high yield agricultural practices destroy the environment. Leo Horrigan, Robert S. Lawrence, and Polly Walker, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, May 2002,
How Sustainable Agriculture Can Address the Environmental and Human Health Harms of Industrial Agriculture. Environmental Health Perspectives, vol 110, number 5, http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/110p445-456horrigan/horrigan-full.html

Fertilizers. In 1998, the world usedthat depends upon them is inherently unsustainable

11. Environmental degradation leads to extinction. John Cairns, Jr., department of biology, Virginia Polytechnic institute, 1998 (Goals and Conditions for a Sustainable World
http://www.int-res.com/esepbooks/CairnsEsepBook.pdf) [OBrien]

Sustainable use of the planet will requirea number of steps can be undertaken.

Advantage Three: Every other impact possible 12. Here are 26 Impacts to monocropping. Scot Nelson, PhD, University of Hawaii at Mnoa, May 16-19 2006, Poly- and Monocultures: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
http://www.agroforestry.net/events/afwksp2006/pres/Nelson_Monocrops_script.pdf [Bhattacharjee]

Bad and Ugly aspects of monocropping includeIncreased use of pesticides.

PlanThe United States federal government should create a marketing organization aimed at improving the sustainability of small farms in Sub-Saharan Africa to operate as part of USAID.

SDI 2007 5 Week

7 Agriculture Neg

Their 1AC (3/3)

Contention three is solvency: 13. The plan is critical to enabling small farmers to continue productiononly if they are able to compete in the market against agribusiness can they be successful. Peter B.R. HAZELL, Development Strategy and Governance Division, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, 2005, Is there a Future for Small Farms? http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/action/showFullText?submitFullText=Full+Text+HTML&doi=10.1111%2Fj.0169-5150.2004.00016.x

Small farms have always been at a disadvantage those who are more distant from roads and markets (Narayanan and Gulati, 2003).

14. US farming policy is the key reason Africans are struck by poverty and only the US can reverse this, international organizations dont work Marian Tupy and Christopher Preble, policy analyst with the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity and director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, 6/17/05, Reason Magazine, Trade, Not Aid. [Bhattacharjee]
When British Prime Minister Tony Blair met alleviate poverty in the poorest corners of the globe.

15. USAID in market integration helps small farms and has a multiplier effect. MSU Agricultural Economics, November 17 2000, Synthesis of the USAID, Bureau for Africa Workshop for Agriculture,
Environment, Private Sector and Food for Peace Officers, http://www.aec.msu.edu/agecon/fs2/africanhunger/povertyreduction.pdf

Market-oriented agricultural intensification on small farms...demonstrating the advantages of new technologies and modern livelihoods.

16. Plan Key to Change Current US Policies US Congress Department of Technology, September 1988, Enhancing Agriculture in Africa: A Role for US
Development Assistance, http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/ota/Ota_3/DATA/1988/8814.PDF

The United States has the potentialconsidered for support from donors, for example, the Japanese.

17. Change in USAID projects is key to solve Nelson Edwards, Matt Tokar, and Jim Maxwell, 1997 Agribusiness Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Optimal Strategies
and Structures, final report, from USAIDs Bureau for Africa, Google scholar

Most of the existing USAID projectscan be defined and facilitated.

SDI 2007 5 Week

8 Agriculture Neg

Topicality

SDI 2007 5 Week

9 Agriculture Neg

T increase PHA isnt to make a new org.

A. interpretation increase means to augment an existing policy action, and not to create a new one Def. Online Plain Text Dictionary Increase: Addition or enlargement in size, extent, quantity, number, intensity, value, substance; augmentation; growth B. violation: the affirmative case creates a new organization in USAID, instead of augmenting an existing one C. standards: Limits out interpretation prevents the aff from exploding the number of cases by making a new organization. There are an infinite number of organizations that can be made. Fairness the neg has no idea what kind of new organization the aff would make to try to increase aid, making it impossible for the neg to predict what kind of organization the aff would make.. This is key to predictable ground. Effects topicality the affirmative makes a new organization instead of directly increasing aid to these farmers, such as in the form of funding. The aff takes untopical actions to reach a topical end result. This is unfair because the neg shouldnt have to be prepared to debate against untopical actions this kills inround education. Effectually topical affs destroy neg link ground and neg cp ground we never know when they will spike out of or DA links. This is an independent voter for fairness and education for the reasons above. D. voters Fairness, education, and jurisdiction

SDI 2007 5 Week

10 Agriculture Neg

T - Marketing isnt PHA

A. interpretation: PHA includes immunizations, STD testing and treatment, and family planning Code of Federal Regulations 04
(Title 45, Vol. 2, 10-1, http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/ 12feb20041500/edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2004/octqtr/45cfr402.2.htm) Public health assistance means health services (1) that are generally available to needy individuals residing in a State; (2) that receive funding from units of State or local government; and, (3) that are provided for the primary purpose of protecting the health of the general public, including, but not limited to, immunizations for immunizable diseases, testing and treatment for tuberculosis and sexually-transmitted diseases, and family planning services.

B. Violation: the affirmative provides marketing services, which does not fall under our interpretation of immunizations, STD testing and treatment, and family planning. C. Standards:
Limits their interpretation explodes the topic list allowing any affirmative that prevented a death Predictability a huge caselist means a huge neg burden and unpredictable affirmatives Ground we lose ground. We were prepared to debate diseases, and they ran a food aff. Thats key to DA and K links Education we lose topic specific education because they choose an affirmative that doesnt fall under public health assistance.

D. Voting issue: for fairness, education, and jurisdiction

SDI 2007 5 Week

11 Agriculture Neg

Green Revolution CP

SDI 2007 5 Week

12 Agriculture Neg

Green Revolution CP 1NC (1/3)

CP text The United States federal government should give aid to the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in their efforts to promote the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. OR CP text- The Rockefeller Foundation and the Gates Foundation should give more aid to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa There is not enough funding right now, more is necessary Information Agency of Mozambique, 05 (Africa News, Mozambique; Guebuza Urges More Donor
Support for Agriculture, lexis nexis, vc) N. Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Thursday urged the United States and other donor nations to provide more support for the development of agriculture in Africa, so that the peoples of the continent may achieve self- sufficiency in food as quickly as possible. Speaking in New York at the opening of a meeting between the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), Guebuza made it clear that the poor yields from African agriculture are largely due to the limited financial resources available to train technical staff, and acquire agricultural equipment. Guebuza stressed that, in order to break the cycle of hunger in Africa, "it is imperative that all those who are in favour of the elimination of hunger should contribute towards this. More than anyone else, it is the industrialised nations who have the financial and technical resources to carry this out". He added that, for African agriculture to become productive and profitable for the millions of peasant farmers who depend on it, large-scale investments will be necessary, and these are currently not in sight. Guebuza said that, if African countries had the necessary funds, they would invest them in infrastructures such as irrigation systems, and the building of roads that would allow agricultural produce to reach domestic and foreign markets speedily. They would also invest in building factories to process some of the crops.

SDI 2007 5 Week

13 Agriculture Neg

Green Revolution CP 1NC (2/3)

Solvency: AGRA solves for marketing, as well as all the other aspects of agriculture that the aff cannot solve for, such as improving seeds, seed distribution, and crop scientists AfricaFocus, 06 (providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a particular focus on U.S.
and international policies, Africa; Green Revolution?, lexis nexis, vc) Over the long term, the partnership, called Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), intends to improve agricultural development in Africa by addressing both farming and relevant economic issues, including soil fertility and irrigation, farmer management practices, and farmer access to markets and financing. Almost three-quarters of Africa's land area is being farmed without improved inputs such as fertilizer and advanced seeds. "No major region around the world has been able to make sustained economic gains without first making significant improvements in agricultural productivity," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation. "In Africa today, the great majority of poor people, many of them women with young children, depend on agriculture for food and income and remain impoverished and even go hungry. Yet, Melinda and I also have seen reason for hope - African plant scientists developing higher-yielding crops, African entrepreneurs starting seed companies to reach small farmers, and agrodealers reaching more and more small farmers with improved farm inputs and farm management practices. These strategies have the potential to transform the lives and health of millions of families. Working together with African leaders and the Rockefeller Foundation, we are embarking on a long-term effort focused on agricultural productivity, which will build on and extend this important work." The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa's first investment of $150 million ($100 million from the Gates Foundation and $50 million from the Rockefeller Foundation) will support the Program for Africa's Seed Systems (PASS). PASS will mount an across-the-board effort to improve the availability and variety of seeds that can produce higher yields in the often harsh conditions of sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, PASS will help: Develop Improved Varieties of African Crops African agricultural environments are highly diverse with significant differences in local pests, diseases, rainfall patterns, soil properties and the desired attributes demanded by local small farm communities. PASS will fund around 40 national breeding programs a year that will use local participatory crop breeding to address these barriers and provide more robust, higher-yielding crops for small farmers. PASS will invest $43 million with a five-year goal of developing 100 new and improved crop varieties suitable for the ecologically varied agricultural environments in Africa. Train New Generation of African Crop Scientists Accelerating a new Green Revolution for Africa is a multi-layered challenge. While it starts with improved crop varieties at the most fundamental level, it also requires the development of new generations of trained African agricultural scientists. That is why PASS will invest $20 million to provide graduate level training in African universities for the next generation of African crop breeders and agricultural scientists upon which the seed system depends for growth and productivity. Ensure Improved Seeds Reach Smallholder Farmers. Africa has the lowest levels of improved seed utilization of any region in the world, mostly because such seeds are not physically or financially available to the majority of farmers. The poor state of rural transportation infrastructure, a lack of effective points of seed delivery to small farmers, and inadequate access to financial services all contribute to low utilization and inadequate agricultural productivity. PASS will invest $24 million to ensure that improved crop varieties are produced and distributed through private and public channels (including seed companies, public community seed systems and public extension) so farmers can adopt these varieties. Develop a Network of African Agro-Dealers. Another challenge particular to Africa is the lack of a robust market for bringing new products to farmers. PASS hopes to address this by providing training, capital and credit to establish at least 10,000 small agro-dealers who can serve as conduits of seeds, fertilizers, chemicals and knowledge to smallholder farmers, and in doing so help increase their productivity and incomes. This will be a $37 million investment.

SDI 2007 5 Week

14 Agriculture Neg

Green Revolution 1NC (3/3)

Solves. Green Revolution has been empirically successful Gates Foundation, 07 (foundation to help reduce inequities in the United States and around the world, New
Hope for African Farmers, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/GlobalDevelopment/Agriculture/RelatedInfo/AfricanFarmers.htm, vc) The Rockefeller and Ford foundations initiated the Green Revolution in partnership with the governments of developing countries. The idea was to take a comprehensive approach to improving agriculture, starting with the seeds farmers plant and ending with the markets where they sell surplus crops. Rockefeller and its partners bred hardier seeds that responded better to fertilizer and irrigation, and they nurtured a group of agriculture experts in developing countries to ensure these new seeds were wellsuited to the local soil and climate. Working with the foundation, governments made wise investments in agricultural infrastructure, and together they linked farmers to more and better markets where they could buy improved seeds and fertilizer and sell their surplus. Rockefeller started the cutting-edge work in Mexico and it soon spread to dozens of countries in Asia and Latin America. Although there were some environmental and social impacts that needed to be addressed, the revolution contributed to significant improvement in the well being of millions of small holder farmers. However, the Green Revolution never reached most of Africa, and today 16 of the 18 most undernourished countries in the world are located on that continent. While much of the world has benefited from agricultural innovation, three-quarters of smallholder farmers in Africa still use the same unimproved seeds they used 50 years ago and still dont have access to improved soil fertility practices. Science has passed them by completely.

AGRA solves for sustainable agriculture African Green Revolution, 07 (site promoting Africas Green Revolution, African Green Revolution,
http://www.africagreenrevolution.com/en/green_revolution/green_revolution/index.html, vc) With the necessary potentials, entry points, driving forces and leverage factors now being identified, Kofi Annan is optimistic that an African Green Revolution can drive African farming communities from subsistence farming to sustainable modern agriculture and rural transformation. In his Call to Action speech of July 2004, Annan described what the African Green Revolution will look like: "We will see proven techniques in small-scale irrigation and water harvesting scaled up to provide 'more crop per drop'; improved food crops developed through publicly-funded research focused specifically on Africa; soil health restored through agroforestry techniques and organic and mineral fertilizers; Electrification and access to information technologies such as cell phones would increase rural productivity; Homegrown school feeding programs would provide nutritionally balanced meals, further stimulating demand from local farmers; and social safety nets, from grain reserves to early warning systems, would protect the most vulnerable."

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15 Agriculture Neg

More Solvency to Green Revolution CP

AGRA solves Gates Foundation, 07 (foundation to help reduce inequities in the United States and around the world, New
Hope for African Farmers, http://www.gatesfoundation.org/GlobalDevelopment/Agriculture/RelatedInfo/AfricanFarmers.htm, vc) Eventually, the combination of Rockefeller and Gates resources and Rockefellers years of experience will address the whole range of issues that has made agricultural development such a challenge in Africa. The partnerships first initiative will focus on: Breeding better crops that are adapted to the variety of local conditions in Africa. The goal is to develop 100 new varieties in five years. Training African breeders and agricultural scientists who can spearhead this process in the future. Guaranteeing reliable ways to get high-quality, locally adapted seeds into the hands of small farmers, through seed companies, public organizations, community organizations, and a network of 10,000 agro-dealers, the small merchants largely responsible for providing supplies and knowledge to Africas farmers.

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16 Agriculture Neg

Green Revolution CP: No link to China heg DA

(The CP does not link to the china heg DA. Because the Rockefeller foundation and China have good relations, AGRA would not be viewed as a threat to China)

The Rockefeller Foundation has good relations in China Litsios, 05 (Socrates, works for WHO and is senior Scientist in the Division of the Control of Tropical Diseases,
Selskar Gunn and China: The Rockefeller Foundation's "Other" Approach to Public Health, Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 79, pg 295, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy1.cl.msu.edu:2047/journals/bulletin_of_the_history_of_medicine/v079/79.2litsios.html, vc) Gunns sixty-one-page proposal in 1934 was a carefully structured report designed to acknowledge what the [Rockefeller] Foundation had been doing up until then while arguing that something new was needed. It was based on the premise that the Foundation should continue to have a program in China,10 its everincreasing role in world affairs having convinced Gunn that the opportunities in China are vastly more significant than those presented in any of the many countries where I have worked for the Foundation in Europe.11 The past year had been spent fostering cordial relations with Chinese officials and with important people connected with purely Chinese institutions.12 John B. Grant, a Foundation staff member stationed at the PUMC, was instrumental in establishing these relationships and in convincing the Chinese authorities of the sincerity of the [Rockefeller] Foundations interest in Chinas development.

The Rockefeller Foundation has had a good history with China Ninkovich, 84 (Frank, Department of History, St. John's University, The Rockefeller Foundation, China,
and Cultural Change, The Journal of American History, Vol. 70, No. 4. (Mar., 1984), pp. 799-820, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723%28198403%2970%3A4%3C799%3ATRFCAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M, vc) In 1915, on hearing of the Rockefeller Foundation's desire to set up a medical school in Peking, Paul Reinsch, the United States minister to China, remarked approvingly that the foundation's plans were "in full accordance with the traditions of our past relations with China, where the activities of our people have been religious, cultural and educational in a far greater measure than they have been commercial." Reinsch's comment highlights two key elements of the relationship between the United States and China: the vital role that policymakers assigned to the cultural dimension of that relationship; and the conviction that the management of cultural contacts was properly a nongovernmental function. The Rockefeller Foundation's attempt over the course of forty years to channel China's modernization in a liberal direction epitomizes the marriage of national interest and private policymaking. At the same time, the Rockefeller experiment in the management of ideas also provides an example of how an important aspect of United States foreign relations can be understood "less from the study of diplomatic correspondence in government archives than from an examination of extragovernmental forces."

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17 Agriculture Neg

Biotech Tradeoff DA

SDI 2007 5 Week

18 Agriculture Neg

Biotech tradeoff 1NC (1/2)

Small farmers oppose GM crops and would not use it, ever. Passing the plan would tradeoff with biotech. The East African Standard, 04 (east African news, Kenya; Farmers Oppose Genetically Modified Foods
Bill, lexis nexis, vc) Farmers across the country yesterday expressed outrage over a Government Bill seeking to introduce genetically modified crops. Representatives from 10 districts said they would support a Private Members' Motion seeking to outlaw GM crops instead. The impact of GM food on the country's agriculture, farmers' livelihood, food security and human health," said the representatives of the Kenya Small-Scale Farmers' Forum, is a matter of serious concern. Speaking at a press conference in Nairobi, the farmers warned that patents on GM seeds alone threatened the future of agriculture, given that most small-scale farmers usually store their seeds for up to three years.

Biotech is key to solving for famine Harris, 01 (Lissa, a freelance writer in uptown New York, Rockefeller Foundation president says biotech is key
to easing hunger, http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/01/10.11.01/Conway_on_biotech.html, vc) Rockefeller Foundation president says biotech is key to easing hunger. Biotechnology is an important tool for alleviating hunger in Africa, according to agricultural ecologist Gordon Conway, a pioneer of the green revolution in
the 1960s and now president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Conway, long an advocate of using technology as a means of alleviating hunger and poverty, was speaking in a Cornell public lecture in G10 of the Biotechnology Building, Oct. 4. The directors of philanthropic organizations are not generally known for getting embroiled in controversy. Over the past few years, however, Conway has been doing just that. In the furor over genetic engineering, he has adopted a high profile as one of the few public figures charting a middle course. However, Conway is quick to point out that his primary interest is not the technology but the problems of hunger and malnutrition he believes that technology will help solve. "The Rockefeller Foundation is not interested in biotechnology per se," he said. "It is only interested in biotechnology in the sense that it may have something to do with improving food security in developing countries, and particularly in Africa." Conway said he sees genetically engineered crops as a potential boon to

subsistence farmers in the developing world. He believes that opponents of genetically modified food are standing in the way of technology that could help poverty-stricken farmers. However, he also is a critic of the biotechnology industry, in particular for its development of "terminator" genes, which cause seed sterility, thus forcing farmers to buy fresh seeds every year instead of saving seeds from the previous growing season. Indeed, in response to public rebukes from Conway, Monsanto -- a leading agricultural biotechnology and chemical company -- recently pledged to drop plans to market terminator seeds.

Famine causes a spike in epidemics of communicable diseases Devereux Research Fellow for the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex 01 [STEPHEN DEVEREUX,
Sens Entitlement Approach: Critiques and Counter-critiques, Oxford Development Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2001)

There are two ways in which the entitlement approach can be salvaged on this issue. One is to attribute vulnerability even to communicable diseases to heightened susceptibility due to undernutrition (weakened biological resistance). Nutritionists such as Young & Jaspars (1995, p. 105) favour this view, arguing that de Waal underestimates the synergism between malnutrition and morbidity which they regard as best explaining famine mortality. The second defence is to assert that people who become exposed to communicable diseases (for instance, displaced populations in refugee camps) left their villages and migrated in search of relief precisely because they had lost their entitlements to food. Ravallion (1996, p. 9), for instance, suggests that the relationship between food shortage and morbidity or mortality outcomes reflects behavioural synergies (which might include increased exposure due to famine-induced distress migration) as well as biological synergies (increased susceptibility to infection). In terms of both explanations, exposure to disease is accepted as the proximate cause of death, but the underlying cause of death remains as entitlement failure. A reconciliation of this debate might be to accept the merits of both explanations.18 Famine mortality reflects both increased susceptibility and increased exposure to diseases, some of which are hunger-related while others are notbut both reflect a common origin in disrupted access to food (epidemics that are not triggered by food scarcity are not, definitionally speaking, famines). The relative contribution to mortality of starvation, hunger-related morbidity and epidemic diseases will vary from one famine to another, but all three contributory factors are intrinsic to the famine process, and all three can arguably be accommodated within a broadly framed entitlement analysis.

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19 Agriculture Neg

Biotech Tradeoff DA 1NC (2/2)

Diseases in Africa will mutate and quickly spread beyond the continent UDaily 06 [(U.S. can help halt spread of diseases, Africa expert says, 2:51 p.m., March 23, 2006, pg.
http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2006/mar/global032306.html) globalization has transformed economies around the world and has allowed for more personal mobility, it helped spread diseases, Lisa Meadowcroft, executive director of the American affiliate of the African Medical and Research Foundation, said at UD Wednesday evening, March 23. Health is a global issue relevant to everyone, everywhere, she said. In the age of globalization, we need to recognize this vital fact and consider its implications. Even more, we need to figure out what it means to be a global system. During her lecture, Meadowcroft said there is recognition among American and European leaders that responding to challenges in Africa and other parts of the developing world is in their best interest. Meadowcroft, formerly of the International Rescue Committee, said the health care system in Africa lacks the personnel and resources to
2:51 p.m., March 23, 2006--Although also has

function at an appropriate level. Many ministries of health can only allocate about $10 per person per year to health, and that includes job salaries and administration costs, she said. Moreover, 80 percent of the better equipped hospitals are in cities, while 80 percent of Africa's population lives in rural areas. Meadowcroft said 40 million people around the world have HIV, with 26 million of them living in Africa. Although the country makes up less than 15 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of those infected with HIV/AIDS in the world live in Africa. The human toll of HIV/AIDS in Africa is startling, she said. Last year alone, 2.4 million people died. Imagine. Imagine the pain, grief and suffering of African families trying to come to terms with losing so many of their loved ones, then imagine having to deal with the grief and suffering along with all the extraordinary economic burdens caused by HIV/AIDS. Meadowcroft said the disease is destroying families and is a threat to world security. By 2010, it is estimated that

more than 20 million children will be orphaned because of HIV/AIDS. Meadowcroft also discussed the devastating affects of malaria on African economies and the strain it puts on health care resources even though it is a preventable disease. Meadowcroft said the avian flu could potentially become the worst pandemic the world has ever seen and said it is in the U.S. government's best interest to protect Africa
from the avian flu before it starts. Africa is a continent rich in natural resources and those resources could be useful and very valuable to the U.S., she said. Countries like Nigeria and Sudan, for example, could become significant energy suppliers to the U.S., helping us to relieve our dependency on oil in the Middle East. Meadowcroft said the violence, political instability and poverty in many of these countries prevents the U.S. from establishing an economic relationship. Meadowcroft also explained how SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) caused a decrease in tourism and a weakening of the health care system in Asia and said the same problems could arise in the U.S. The point of all this is that there are some pretty horrible diseases mutating in the world

today, she said. And there are new diseases mutating on a regular basis. From the standpoint of U.S. interests, these diseases pose a huge economic and social cost. Can you imagine the reaction here if suddenly we found ourselves faced with epidemic that began killing tens of thousands of Americans every week? Meadowcroft said the U.S. must help improve economies in Africa and support its health care systems to help halt the spread of devastating diseases.

A global epidemic will kill over 100 million people, its the biggest and most likely impact Falkenrath Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at The Brookings Institution 06 [Richard A. Falkenrath, Former Special
Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Policy, Former Plans within the Office of Homeland Security, and Former Director for Proliferation Strategy on the National Security Council, PUBLIC HEALTH MEDICAL PREPAREDNESS, Committee on Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, CQ Congressional Testimony, March 16, 2006 Thursday, pg. l/n) A catastrophic disease event is admittedly an extreme scenario, residing at the very highest end of the threat spectrum. With respect to manmade threats bioterrorism - I am not suggesting that such a scenario can be easily effectuated or is imminent. Nonetheless,

I do not believe that the trends are in our favor. With every passing year, the latent technological potential of states and non-state actors to use disease effectively as a weapon rises inexorably. With respect to naturally occurring disease threats, no one can estimate precisely the likelihood, timing, or consequence of the appearance of a new human pathogen.5 However, for at least one potentially catastrophic disease, even the conservative World Health Organization concludes that "the world may be on the brink of another pandemic."6 According to the WHO, a pandemic along the lines of the relatively mild pandemic of 1957

would result in 2 million to 7.4 million deaths worldwide. A pandemic with the death rate of the 1918 Spanish flu - perhaps the most extreme human disease event in history -

could result in several million fatalities in the United States and perhaps over one hundred million abroad. In sum, when viewed in comparison to all other conceivable threats to U.S. national security, the catastrophic disease threat is and for the foreseeable future will remain the gravest danger we face. No state, no terrorist group, no ideology or system of government, no other tactic or target or category of weapons, no technological accident, and no other natural phenomenon, presents as terrifying a combination of likelihood, poor defenses and countermeasures, and consequence.

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Biotech DA - Small farmers oppose GM

Small farmers oppose GM crops Buckley, 00 (Stephen, Washington Post Foreign Service, Brazil Battles Over Beans; Farmers at Odds Over
Genetically Modified Crops, lexis nexis, vc) Hostility toward globalization suffuses the debate over genetically modified soybeans in Brazil, which is second only to the United States in the production of the crop. An opinion poll conducted on the Internet and released last week by Gazeta Mercantil, Brazil's leading business newspaper, found that 60 percent of respondents oppose bioengineered crops, including 23 percent who believe such products primarily benefit multinational corporations. In addition, small-scale farmers say that if the government legalizes genetically modified seeds, they would go bankrupt. They say that medium- and large-scale farmers would have an overwhelming advantage because they could more easily afford to buy the seeds, which are more expensive than their conventional counterparts.

Small farmers dont like GM crops Tayob, 03 (Riaz, Editor of Business Day, Modified food hurts farmers, lexis nexis, vc)
Modified food hurts farmers. The article Africa dare not cave in to agricultural Luddites (July 21), ignores the complex political reality of agricultural production. Under the banner of embracing science, the writer prescribes that production of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) should be considered on a case by case basis. Failure to do so may leave Africans missing the "next big opportunity" in agriculture. The political reality of agricultural production in Africa challenges this presumption. Most African countries have to protect all patent holders, which means paying royalties for GMOs, under the World Trade Organisation's agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights - or face sanctions. GMOs are regulated under patent law, and anyone found in possession of crops without the consent of the owner of the GMO will be punished by having their crops confiscated or fined for not paying royalties. By adding GMOs to agriculture, farmers will be obliged to buy seed instead of saving seeds from one year to the next. GMO companies have been so brash as to create a terminator gene that will ensure that the seeds are barren and cannot be used for the next planting. Of course, large-scale commercial farmers may benefit from higher yields, but most farming in Africa is not of this nature. Unlike rich northern countries, most African farmers are small-scale producers who cannot even afford suitable inputs, let alone expensive patented seeds. The introduction of genes into general circulation affects all the world (due to genetic contamination) in direct violation of the precautionary principle. Developing countries, like Zambia, are not Luddites when they are cautious by conducting research with GMOs or oppose their introduction. These countries act in the interests of their people's welfare as they recognise agriculture as the means of survival for most Africans.

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Biotech key
Biotech solves poverty and food security Panafrican News Agency, 00 (international news service with coverage of the African continent, Africa-atLarge; Biotechnology Could Solve Africa's Food Problems, lexis nexis, vc) Biotechnology could solve Africas food problems. The Deputy Under-secretary in the US Department of Agriculture, James Schroeder, has said that Washington would support African scientists to use biotechnology to achieve food security and reduce poverty. "USDA is committed to a long-term strategy to support research and technical assistance aimed at improving African food production and security. Biotechnology to improve African food production ad security must play a role in this strategy," he told more than 100 participants at the weekend at end of a two- day workshop on "Enabling Biotechnology for African Agriculture" organised jointly by the USDA, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and several international institutions.Biotechnology is the use of modern scientific techniques, including genetic e ngineering, to modify plants, animals and micro-organisms. It can be used to develop high yielding and disease resistant plants and animals to increase productivity. The workshop brought together more than 100 scientists, agriculturists, policy makers and other professionals from Ghana, US, Kenya, Mexico, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Cote d'Ivo ire. Schroeder said biotechnology offers the opportunity for meeting the global f ood needs of the growing population, especially those who suffer malnutrition and hunger.

Biotech increases income, access to health services, and solves social problems BusinessWorld, 05 (business magazine, Transgenic crop benefits touted by gov't scientists, lexis nexis, vc)
She noted that biotechnology has improved some local farmers' crop yields significantly. "The experiment in Tigaon, Camarines Sur is an eye-opener. Through biotech, the farmers increased their corn yield by 700%," she said. This project, she added, has been supported by the President since July 2001 when she issued a policy statement supporting and promoting the safe and responsible use of biotechnology and its products as one of several means to achieve and sustain food security, equitable access to health services, a sustainable and safe environment, and industry development. Ms. Halos pointed out that individual farms in the Philippines are relatively small at an average size of 1.5 hectares. Such farms support a family of six to 12 persons and have variable soil fertility. Rainfall, marketing and farmers' education are added factors that further influence rural families' incomes. "In short, with conditions so variable," she said, "it's folly to provide a single solution to problems of low productivity which, in general, characterizes Philippine agriculture. Hence, we believe that biotechnology is one of the best and most effective means to increase rural incomes and solve related social problems."

Biotech solves hunger, pesticides, and environment Earle, 99 (Patrick, All Africa News Agency, Africa-at-Large; Genetic Engineering Could Solve World's Food
Needs, lexis nexis, vc) Due to population pressure and land use in many places in Africa, the land available for farming is actually decreasing. This means farmers must be helped to be more productive on their existing farmland. Biotechnology provides avenues through which these can be improved. Better still is biotechnology in horticulture. Forests and crops result to high yield and crops mature quickly. Biotechnology also offers alternatives to toxic pesticides since genetic solutions are used for cropprotection. Another form of biotechnology is the tissue culture. This is a low cost, relatively simple yet powerful technology that complements traditional crop improvement programmes. Tissue culture has been used for mass propagation of diverse genetic materials and for identifying and developing disease in tree plants. Such genetic breeds are of high yield and offer sustainable agriculture by reducing needs for toxic pesticides. Africa needs genetically produced crops to improve food production. With the lowest crop production per unit area world-wide, there are prospects for increase in food productivity if genetically engineered crops are used beyond of their high yield resistance to diseases and bad weather. Africa also needs biotechnology to solve its environmental problems, says the chairman of African Biotechnology Stakeholders Forum ABSF John Opiyo Ochanda. He cites Kenya where the demand for tree seedling is 14 million per year, whereas the country can only supply 3 million, a clear indication of the need for the tissue culture and techniques to curb deforestation.

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Biotech key
Biotech solves for the environment McConnell, 07 (Bill, writer for Newsweekly, GM crops: Calculating costs and benefits, lexis nexis, vc)
Finally, he [Freese] says GM crops threaten organic farming -- an increasingly attractive option for small farmers that can't compete with giant industrial-scale farms. Cross-pollination or inadvertent mixing by seed producers can contaminate organic crops, as can drift from overhead spraying of insecticide or herbicide. Monsanto argues that whatever problems have started appearing, they are minuscule compared with the benefits already delivered by GM products worldwide. A Monsanto-financed study by the U.K.'s PG Economics Ltd.shows that reduced fuel and chemicals costs have saved farmers around the world more than $27 billion for the decade ended 2005. From an environmental standpoint, GM technology has reduced pesticide spraying by 224 million kilograms, an estimated reduction of more than 15%. By reducing the need to kill weeds through tilling, GM technology has also significantly reduced the release of greenhouse gas emissions from turned soil. In 2005 alone, the cut in emissions was the equivalent to removing 4 million cars from the roads.

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Biotech DA - Environment Impact

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION LEADS TO WAR. Prof Arthur H Westing, Dr Warwick Fox, & Dr Michael Renner, Environmental Degradation as both Consequence and Cause of Armed Conflict, Working Paper prepared for Nobel Peace Laureate Forum participants by PREPCOM subcommittee on Environmental Degradation, June 2001, http://www.institute-fornonviolence. com.au/downloads/pdf/EnvirDegrad.pdf It is evident that armed conflicts can lead to environmental problems in terms of both resource scarcity and environmental degradation. However, those same environmental problems, whether caused by armed conflict or by other means, are increasingly understood to play an important role in generating or exacerbating disputes that might lead to armed conflict. Depleting water resources, over-exploiting fisheries, degrading arable land, decimating forests, and altering the natural balance of ecosystems from wetlands to coral reefs are among the principal processes of anthropogenic environmental change. Climate change is likely to augment these challenges.

THE BURDEN FOR DEALING WITH ENVIRONMENTAL DECAY RESTS ON THE POOREST OF SOCIETY, INCREASING THE RISK OF CONFLICT. Prof Arthur H Westing, Dr Warwick Fox, & Dr Michael Renner, Environmental Degradation as both
Consequence and Cause of Armed Conflict, Working Paper prepared for Nobel Peace Laureate Forum participants by PREPCOM subcommittee on Environmental Degradation, June 2001, http://www.institute-fornonviolence. com.au/downloads/pdf/EnvirDegrad.pdf (iv) The unequal nature of adverse impacts and burdens: Another potential cause of armed conflict is that the burdens resulting from environmental degradation will be felt highly unevenly by different social groups and communities. This uneven impact may well reinforce existing social and economic inequities or deepen ethnic fault lines, and therefore heighten patterns of polarization in society. As cases from India, Mexico, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Sudan, and other states show, poorer communities, minority groups, and indigenous peoples typically bear the brunt of adverse environmental change, particularly such change triggered by oil drilling, mining, logging, or large-scale dam and irrigation projects.

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Biotech DA - Hunger Impact

TAKEN FROM BIOTECH 1AC Hunger is a underlying cause of conflicts. Biotech is key to prevent war Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 02 (MULTI STAKEHOLDER DIALOGUE: Food, Security,
Justice and Peace, 2002 pg. http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsummit/msd/Y6808e.htm#P43_14217)

. Nowadays, the boundaries of moral concern are those of the planet. 24. Eliminating hunger is not just a moral imperative: it also makes economic sense, increasing productivity, raising incomes, creating jobs and adding to the demand for goods and services throughout the economy. It is also a necessary contribution to the many

avenues that need to be followed to reduce violence and promote lasting peace. As concluded in a study commissioned by Future Harvest, a foundation established by former US President Jimmy Carter, "rehabilitation of agriculture is a central condition for development, reducing poverty, preventing environmental destruction -and for reducing violence. Poor conditions for agriculture hold grave implications for socio-economic development and sustainable peace. We also see good governance as crucial
in building healthy conditions for agriculture, and thus in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty, scarcity and violence. The central issues are not merely technical: they relate directly to the way human beings organize their affairs and how they cope with natural and man-made crises"20. 25. Policies need to be put in place to promote growth and distribute its benefits broadly across society. Agricultural development, as part of economic and social changes that give the poor greater power over the productive resources and the social factors

that shape their livelihoods, is indispensable to the enhanced food security of the rural population and to a more peaceful and stable environment. Equitable growth and pro-poor policies are critical not only to prevent the outbreak of conflicts but also in immediate post-conflict situations.

This war outweighs on probability- sub-Saharan Africa is the least stable region in the world Trudell, J.D. Candidate 2006, 05 (Robert H., Fall, Food Security Emergencies And The Power Of Eminent
Domain: A Domestic Legal Tool To Treat A Global Problem, 33 Syracuse J. Int'l L. & Com. 277, Lexis) [*288] The lack of food security in sub-Saharan Africa makes it one of the least stable regions of the world.

pressures of a growing population have resulted in a reduction of cropland. 75 In Africa, forests are cut down to make grazing pastures, then grazing pastures erode away and become deserts or areas of land incapable of producing any sustainable harvest because the soil has no more nutrients. 76 One commentator, writing about sub-Saharan Africa, noted: "the relationship that exists between human security and environmental degradation is best illustrated in the agricultural sector." 77 Many of the farmers in this region still use the "slash-and-burn" method of subsistence farming. 78 The forests of sub-Saharan Africa are cut down for agriculture because, as will be further discussed below, the African soil quickly loses its ability to sustain

Such instability has a negative effect on global security, especially in the poorer countries of the world, which suffer from major violent conflicts. 73 One cause of this instability can be seen in the connection of food insecurity with the degrading sub-Saharan environment. 74 In the search for sustainable agriculture, the
72

plant life so more and more land is needed to grow the same amount of food.

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Non US actor CPs

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Canada CP 1NC (1/1)

Canada should ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________. Well clarify. Contention 1 Solvency Canadas CIDA is a leader in agricultural aid to Africa Cornelius, 04 (Jim, executive director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, a Winnipeg-based aid agency, Africa
faces another tough year, lexis nexis, vc) Canada is responding to the growing need for funding for international agricultural development. The Canadian International Development Agency, which manages Canada's foreign aid program, has promised that its budget for agricultural development will increase from $100 million to $500 million by 2008. CIDA is leading many agencies in the developed countries in this move to reinvest in agriculture and rural development. It is critical that this aid be directed in ways that address the needs of poor rural households, particularly in Africa. Expanded programs to address HIV/AIDS directly are also required. African governments, community groups and churches are increasing their efforts to combat HIV/AIDS. Nevertheless, more national and international resources for HIV/AIDS programming are essential. While HIV/AIDS programming is one of the priorities of the Canadian International Development Agency, the levels of support are still inadequate to address this calamity. The changing of the political guard here in Canada brings with it many uncertainties. What will be the approach of the new Paul Martin government? In speaking to the recent Liberal party leadership convention in Toronto, Irish rock-star Bono challenged Martin to address the scourge of hunger in Africa. "If we really deep down believe that Africans are equal to us," he said, "we wouldn't allow this to happen." Hope for Africa in the new year rests in part on Canada's continued new commitment to agricultural development and further commitments to address HIV/AIDS on the continent. Consider again that woman in Malawi who is so thankful for a few extra years of life to care for her children.

Unlike other actors, Canada understands which sectors need aid, uniquely solves. Nolen, 02 (Stephanie, The Global and Mail, Starved for answers; We've given billions in food aid but those;
starving faces won't go away. Is Third World hunger; insurmountable? STEPHANIE NOLEN thinks not, lexis nexis, vc) The most significant problem is the lack of support for rural agriculture. Seventy per cent of the world's poor live in rural areas and rely on food they grow themselves. Making those people "food secure" is the key to ending hunger. (Food security, as defined by the WFP, is having access at all times to nutritious food, and consuming at least 2,700 calories per day.) But only a fraction of aid money goes to developing rural agriculture. Some of the blame lies with the governments of the hungry countries: The nations with the largest number of people without adequate food are also those who spend the least on agricultural development, says Charles Riemenschneider, an agricultural economist with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Poor, rural people, by and large, don't vote. The power base for those governments is urban dwellers, and so they support policies that provide cheap food in the cities, at the expense of rural producers. But rich countries are to blame, too. There is less spending on all kinds of aid than there was a decade ago, and much less than there was on agriculture. Aid for agriculture declined by half in the 1990s. New trends in development - to basic education, infectious diseases - compete for the shrinking aid dollar. There are signs that the pendulum is swinging back in support of rural agriculture. Canada's Minister of International Co-operation, Susan Whelan, recently announced that this would become a new area of focus for funding by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), mirroring a trend at the World Bank and other bilateral aid agencies.

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EU CP 1NC (1/1)
The European Union should ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________. Well clarify. Contention 1: Solvency The EU is a leader in aid to Africa, especially in infrastructure, which is key to solve Gooch, 07 (Anthony, EU, THE EU AND THE WORLD BANK AT THE FOREFRONT OF AID TO AFRICA,
http://www.eurunion.org/News/press/2006/20060018.htm, vc) On February 23rd, the European Commission welcomed the World Bank Groups Africa Catalytic Growth Fund, announced in February 22nd press reports. Both institutions are determined to support and accelerate shared economic growth and to assist in the achievement of Millennium Development Goals that have proved difficult to attain in Africa. The World Bank Group Trust Fund is complementary to the European Trust Fund for Infrastructure, which was launched on February 9th by the EC and the EIB (European Investment Bank) as a new tool to implement the Euro-Africa partnership on infrastructure. Both institutions are key actors in development cooperation and have now new means to better respond to the African challenges. Last year, the international community has taken substantial commitments to raise more money for development aid and deliver it better and faster. This year we must deliver on these commitments. Together with the European Investment Bank, the EU has launched the European Trust Fund for Infrastructure. I am happy that, with its new trust fund, the World Bank joins its efforts with the EU. As key partners in development cooperation, the EC and the World Bank take a major role in this process. (Louis Michel, Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, pictured at left) The EU and the World Bank have both adopted strategies and action plans to deliver on their commitments. Last December, the European Union adopted the European Consensus on Development and the EU Strategy for Africa. Today the EU has a joint strategy for development shared by all its Member States and by the Commission alike. The World Bank has equally adopted an Action Plan to support Africa in September 2005. To establish synergy and complementarity between the two strategies, both institutions are engaged in frequent consultations: in the so-called Limelette process, ways of closer collaboration in key areas such as infrastructure, regional integration and trade and public finance management are being discussed. Development is a global effort and both the EU and the World Bank share the same objective of growth and poverty eradication in Africa. Both institutions are working together in this respect. The two Trust Funds will allow the channeling of additional resources from other partners rapidly to Africa with the aim of accelerating progress towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals.

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WHO CP 1NC (1/1)

The World Health Organization should ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________. Well clarify. Contention 1: Solvency The WHO is a leader in aid to Africa, especially in infrastructure, which is key to solve Gooch, 07 (Anthony, EU, THE EU AND THE WORLD BANK AT THE FOREFRONT OF AID TO AFRICA,
http://www.eurunion.org/News/press/2006/20060018.htm, vc) On February 23rd, the European Commission welcomed the World Bank Groups Africa Catalytic Growth Fund, announced in February 22nd press reports. Both institutions are determined to support and accelerate shared economic growth and to assist in the achievement of Millennium Development Goals that have proved difficult to attain in Africa. The World Bank Group Trust Fund is complementary to the European Trust Fund for Infrastructure, which was launched on February 9th by the EC and the EIB (European Investment Bank) as a new tool to implement the Euro-Africa partnership on infrastructure. Both institutions are key actors in development cooperation and have now new means to better respond to the African challenges. Last year, the international community has taken substantial commitments to raise more money for development aid and deliver it better and faster. This year we must deliver on these commitments. Together with the European Investment Bank, the EU has launched the European Trust Fund for Infrastructure. I am happy that, with its new trust fund, the World Bank joins its efforts with the EU. As key partners in development cooperation, the EC and the World Bank take a major role in this process. (Louis Michel, Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, pictured at left) The EU and the World Bank have both adopted strategies and action plans to deliver on their commitments. Last December, the European Union adopted the European Consensus on Development and the EU Strategy for Africa. Today the EU has a joint strategy for development shared by all its Member States and by the Commission alike. The World Bank has equally adopted an Action Plan to support Africa in September 2005. To establish synergy and complementarity between the two strategies, both institutions are engaged in frequent consultations: in the so-called Limelette process, ways of closer collaboration in key areas such as infrastructure, regional integration and trade and public finance management are being discussed. Development is a global effort and both the EU and the World Bank share the same objective of growth and poverty eradication in Africa. Both institutions are working together in this respect. The two Trust Funds will allow the channeling of additional resources from other partners rapidly to Africa with the aim of accelerating progress towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals.

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China CP 1NC (1/2)

The Peoples Republic of China should ______________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________. Well clarify. Contention 1: Solvency Chinas amazing successes make it the only actor able to solve Xinhua, 96 (Beijing news agency, Congratulations for being able to feed its population, lexis nexis, vc)
Beijing, 10th November: China is highly acclaimed in the world for its ability to feed 22 per cent of the world population with only 7 per cent of the world's total arable land, said a senior official of the Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO]. In an interview with Xinhua on the eve of the first-ever World Food Summit to be held in Rome from 13th-17th November, Ajmal Qureshi said, "From a level of 1500 calories per capita per day in the early 1960s, the country has increased food availability to over 2700 calories per capita per day, mainly through increases in domestic production," China's rural poor population also declined from 260 million in 1978 to 65 million in 1995, he added. Qureshi, who has been the FAO representative in China since 1992, said, "The agricultural policy followed thus far (by China) to achieve these results has been extremely successful, and in particular I would like to underline the reforms introduced after 1978 which have demonstrated the seriousness of the pragmatic and imaginative policies of the government and the high priority that it has attached to the agricultural sector." He added that the reforms since 1978 have provided a package of incentives underlining the role of research and technology in increasing agricultural production. "Although there have been a lot of debates on the issue of China's ability to feed its population in the years to come, FAO has adopted an optimistic view and appreciates the Chinese government's efforts to streamline its agricultural policy and the high priority attached to the agricultural sector," Qureshi said. "China's achievements in the agricultural sector are no less than a miracle in modern times," he said. While China's population a little more than doubled to over 1.2 billion in 1995 from 500 million in 1949, Qureshi added, its cereal production increased more than four times during this period, from only 113m tons to 466m tons. The FAO official pointed out that China's practice could be helpful

to other developing counties and therefore facilitate the South-South cooperation between China and a number of African countries. Commenting on the cooperation between FAO and China,
Qureshi said that the cooperation has always been excellent since the country joined the organization, and a total of 51 FAO projects have been carried out in China. "China is regarded as a country in which technical assistance, such as the one provided by FAO, is best utilized, absorbed and replicated before maximizing the impact of such technical assistance projects," he noted. He said the cooperation between FAO and China during the last few years has concentrated on food security, sustainable agriculture, credit extension, agricultural statistics and forestry.

China solves for agriculture, Sudan proves BBC, 07 (BBC Worldwide Monitoring, China to set up "model farms" in Sudan, lexis nexis, vc)
Eng Muhammad al-Amin Kabbashi, the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, lauded the intimate links with China in the agricultural sector. He expressed appreciation for China's role in bringing about a major transformation through the Green Revolution. He made the statement at the signature of an agreement to establish a model agricultural center in Sudan, one of 10 such centers in Africa where agricultural technology would be transplanted. Signing for Sudan was Dr Umar Abd-al-Wahab, Undersecretary at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Signing for China was Mr Jiang Jian [as heard] the head of the Chinese delegation which conducted the preliminary studies for establishing the center over an area of 100,000 feddans [1 feddan equals 1.038 acres]. They proposed the areas of Fao and Al-Jazirah for the project, within the framework of a grant from the Chinese government to serve as a model farm for the production of rice, wheat, and maize.

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China CP 1NC (2/2)

China comparatively better than US- More influence and better aid strategy BRIDGES 2006 (CHINA VOWS TO RAMP UP AID, INVESTMENT, TRADE WITH AFRICA, November
8, 2006, http://www.ictsd.org/weekly/06-11-08/story1.htm) Political and business leaders from China and several African countries vowed to expand trade and investment flows, as well as other forms of bilateral cooperation, during a 4-5 November summit in Beijing. In his opening speech, Chinese President Hu Jintao promised to double Beijing's current level of development assistance to African countries by 2009. In addition, he pledged USD 5 billion in concessional loans and credits over the same period along with a further USD 5 billion to set up a fund that will encourage Chinese businesses to invest in Africa. By some accounts China is already a bigger lender to the continent than either the US or the World Bank. Hu announced new debt cancellation initiatives and the extension of duty-free market access to more products from Africa's least-developed countries that have diplomatic relations with China. He also unveiled plans to train 15,000 African professionals and to support regional efforts to combat malaria and promote economic integration.

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On Case arguments

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No inherency
No inherency- there is already a program in place that does what the aff plan does. Mail and Guardian, 01 (Africas first online newspaper, South Africa; Millions Pumped Into Small-Scale
Farming, lexis nexis, vc) Agrilink, a project aimed at increasing employment opportunities in agriculture, has raised R11,3million to assist small farmers in acquiring skills that will enable them to compete with their more established counterparts in the commercial markets. The USAid-funded project was launched in October last year as a pilot in the Eastern Cape. Agrilink provides entrepreneurial and business skills training to small-scale farmers that includes business planning and management of finances and assets. Agrilink has set up strategies to improve productivity and development in the small-scale farming sector. It facilitates access to credit for emerging small farmers, who in the past had difficulty securing loans because of highrisk profiles. Agrilink project manager Ronald Ramabulana says the project's success in the Eastern Cape will have positive spin-offs for the rest of the country, particularly for rural areas where many people are engaged in small-scale farming for food security purposes. "There is a need for people to move beyond food security and take up farming as a business activity, not just to support their families but to compete with established farmers on the markets. "

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Adv Takeout: Poverty

Alt causes to low agriculture government, donor policies, land degradation. Marketing small farms not key. Southgate and Graham, 06 (Douglas, Douglas, specialists in environmental problems in developing
countries and agricultural development, August 9, From Subsistence to Sustainable Farming in Africa, http://www.sdnetwork.net/main/page.php?type=press&press_id=32, vc) The report examines three main problems behind low agricultural yields: Government policy: African governments largely have ignored the agricultural sector, often focusing on misguided attempts to industrialize. Poor infrastructure means that farmers have little access to inputs (such as fertilizer and pesticides) and also inadequate access to markets for finished products. Policies such as marketing boards, price controls, parastatal monopolies and punitive taxation have been used to benefit the politically connected elite, while farmers have suffered. Policy of international donor agencies: International donor agencies have done little to help African farmers. The report shows that in recent decades, donor agencies have been more likely to fund projects favoured by politically powerful NGOs in wealthy countries. Between 1986 and 2001, the amount of donor resources devoted to agriculture, forestry and fisheries declined from 27 to 10 percent of total donations. Land degradation: With much land already unsuitable for farming, subsistence farming takes an environmental toll, trapping much of the rural population in a downward spiral of land degradation and mounting poverty. When soil nutrients and moisture are depleted in one area, small-scale producers often move to less degraded land, including forested land. As a result, the proportion of forests being converted to agricultural use is greater in Sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region in the world.

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Adv. Takeout: Poverty

Alt cause to poverty conflict Tadjoeddin, 04 (Mohammad, graduate at the Institute of Social Studies, Jakarta Post, Conflict must be part of
poverty reduction strategy, lexis nexis, vc) First, in several poor regions like Gorontalo and East Nusa Tenggara, more than 30 percent of the population still live in poverty. Second, the national poverty figure of 17.6 percent does not include the conflict prone regions, namely Aceh, Papua, Maluku and North Maluku. This is because the survey could not be undertaken in those provinces for security reasons. Looking at the past data, poverty rates in Maluku (including North Maluku) and Papua in 1999 were extremely high, 46 percent and 55 percent respectively. The figures were more than twice the national poverty average at that time. Given the high incidence of poverty in conflict prone regions, can we link the effort to reduce poverty and the outbreak of violent conflict? Should conflict be seriously considered in a poverty reduction strategy? There is a growing international literature on the link between conflict and poverty. Most refer to cases in African countries, such as Rwanda, The Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, etc, where chronic poverty is regarded as a direct result of persistent conflicts and viceversa. However, it is still hard to find Indonesian literature on the subject although the country is facing the problem of conflict and poverty. Conflict analysis and its prevention should be considered as an important element in the poverty reduction strategy in Indonesia, beyond the traditional discussions focussing on how to identify the poor, how to target them, its fiscal consequences and so on. However this issue has not been properly addressed in the current draft of Indonesian Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). To begin with, the following questions need to be addressed. Does conflict cause poverty? Does poverty lead to conflict? Is there a two-way causation between poverty and conflict, leading to a vicious circle of "conflict -poverty -- conflict" or "poverty -- conflict -- poverty"? Violent conflicts have direct effects on poverty through the destruction of physical, human, and social capital, resulting in a disruption of productivity, heightened unemployment, social displacement and increased physical insecurity. These developments were basically what one could find in Maluku, for example. As can be seen in conflict prone areas in Indonesia, conflicts have created fresh poverty. A significant number of people have suddenly become poor. Part of the community directly affected by violent conflict will automatically fall below the poverty line, mostly due to the destruction of physical capital, loss of work due to disrupted economic activity or the loss of incomeearning family members. At the same time, poverty has also generated vulnerability. For example, most Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) quickly fall below the poverty line. According to the data compiled by the World Food Program at the end of 2002, there were 1.1 million IDPs from conflict prone regions, namely Aceh, Sambas, Sampit, Poso, Maluku, North Maluku, Papua and East Timor. They left their jobs and economic assets, and their social and cultural life was disrupted. They moved to new areas without any certainty about their future. Moreover, the IDPs also affect local inhabitants that live near their settlements as their presence often causes economic and social disharmony. On the other hand, poverty might also cause conflict. However, this direction of causality is not as obvious as the other way round. Although poverty might not be the root cause of major conflicts or rebellions in Indonesia, poverty can stimulate crimes that can escalate into a serious social problem. Lampung might be the best example for this case. Although this province is not widely considered a conflict-prone region like Aceh, Papua or Maluku, there is a significant level of violent conflict in Lampung, mainly in the form of spontaneous violence between villages, armed robbery and vigilantism. The social division between the native and migrant populations is often associated with groups involved in violent conflicts. A recent World Bank study on violence in Lampung, the poorest province in Sumatra, notes that poverty -- in relative, as well as, in absolute terms -- is an important underlying factor behind the violent conflicts in the region. Conflict is a central element that must be recognized in developing a poverty reduction strategy. Conflict is a barrier to poverty eradication. Conflict creates a situation where any kind of development interventions like social safety nets, rebuilding infrastructure and providing public services such as basic health and education would be less successful and less effective. Furthermore, conflict retards economic growth -- as many studies also suggest -- while growth is essential for poverty reduction. Parties committed to development and poverty reduction -- especially the government bodies, NGOs as well as donor agencies -- need to start addressing the barriers to their work. Dealing with conflict is essential to development as conflict must be seen in a broader context of development, rather than confining the issue within the security and political domain.

SDI 2007 5 Week

35 Agriculture Neg

Adv Takeout: Environment

Alt cause to environment degradation, population Browning, 06 (John, writer for the Richmond Times Dispatch,To Protect Environment, Control Population,
lexis nexis, vc) When a plumber arrives at a home to repair damage caused by a water leak, the first thing he does is turn off the water to prevent further damage from occurring. Similarly, if we really want to protect what is left of our environment, then the first thing we must do is eliminate the main cause of environmental destruction: population increase. The ongoing problem of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay is an example of how population increase will effectively negate all efforts to improve the environment.

Alt cause to environmental damage, war Japan Economic Newswire, 00 (July 17, NGO forum says war main cause of environmental destruction,
lexis nexis, vc) A five-day international meeting of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Okinawa Prefecture called for an end to all conflicts and the abolition of weapons Monday, saying war is the main cause of environmental destruction. The International Environmental NGO Forum wrapped up the meeting in Okinawa's capital Naha after adopting a declaration in which about 200 participants pledged to work toward making the 21st century peaceful and environmentally friendly, transcending a century of war and environmental destruction.

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36 Agriculture Neg

Adv takeout: Environment

New kinds of the tech solves for these environmental problems in pesticides The Globe and Mail, 88 (a Canadian English-language nationally distributed newspaper, based in Toronto and
printed in six cities across the country ,TECHNOLOGY Biological pesticide gets nod, lexis nexis, vc) Igene Biotechnology Inc. of Columbia, Md., says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has unconditionally approved its biological pesticide Clandosan for use in the United States. Clandosan is a non-toxic substitute for certain banned pesticides called nematacides. The company said commercial production will start at once, for use on lawn and turf grasses, in nurseries and on certain fruit, nut and vegetable crops. Clandosan makes use of a naturally occurring complex of protein and chitin, a polysaccharide found in the shells of crabs, shrimps, crawfish and other shellfish, that also acts as a slow-release fertilizer. The form approved by the EPA is not water soluble, reducing the risk of groundwater contamination from runoff.

New types of fertilizers solve New Agriculture Movement, 07 (, Giving natural nutrition to the earth,
http://www.coa.gov.tw/nam/suggest.php?issue=12016&id=12018, vc) What is the difference between biological fertilizers and traditional fertilizers? An analogy might help. The biological fertilizer is just like the home-made red bean soup that brings out the bean's natural flavor; however, the chemical fertilizer is like a canned red bean soup. A natural organic Fertilizer for vegetables You might enjoy the pleasant taste of red bean soup, but it is still an artificially processed product and isn't natural enough. If too much or inappropriate amounts of artificial additives were added in some cans, they could cause some damage to the body after some time. Fertilizers are a very important nutrient source during the growing process. It is like drinking the red bean soup to obtain some nutrition for humans. Would you like to give your crops the natural nutrient? Or artificial fertilizer? Around the world, agriculture is moving toward natural, safe and organic biological fertilizers. Serious soil acidification and ecological damage are the outcome of farmers' long-term use of chemical fertilizers on a large scale. With the growing sense of the green revolution, how to get along well with Nature and develop sustainable agriculture has become the common goal of the whole world and Taiwan is certainly not beyond this tendency. In fact, according to "A Study on the Agricultural Bio-tech Industry Output Value in 2004" of the Council of Agriculture, the output value of Taiwan's agricultural development in the biotech industry was estimated at NT$20.8 billion in 2004. And in eight categories, biological fertilizers'output has increased dramatically from NT$38.55 million in 2003 to NT$406.5 million in 2004,a growth of 10.5 times that surpassed other kinds of agricultural biotechnical categories. The biological fertilizer category was the industry leader. Besides, the number of manufacturers has reached 15. Although the proportion of the agricultural biotechnology's total output value is not high, its high-multiple growth reflects public demand and preference for a safe, natural agriculture. Manufacturers then invest more in production for catering to these demands.

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37 Agriculture Neg

Adv. Takeout: all other impacts

Many small-scale farmers use monocropping. The aff doesnt solve. The Times of Zambia, 05 (Africa News, Zambia; Management Practices, Vital in Crop Production, lexis
nexis, vc) Recently, many of these resources and farming technologies have been neglected leading to loss of some valuable hereditary diversity and quality crop production. If this situation is to be reversed this farming season and in the future, growers should take advice as to what management practices they should employ to exploit the potential of the crop. Most small-scale farmers in Zambia would do well to reduce hectarages planted to various crops and as an alternative plant manageable ones and apply management practices. As long as farmers continue planting large unmanageable hectarages, consequently not taught how effective technology is, the national average yields per hectare will continue being unreasonably low and deprive people of food. Pannar Quality Seed production manager Nicholas Mwansa lamented, "It is disappointing to note that after so many years of independence and agriculture extension programmes, most Zambian small-scale farmers continue to be conservative that is using outdated systems such as planting recycled or non-certified seeds, maintaining old methods of weed control, practicing monocropping and disregarding chemicals for weeds, insect pest and disease control". Mwansa noted that in a country where more than 80 per cent of the population largely thrives on agriculture, "It is also distressing to know that the adoption rates of modern farming technologies have been low".

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38 Agriculture Neg

Solvency takeouts
AFRICANS DONT WANT SMALL SCALE FARMING BBC Worldwide Monitering, 06 (news, information and comment gathered from the mass media around the
world, November 22, Namibia; Government Wants to Survey 2 500 Small-Scale Farms, http://www.lexisnexis.com/us/lnacademic/auth/checkbrowser.do?ipcounter=1&cookieState=0&rand=0.0094609843 40935785&bhcp=1, vc) Text of report by Brigitte Weidlich entitled "Government wants to survey 2,500 small-scale farms" by Namibian newspaper The Namibian website on 22 November Government intends to divide land into 2,500 small farms which have to be serviced, surveyed and provided with at least one borehole each, a government official said. What land would be divided was not specified. Speaking at a land reform workshop organized by the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) yesterday, Dr Nashilongo Shivute, undersecretary in the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement, said this process was very costly and the beneficiaries to be resettled there needed training in the field of commercial farming. "We even think of erecting a house each on those farms," Shivute said. "This project could however not yet materialize due to lack of funding," Shivute told the 30 participants. Several hundred of those farms would be in the communal areas, Shivute said, but residents living there could decide whether they wanted such small farms surveyed in their areas or not. "In the Oshana Region the communities said they did not want such small-scale farms, they did not agree to that," Shivute added.

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39 Agriculture Neg

USAID cant solve

Plan is against USAIDs ideals, it would try to promote its own GM crops in the process, killing solvency GRAIN, 05 (an NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based
on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge, USAID in Africa: For the American Corporations, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=331, vc) The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is officially the principal US agency for providing economic and humanitarian assistance to developing and transitional countries. However, such US foreign assistance has always had the central objective of furthering US foreign policy interests. USAID is very open about this objective, once claiming on their website: ... the principal beneficiary of Americas foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the USAID contracts and grants go directly to American firms. And when it comes to agriculture, there is one aspect that really does help certain US multinational companies - the spread of GM crops around the world.

USAID is so concerned with benefiting itself that the plans solvency would be weak GRAIN, 05 (an NGO which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based
on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge, USAID in Africa: For the American Corporations, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=331, vc) "From the American people says the USAID logo. A generous gift of financial aid from the American people. But in reality, the slogan should be saying For the American Corporations; USAID is more about imposing around the world a US philosophy, and in this case the US agricultural model and its genetically modified (GM) crops, that blatantly benefits US corporations. The US currently grows more GM crops than any other country with over 60% of the global GM area. The next country is Argentina with only a 20% share of GM crops, and the other 20% split amongst another 12 countries, though most of these countries grow such a small GM area, that they are statistically insignificant. It is therefore abundantly clear that a GM crop is very much also a US crop, forced upon the world by a handful of US corporations and universities with the backing of the powerful US government. The US government has been desperately trying to convince the world that the US agricultural model is best.

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40 Agriculture Neg

USAID cant solve

USAID only helps itself. Would not solve Lopez, 05 (Bernardo, UPSHOT column in BusinessWorld, UPSHOT; US control of global agriculture, lexis
nexis, vc) The USAID website candidly admits its role in controlling global agriculture: "The principal beneficiary of America's foreign assistance programs has always been the United States. (Programs) have helped create major markets for agricultural goods, created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans." Clearly, this is the mandate of USAID. After World War II, the US goal was to open up global markets for its surplus agricultural commodities. Due to globalization, there was a dramatic shift in strategy, from selling food to the world to controlling world food production itself (Source: gmwatch.org). "The US government has generally embraced these changes (in strategy) expanding the monopoly control of its corporations over key (food) sectors. GM crops are not just another technology for US agriculture; they are the front and center in US foreign policy, and critical to control over seeds." The root cause of poverty is the government, small farms are not enough to solve Vanguard Daily, 01 ( newspaper aimed at promoting knowledge and political stability, Nigeria; Politics Of Safety-nets And Poverty Eradication, lexis nexis, vc) The apparent failure of Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP), inaugurated in the first few months of Fourth Republic is a clear demonstration that the problem of absolute poverty in Nigeria is far beyond the question of money. In essence, money alone cannot eradicate absolute poverty in Nigeria. The failure of the present administration to acknowledge this fact cast serious doubt on its understanding of the Nigerian society and of course their understanding of the nature of poverty in the country. Absolute poverty in the country is structural, and it can only be taken care of structurally. I am by no means skeptical of Professor Gana's goodwill and sincere intentions towards the poor in Nigeria, or the genuine concern of the present administration to alleviate the unending sufferings of the masses. However, what the honourable minister probably failed to realize is the apparent conflict and lack of logic in identifying a problem and at the same time overlook its root causes. Earmarking the huge sum of N25 billion for what amounts to a safety-nets programme for the poor is a halfway process, which still lives the root cause of poverty untouched. At this stage in our national development, any effort towards eradicating absolute poverty should be inward looking. The key to eradicating absolute poverty is not in recreating or duplicating safetynet schemes, except perhaps, a sustained improvement of the lot of the poorest is out of the question. While we all wish that abject poverty could be a thing of the past in the country, this article wish to draw a correlation between poverty eradication and social justice in Nigeria. This view is framed around the proposition that, eradicating absolute poverty cannot be achieved in isolation of social justice. We must understand the fact that, there is a synergistic relationship between the type of poverty that is prevalent in country today and the activities of military and civilian scoundrels who have dominated affairs in the country for decades. Absolute poverty has persisted simply because, this group of criminals always get away with their perfidies. With no precedence in place with regard to invoking the full powers of the law on the miscreants of the past, subsequent administrators or politicians perceive public treasury as a resource to be plundered with impunity. And from our past experiences, there is no guarantee that the present N25 billion earmarked for the PES will be used judiciously for the benefit of the poor. Thus safety-nets programmes designed in theory for the poor has become a big industry for the ruling elite in Nigeria. This is now a tradition in every of government. Although the poverty eradication scheme planned by the present administration may free resources for programmes that may benefit the poor in the short-run, that does not provide any lasting answer to the problem of "absolute poverty" in Nigeria. Neither would it put an end to the endemic problem of ghost workers-a contributing factor to poverty in to country. Such programmes are only safety-nets programmes, which should not be confused with what the state is expected to deliver, namely social justice.

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41 Agriculture Neg

Plan would not be successful

The government always twists facts in their favor; the plan would not have any major results. Riedl, 02 (Brian, the Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary issues at the Heritage Foundation,
Twisting 'the facts', lexis nexis, vc) Now, policymakers want to convince the American people that we didn't just buy a lemon. Some in Congress are relentlessly promoting a new 12-page report produced by the House Agriculture Committee entitled "The Facts on U.S. Farm Policy" in hope of quieting the nationwide, bipartisan backlash the farm bill provoked. To understand why they're still glad-handing us, take a closer look at the legislation. With economic stagnation and a depressed stock market drying up the revenues needed to fight the war on terrorism, Congress voted to spend a record $180 billion on farm subsidies. Nearly three-quarters of these funds will go to the wealthiest 10 percent of farmers - most of whom earn more than $250,000 per year - or to such needy "farmers" as Ted Turner, Scottie Pippen, David Rockefeller and a dozen Fortune 500 companies. The average household cost: $4,400 in taxes and inflated food prices over the next decade. But you won't find that information when reading "The Facts on U.S. Farm Policy." Rather than attempt to provide a levelheaded, detailed defense of U.S. farm policy, this simplistic document succeeds only in insulting taxpayers' intelligence. Many government studies are thick, detailed analyses. Pages overflow with small print and footnotes designed to show the reader that the information is trustworthy. "The Facts," by contrast, looks like a campaign brochure. Rather than bore readers with details and data, it does the thinking for them with short, simple rhetoric placed on a background of bright colors with a glossy finish. Instead of backing up assertions with sources, footnotes or appendices, "The Facts" prefers inspirational quotations and pictures of ex-presidents smiling. But this slick design can't disguise an often comical lack of logic. For example, to prove that U.S. farm policy is geared toward real farm families instead of big agribusiness, the report cites the fact that foreign agriculture tariffs are high. Come again? "The Facts" claims that farm policy cannot be geared to big corporate agribusinesses because "[they] actually oppose U.S. farm policy." Of course, not one example is provided. Finding one would require looking beyond the corporate agribusinesses that spent more than $50 million lobbying Congress in favor of the farm bill, according to campaign finance watchdog Opensecrets.org. Even though the Congressional Budget Office puts the cost of farm subsidies at approximately $180 billion over the next decade [history suggests it could cost double that amount], "The Facts" lists farm spending at "only" $135 billion. What happened to the other $45 billion? The authors provide no calculations, sources or footnotes to tell us. They don't show much confidence in their $135 billion cost estimate, however, because the same page includes an annual breakdown of agriculture funding with a 10-year sum totaling $182 billion. The authors of "The Facts" also prefer ad hominem attacks to serious analysis. In a cartoonlike caricature, they decry "radical special interests" who don't want good public policy, but would rather employ "envy and 'divide and conquer' tactics" to push "agendas that the vast majority of Americans reject." Personal attacks are nothing new in politics, but most politicians stop personally attacking their opponents once they have defeated them.

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42 Agriculture Neg

Aid for agriculture fails

50-80% of agriculture projects fail. solving for only the marketing part of small scale farming not going to work. Mauro, 05 (Craig, freelance writer in Washington, DC, Peanut Project in Guyana Offers Valuable Lessons on
Development Aid, http://www.washdiplomat.com/November%202005/a5_11_05.html, vc) GEORGETOWN, GuyanaAfter 40 years in the development field, Jerry La Gra has a good idea of what it takes to make projects work in poor countries. La Gra, who specializes in agricultural projects mostly in the Americas, compares the process to fixing a chain. Lets say the chain has 20 links in it. If 10 of those links are broken, you can fix one, but youre still not going to have a whole chain. So you have to fix all the broken links, said La Gra, an American who has lived and worked in Guyana for more than a decade. Thats basically what we have learned over the past 40 years of trial and error. He estimates that at least 50 percent, perhaps as much as 80 percent, of agricultural development projects have failed. Most of those failures can probably be linked to projects where were focusing on one broken link, when the system maybe has 10 broken links, he said. La Gra is a coordinator in Guyana for an innovative project financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that is training peanut farmers in the countrys Rupununi region. The Peanut CRSP (Collaborative Research Support Program), as the project is called, is trying to move beyond simply improving the yields of poor farmers to establishing small cottage industries that produce peanut butter, thus increasing family incomes in an impoverished and remote area.

US donor projects dont work because they are fundamentally flawed. reasononline, 95 (the monthly print magazine of free minds and free markets. It covers politics, culture, and
ideas through a provocative mix of news, analysis, commentary, and reviews, Aid and Discomfort, http://www.reason.com/news/show/29756.html, vc) Perpetuating Poverty doesn't merely say that the foreign aid bureaucracy's diagnosis of and prescription for Third World ills is fundamentally flawed. It argues that the foreign-aid establishment doesn't seem to care that its policies don't work. Citing evaluations published by the agencies them selves, various contributors show that the institutions are aware of their own dismal performance records. In one report, cited by Bovard, the World Bank admitted that 75 percent of its agricultural projects in Africa were failures. Nonetheless, the agencies fail to adjust their lending behavior accordingly; indeed, their usual response is to increase aid. Nicholas Eberstadt offers a particularly eloquent explanation for this phenomenon: "To a disturbing degree, Western bilateral and multilateral aid agencies treat objectives and strategy as peripheral to the real business at hand. Throughout the so-called donor community there is a pervasive tendency to equate performance with 'moving money': to judge aid not by the effectiveness with which it is spent, but simply by the fact that it is spent."

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43 Agriculture Neg

Small farms dont solve

Small farms suck. Would not solve for anything. Byakola, 03 (Timothy, part of the Climate and Development Initiatives organization, The Fallacy of Genetic
Engineering and Smallholder Farmers in Africa, http://www.panna.org/resources/gpc/gpc_200304.13.1.06.dv.html, vc) In Africa some 60 million farmers, or 50% of the total farming population, live and work in areas of comparatively low agricultural potential,1 areas that are that can be classified as Complex, Diverse and Risky (CDR). These areas are often relatively remote, with no ready market for farmers' surplus production, and with no easy access to external farm inputs. They tend to have relatively infertile soils, lower and more variable rainfall and are often outside the plains and valley bottoms, so are prone to problems related to cultivation on steep and unstable slopes. Traditionally, these areas and the crops grown there have received little attention from the agricultural research institutions for a number of reasons: the potential returns for research are low in these areas;
it is difficult to produce results using formal sector agricultural research methods; and it is difficult to reach the large number of small farmers living scattered throughout these areas with any suitable innovations that have been developed. Accordingly, farmers in Complex, Diverse and Risky areas have developed highly diverse farming systems to cope with these constraints. They have tended to rely on their social relations within the local community and family connections for credit, agricultural information and access to new technologies, such as new varieties of seed. These farmers often have limited land, in cases where they have

access to large areas of land, almost invariably it is of low potential. They usually also have limited capital resources; much farm production does not enter cash market systems and what cash there is from crop sales must be used for other household needs. Many farmers are ineligible for credit, because they do not have titles to their land and/or
because they cannot repay loans in cash and/or because they do not want the modern production packages of which institutional agricultural credit generally consists. This kind of credit is often also available from local moneylenders, but usually at very high rates of interest. As a result, it is used only for emergency consumption needs. Thus, the only resource over which farmers have some control is labor. Even this may be in short supply for agricultural production. There is often a higher return to the household's most productive labor resources (mobile, adult males) in off-farm employment in towns or as migrant labor, so only the children, the old people and the women are left to work the fields. Women, in particular, face conflicting demands on their time from domestic chores such as water and fuel-wood collection, child care and food preparation.

Small farms dont solve, biotech key, Malaysia proves. Heng, 04 (Sim, writer for the New Straits Times, PM: Only hi-tech agriculture can ensure food self-sufficiency,
lexis nexis, vc) KLUANG, Thurs. - The agriculture sector needs to undergo a revolution if the nation is to become selfsufficient in food production and exports, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said. Opening the country's first large-scale integrated modern agriculture project here today, he said the Government would give its full support to any move to modernise agriculture. He said the advancement of agriculture could help enhance the living standards of the people, particularly of the rural poor. "But this is only possible if traditional farmers are willing to change their mindset and accept modern farming methods that promise high yields. "High technology is not only for the manufacturing sector. Very little is said about hi-tech agriculture, which is possible through the use of bio-technology," he said. Illustrating this point, he said a ciku fruit that weighs 500gm was only possible with the infusion of high technology. He [Badawi] said to remain competitive with other foodproducing countries in the region, Malaysia had no choice but to switch to hi-tech farming. "That is why this project in Air Hitam and Kluang is so important for the country. It is a positive move in the right direction to boost our agriculture output and reduce our annual food import bill," he said at the launch of a greenfield commercial farming project in Kahang, about 20km from here.

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44 Agriculture Neg

Small scale farming not sustainable

Organic/small-scale farming is not sustainable, empirical proof. Gee, 02 (Henry, editor of acclaimed science journal, Nature, Online: Science: The future on a plate: Organic
farming will not solve the crisis in food production, lexis nexis, vc) Organic farming is much the same kind of exercise. In the quest for sustainability, organic farming will lose, because it cannot be relied on to match the yields from intensive agriculture if practised on a large scale - whatever the perceived benefits. Organic farming only works if it is subsidised or marketed as a boutique product. Some may promote organic farming as a panacea - but they would have history against them. Mankind stumbled across agriculture more or less simultaneously in several parts of the world, but most successfully in the "Fertile Crescent", the home of what are still the world's most valuable domestic plant and animal species, including sheep, cattle, barley and wheat. The Fertile Crescent is a strip of land stretching from the Jordan Valley, across Syria and parts of Turkey and Iran, into the Tigris-Euphrates drainage, and Iraq. It doesn't look fertile any more, and the reason is simple - agriculture. After 10 millennia of tillage, says Diamond, "human societies of the Fertile Crescent inadvertently committed slow ecological suicide in a zone of low rainfall prone to deforestation, soil erosion and salinisation". Before artificial pesticides and fertilisers, organic farming was the only game in town. When practised on a scale sufficient to feed the world's first empires, the effort could not be sustained and the result was a desert.

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45 Agriculture Neg

Cant solve farms too scattered

These farms are so scattered that any significant solvency is impossible. Byakola, 03 (Timothy, part of the Climate and Development Initiatives organization, The Fallacy of Genetic
Engineering and Smallholder Farmers in Africa, http://www.panna.org/resources/gpc/gpc_200304.13.1.06.dv.html, vc) In Africa some 60 million farmers, or 50% of the total farming population, live and work in areas of comparatively low agricultural potential,1 areas that are that can be classified as Complex, Diverse and Risky (CDR). These areas are often relatively remote, with no ready market for farmers' surplus production, and with no easy access to external farm inputs. They tend to have relatively infertile soils, lower and more variable rainfall and are often outside the plains and valley bottoms, so are prone to problems related to cultivation on steep and unstable slopes. Traditionally, these areas and the crops grown there have received little attention from the agricultural research institutions for a number of reasons: the potential returns for research are low in these areas; it is difficult to produce results using formal sector agricultural research methods; and it is difficult to reach the large number of small farmers living scattered throughout these areas with any suitable innovations that have been developed.

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46 Agriculture Neg

Large farms key

Small farms dont solve, Africa needs commercial farming New Vision, 06 (Africa News, Uganda; We Should Move Faster to Commercial Farming, lexis nexis, vc)
A lot has been talked about the need to commercialise agriculture in Uganda and Africa in general. It is no longer disputable that peasant agriculture has immensely contributed to the lingering poverty in this country. But little do we interest ourselves with the reasons why there is no transformation from peasantry to commercial agriculture. Many reasons have been advanced to explain why Ugandans have stuck to peasant agriculture. Some have blamed colonial distortions and others post-colonial poor agricultural policies and programmes.

Small farms wont work, commercial farmers key AllAfrica, inc. 07 (a multi-media content service provider, systems technology developer and the largest
electronic distributor of African news and information worldwide, July 18, South Africa; Country 'Needs Skilled, Commercial Farmers', http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy2.cl.msu.edu:2047/us/lnacademic/results/docview/docview.do?risb=21_T18625 78149&format=GNBFI&sort=RELEVANCE&startDocNo=1&resultsUrlKey=29_T1862578152&cisb=22_T18 62578151&treeMax=true&treeWidth=0&csi=8320&docNo=5, vc) Subsistence and small-scale farming was useful, said Roos, but it would not sustain South African agriculture. "We must get away from the idea that African farmers do not need fertilisers. Why must African farmers be satisfied with producing half a ton of maize per hectare while they could be producing 10 ?" African governments favour small-scale farming because it is typically low in technology and a small capital investment allows more people to become economically active. High costs of commercial agriculture are a barrier to entry and the use of genetically modified organisms are seen to threaten access to export markets. In countries such as Zambia and Malawi, small-scale farmers provide most of their countries' domestic maize require-ments. African governments have been reluctant to tamper with this system, not least because this is where their political power lies. Roos dismissed these conditions as unsustainable. "Foreign investors are clamouring to invest in African agriculture but they need a hightech environment. Instead, we want it to be low-tech. It's just not going to happen."

Large farms are more productive than small farms The World Bank, 06 (five institutions that aim to fight poverty and improve living standards for those in
the developing world, Consensus, Confusion, and Controversy Selected Land Reform Issues in Sub-Saharan Africa, http://wwwwds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2005/11/30/000012009_20051130105411/Rendered/I NDEX/345150Consensu101OFFICIAL0USE0ONLY1.txt, vc) By acknowledging that small farmers often use their resources--however meager they may be--better than their larger counterparts does not mean that there are no disadvantages to being small. The main disadvantages of small farmers lie in more difficult access to credit, markets, and information-especially information about new markets and tech- nologies. Public and private agricultural research has often been biased toward developing technologies suitable to large farms, given their lobbying power and financial wherewithal. Larger farmers usually have easier access to cheaper credit. This enables them to quickly respond to the market, especially when the market demands agricultural products with high investment costs, such as for example, horticultural products. Small farmers are also at a disadvantage when the market demands large quantities of standard quality be produced at exactly the right moment. Coordinating such production may be easier to organize on a large farm, even if it means managing a large labor force. This applies to many of the "plantation crops," such as bananas, sugar, and tea. Hence, there do exist situations were medium and large farms are more productive than small farms.

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Large farms key

Even after factoring in the benefits of small farms, large scale farming is still the best option This Day, 05 (Africa News, Nigeria; 'Large Scale Farming Essential for Global Competitiveness', lexis nexis,
vc) Therefore the argument that efforts targeted at developing small-scale agriculture will ultimately lead to the development of the agricultural sector in Nigeria and a large population of Nigerians is valid. However, surviving in a world economy that is becoming increasingly globalised makes the need to build our nations competitive advantage an inevitable criterion for the survival of the nations economy. This is the point where the development of large-scale agriculture becomes compulsory. It is common knowledge in elementary economics that a lot of advantages abound in the production of any good, or service in a large scale. This is called economics of scale. Economics of scale creates a lot of advantages that invariably results in the ability of a large-scale producer to contend better in a competitive market environment. When you produce in large scale the unit cost of all your factors of production drops significantly, giving room for other activities that enhance productivity such as research and development and so on.

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Small farms bad Bird flu

Small farms make it difficult to stop the spread of bird flu Gulfnews.com, 06 (quality online news source with up to the minute breaking news from around the Gulf
region and the Middle East, Small farms make culling difficult, http://archive.gulfnews.com/indepth/bird_flu/more_stories/10026314.html, vc) Small farms make culling difficult. Mumbai: Health workers trying to stamp out an outbreak of bird flu in western India struggled yesterday to convince anxious villagers that chickens bred in their backyards must be slaughtered. Workers in pale blue protective gear had culled about 40,000 birds by late Thursday and were busy slaughtering another 35,000 birds, said S.M. Ali, an official in the animal husbandry department of Maharashtra state, where the outbreak occurred. Authorities were still awaiting results of tests to determine whether chickens from the Jalgaon district of Maharashtra have the virulent H5N1 strain of the disease. India's first outbreak last month of H5N1 bird flu was centred in large poultry farms. But the latest outbreak has hit small backyard farms, most with less than 20 chickens. "This time it's more difficult because teams have to find out if there are chickens in people's homes. But it's being done," Ali said. "We are using local leaders to convince villagers to give up their chickens." It was not clear whether the outbreak in Jalgaon and the one last month are related. Jalgaon is about 500km north of Bombay and more than 170km east of Nandurbar, where the first outbreak was centred. In addition to slaughtering birds, workers will also clear bird droppings and other waste in Jalgaon over the next two weeks, said D.K. Shankaran, the state's chief secretary. Health teams were also conducting checkups to rule out flu-like symptoms in villagers living in Jalgaon and surrounding areas. Bird flu has killed or prompted the culling of more than 140 million chickens and ducks across Asia since 2003, and has recently spread to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Bird flu could kill millions quickly Davis 07 (Mike Davis is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of The
Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu -- The Guardian (London) - February 7th lexis)
Just when most of us thought it was safe to go back into the water (or at least eat chicken and turkey), H5N1 raises its black dorsal fin and reminds us that it has unfinished business with the human race. Although hypotheses abound, virologists have yet to understand avian flu's enigmatic behaviour: burning like a wildfire one season, going to ground the next. However, since the original

outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997, one trend remains consistent: after each hibernation or disappearance, H5N1 re-emerges with its virulence intact and its geographical and species ranges extended. A decade of breakneck research, driven by the fear that another 1918 influenza catastrophe (50-100 million dead in three months, the most murderous event in human history) was close at hand, has provided little solace. The daring laboratory resurrection of the 1918 virus has shown that H5N1 may be only a few amino-acid substitutions away from acquiring transmissibility at pandemic velocity. A pandemic already exists among wild birds and domestic poultry, and we saw a terrifying demonstration of its spreading power during the winter of 2005- 06, when outbreaks emerged helter-skelter across western Asia, Europe and Africa - often with little clue as to the source of the infection. Now H5N1 has resumed its mysterious and seemingly irresistible
march with new human victims in China, Indonesia, Egypt and Nigeria, and a spectacular outbreak among English factory turkeys that raises troubling questions about the biosafety of the corporate poultry industry. The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, is grimly mobilising to confront imminent worst-case scenarios. The proposed response remains the same as last year: rely on local early-warning systems to quickly identify sustained human-to-human transmission and then squelch it with massive saturation of the exposed population with the antiviral Tamiflu. This strategy is based on a dubious perfect-world model of pandemic emergence and medical response, and is overwhelmingly contradicted by the WHO's own recent experiences in the field. In the first place, Roche's wonder-drug Tamiflu is no longer a magic bullet: several recent deaths in Egypt have been attributed to a Tamifluresistant strain and this resistance is likely to spread through the larger population of H5N1 subtypes. Second, the elaborate system of outbreak surveillance, immediate poultry slaughter, and isolation of human victims that has been painstakingly established in China, Vietnam and Thailand simply doesn't exist in many areas of recent outbreak, and will never come into being without a massive, urgent international effort. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, avian flu has simply flown off the radar screen. Nigeria is the current epicentre in the region only because a minimal surveillance effort exists. It is possible that large-scale outbreaks already rage elsewhere among poor Africans' ubiquitous chickens, but we will only know when their children start dying. Africa's vulnerability to a

new pandemic is horrifying, since avian flu would follow the grim furrows already ploughed by HIV/Aids. Infections synergise with one another: a macabre precedent is the case of the Indian subcontinent in 1918, where - thanks to pre-existing famine, malnutrition and malaria - pandemic influenza killed 10-20 million in less than three months. The prospect of a new plague unleashed in the shantytowns of Lagos, Kinshasa or Nairobi, in other words, is virtually apocalyptic; yet the avian flu researchers I have recently spoken to are more worried about the potential for a global pandemic to erupt first in the suburbs of Jakarta or elsewhere in Java.

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Disad Links

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Spending DA link
A huge increase in spending is necessary for solvency IFPRI, 02 (International Food Policy Research Institute, ENDING HUNGER IN AFRICA INTERNATIONAL
FOOD POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE sustainable options for ending hunger and poverty Only the Small Farmer Can Do It, http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/ib/ib10.pdf, vc) The optimistic scenario, by contrast, assumes that governments and donors modestly increase their investments in agriculture and make a greater commitment to policy reform. Crop and livestock yields would rise between 3 and 4 percent per year, and GDP would grow by 8 percent per year in some subregions. Africans would demand 20 to 30 percent more staple foods than in the baseline, and their meat consumption would increase another 56 percent. Per capita consumption of calories would rise to 2,990 kilocalories per day, and the number of malnourished children would drop to 23.4 million (a 40 percent reduction below the baseline projection for 2015). Per capita incomes would rise to almost three times the baseline levels. African production could supply the additional food needed through faster yield growth, and food imports in 2015 would actually total less than under the baseline scenario. Of course, this transformation would require additional investments in agriculture from the donor community and committed African leadership. The optimistic scenario requires an additional investment in agriculture and rural development (beyond current and projected allocations) of US$5 billion per year until 2015.These investment levels depart sharply from recent trends. For years, public investment in agriculture has been falling, not rising. World Bank lending for agriculture declined dramatically between 1980 and 2000, from about 31 percent of its total lending portfolio in 197981 to less than 10 percent in 19992000. Similarly, from fiscal year 1992 to 1997, USAID reduced its funding to agriculture programs from 10 percent of its total obligations to only 5 percent. It cut agricultural investments in Sub-Saharan Africa during that period by 57 percent, to about US$80 million (USAID Report to Congress on Title XII 1998). By 2000, African agriculture received less U.S. development assistance than any other sector.

Farming is very expensive, and the plan would cost a lot. The Post, 01 ( newspaper in Zambia, Zambia; Put Proper Policies, lexis nexis, vc)
Firstly, we have to see farming in general because, if we look closely, farming has become a very expensive venture for most people. Due to the restructuring programmes that have taken place in the farming sector, most ordinarily farmers cannot afford to buy farm inputs like fertiliser. It is simply too
expensive for most of the average families. Even if they decide to go for a loan, you find that at the end of the day they remain with a big debt to be settled because of the expenses involved. Farming levels have gone down considerably in the last ten years. Those whose

year's harvesting was more than one hundred bags of maize this time can only afford about fifteen to twenty bags while those who could manage fifteen to twenty bags of maize, this time they are going without anything because they cannot harvest anything even enough to feed themselves. To a larger extent, this is
because most people now cannot afford the cost of fertiliser which is too expensive for them. Secondly, we see that due to the high costs involved in farming, most people came to a conclusion that it is cheaper to buy maize from the people around rather than doing the actual farming. Think of the expenses in obtaining fertiliser, the labour costs and the time and risks involved, some came to that conclusion. I think these people should be feeling something when they see how expensive the maize is now. In addition, because of the expenses involved in growing maize, some farmers resorted to other crops which do not require fertiliser. This must have been a painful decision for them and the consequences for some people have been disastrous because at the end they needed food and they could not manage to buy using the little money they got after selling their cash crop like cotton, sunflower, soya beans or groundnuts. It has proved to be more difficult than they originally thought. They were faced with another major challenge, and that is to find a better buyer and how to transport their commodity to proper marketing centres. Most of these cash crops are sold at a give away price

because the farmer faces transportation problems and if they find transport it is too expensive for them. The only alternative is to sell at a give away price in order to have a bit of money for their basic essentials. Thirdly, we have to look at the marketing policy which has a very big disadvantage towards the farmer. The marketing force has turned against the poor farmer because he has no say over the value of his own commodity. The
price is dictated by the buyers who have become very exploitative more especially to those in the remote areas. The farmers have to be more united and cooperative to make sure that they take their produce where it can sale with profit instead of being exploited by the "briefcase buyers" who go round the villages looking for maize and other products and finally pegging their own prices. This is very unfair on the poor farmers who cannot manage to transport their products because they cannot easily access such profitable markets.

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PTIX links Plan popular

Plan is popular backed by both Republican and Democratic leaders. Riedl, 07 (Brian, a senior fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the
Heritage Foundation, The dirt on farm subsidies; A system that is supposed prevent food shortages and farmer poverty does neither. July 24, Los Angeles Times, pg. 17) Republican and Democratic congressional leaders rarely agree on a major issue. Yet both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) have gone on the record as opposing the current $25-billion farm subsidy system, which Congress is rewriting this month. Changing the system won't be easy. They will have to battle the powerful agriculture lobby and its allies on the House Agriculture Committee, who are once again employing Norman Rockwell imagery to assert that farm subsidies are an all-American necessity that ensures an adequate food supply and alleviates farmer poverty. But two seemingly arcane aspects of farm policy undermine both claims. First, farm subsidy eligibility is restricted to
growers of only a few crops. Second, once a farmer's eligibility is established, subsidies increase with the size of the farm. These make farm subsidies just another narrowly targeted corporate welfare program. On the first point, producers of just five crops -- wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice -- receive nearly all farm subsidies. In fact, only one-third of the $240 billion in annual farm production is targeted for subsidies. All other farmers -- including growers of fruits, vegetables, livestock and poultry -- receive nearly nothing. This raises the question: If farm subsidies are necessary to produce an adequate food supply with stable prices and thriving farmers, why haven't the growers of nonsubsidized crops experienced these problems? Walk into any supermarket and you will quickly find yourself surrounded by farm products, from apples to oranges, beef to chicken, that are produced and distributed without farm subsidies. Yet their prices and supplies are relatively stable, and the farmers' incomes are just as high as those of subsidized farmers. The free market works for all other farm production, and it can surely work for producers of wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice. These crop eligibility restrictions also undermine the second justification for subsidies: alleviating farmer poverty. If that were the purpose, there would be no reason to favor one crop over another. After all, lawmakers would never create a welfare program that was restricted to workers in certain industries. Creating a farmer poverty program that serves only growers of certain crops (regardless of income) makes no more sense. Today, a rice agribusiness can collect millions of dollars in aid while a low-income apple grower receives nothing. Furthermore, most farmers are not poor. According to the Department of Agriculture, the average farm household earns $81,420 annually and enjoys a net worth of $838,875 -- both well above the national average. Farm incomes are setting records, and the industry's business failure rate is among the lowest. Of course, some family farmers continue to struggle. But if subsidies were really designed to alleviate farmer poverty, then lawmakers could guarantee every full-time farmer an income of 185% of the federal poverty level ($38,203 for a family of four) for under $5 billion annually -- one-fifth the current cost of farm subsidies. Instead, federal farm policies specifically bypass family farmers. Subsidies are paid per acre, so the largest (and most profitable) agribusinesses automatically receive the biggest checks. Consequently, commercial farmers -- who report an average annual income of $200,000 and a net worth of nearly $2 million -- collect the majority of farm subsidies. Fortune 500 companies, celebrity "hobby farmers" and even some members of Congress collect millions of dollars under this program. These farm policies are more than merely ineffective -- they impose substantial harm. They cost

Americans $25 billion in taxes and an additional $12 billion in higher food prices annually. Environmental damage results from farmers over-planting crops in order to maximize subsidies. By undermining the nation's trade negotiations, subsidies raise consumer prices and restrict U.S. exports. Cotton subsidies undercut African farmers, keeping them in desperate poverty. And as Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," has written, farm subsidies contribute to obesity, rising healthcare costs and early death by subsidizing corn and soy (from which sugars and fats are derived) rather than healthier fruits and vegetables. Even small farmers are harmed. Excluded from most subsidies, they must endure the lower crop prices, higher farmland costs and industry consolidation that result from subsidies to agribusiness. Lawmakers would be hard-pressed to enact a set of policies more destructive to farmers, taxpayers, consumers, the environment, trade, global anti-poverty efforts and even our health than the current farm policies. Is Congress paying attention?

Plan is popular, supported by the bush admin and liberal dems. Dugger, 8/1/07 (Celia, The New York Times Media Group, U.S. aid rules impede the flow of food to Africa,
lexis nexis, vc) As the U.S. Congress debates an omnibus farm bill, it is considering a small change that advocates say could make a big difference to the world's hungriest people: allowing the federal government to buy some food in Africa to feed the famished, rather than shipping it all overseas from America. The Bush administration, with unusual support from liberal Democrats, has called for allowing the purchase of some food in poor countries to quicken responses to emergencies. But even so, its proposal would not have prevented the paradoxical deepening of hunger here during a long-term project to deal with the need for food in the harsh, arid reaches of northwestern Kenya.

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PTIX links - Plan not popular

Plan not popular, opposed by farm state legislators Dugger, 8/1/07 (Celia, The New York Times Media Group, U.S. aid rules impede the flow of food to Africa,
lexis nexis, vc) The Bush administration wants to change the law so that up to $300 million of food can be bought in poor countries during emergencies. Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, where growers and landowners got $1.58 billion in corn subsidies in 2005, is advocating a $25 million pilot program to test buying food in poor countries for both emergency and long-term aid. But even that modest proposal is meeting stiff resistance from farm state legislators. The House Agriculture Committee's version of the farm bill includes no such pilot. The committee chairman, Collin Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota, said of his members, ''They're still of the mode that this should be American products we're using our tax dollars to provide them.''

Plan not popular, largely opposed by dems in the House Agriculture Committee Beckmann, 7/6/07, (David, The Washington Times, Reform the farm bill; We can and must do better, lexis
nexis, vc) While foreign-affairs and national-security issues dominate the national headlines, another drama is unfolding in Congress that has all the makings of a national morality play. Last Thursday, the House Agriculture Committee passed its version of the 2007 farm bill. Later this week, that bill will go to the House floor along with amendments to improve it. The outcome of those floor votes will give the nation a clear indication of whether this Congress can rise above special-interest politics and direct taxpayer dollars to people who really need help. The initial indicators are not encouraging. The bill that came out of the Democrat-controlled Agriculture Committee last week is a status-quo bill. It was crafted primarily to serve special interests rather than meet the most pressing needs in rural America or do what we can to reduce hunger in our society.

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Uniqueness -- Chinese influence is growing in Africa now because U.S. interference is low -- Aid is key Boston Globe, 6/03/2007 (Into Africa - As China becomes a major influence in Africa, it faces mounting resistance and a
profound dilemma: How does a nation devoted to nonintervention become a global power? Lexis)

A more confident Chinese leadership has chosen to demonstrate its appeal first in parts of the developing world, which offers a blank slate for Beijing, since most people in the developing world know little about Chinas record on human rights. Certainly, Chinese leaders also must have realized that Africa was a low priority for the United States, and if China could play a major role in Africa, it could stake its claim as a great global power, able to influence events far from its own neighborhood. Not coincidentally, Africa also offered a battleground with Chinas bitter rival Taiwan, along with untapped natural resources ? West Africa alone contains more than 80 percent of new global oil reserves. Chinas aid programs have been critical to its charm offensive in Africa. From almost nothing a decade ago, the country has emerged as probably one of the five biggest donors on the continent, and at a summit last month, Chinese leaders announced they would offer Africa $20 billion in new financing. Unlike some Western donors, Beijing does not insist on economic or political reforms in exchange for aid. Chinas new, more savvy diplomats ? one 2005 report said half of Chinas foreign service were 35 years old or younger ? take pains to advertise Beijings largesse. Some of Chinas aid explicitly goes to programs to soften its image. While the United States has created fortress-like embassies and retreated from public diplomacy, Beijing promotes Chinese culture and language across the African continent. It has done so by creating Confucius Institutes in places like Nairobi, and Chineselanguage programs at leading local universities. As the United States once did with the Peace Corps, China has begun to emphasize people-to-people contacts, for example launching a program to bring idealistic young Chinese to developing nations for volunteer projects. If one nation-state is able to make its power appear reasonable in the eyes of another people, then its desires will encounter less resistance, mused Wang Huning of the Central Committees Policy Research Office.

LINK -- THE PLAN CAUSES HOSTILE U.S.-SINO RESOURCE COMPETITION IN AFRICA Eisenman and Kurlantzick May 06 (Joshua, Assistant Director of China Studies at The Nixon
Center, Joshua, Fellow at the USC School of Public Diplomacy and the Pacific Council on International Policy, Chinas African Strategy, Current History, Vol.105 Iss. 691 Pg. 219) Even as the United States has largely ignored African nations in UN forums, China has supported a range of proposals favored by African countries on UN security Council reform, peacekeeping, and debt relief. In so doing, Chinese officials often portray Beijing as a champion of the developing world that listens to other countries, drawing an implicit contrast with the United States, which China portrays as uninterested in developing nations' needs. As Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao put it, "As a permanent member of the UN security Council, China will always stand side by side with developing countries in Africa and other parts of the world." Yet Beijing's influence must be weighed in light of the fact that China, at least for now, does not share American values of democratization and good governance-in Africa or anywhere else. Because China's influence might constrain the existing powers in Africa, including the United States and France, the temptation may be to match some of China's efforts on the continent in order to win resources. But it is more important that the United States leverage its values, which are still more appealing to average Africans. For the United States, China's growing role in Africa should be a wakeup call. Washington needs to convince both average Africans and their leaders that their future is better served, over the long term, by working more closely with the United States, the European Union, and international financial institutions. After all, a Chinese victory on the continent could come back to haunt the struggling residents of Maputo and other African capitals.

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RESOURCE COMPETITION IN AFRICA UNDERMINES RELATIONS, CAUSING WARS, ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION, AND ECONOMIC COLLAPSE Heinrich Kreft, Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the CDU/CSU Parliamentary Group in the German Bundestag,
Former Deputy Head of Policy Planning and Senior Strategic Analyst of the German Foreign Ministry, Hoover Institute Policy Review, Oct / Nov, 2006 (http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4824886.html)

Chinas energy diplomacy China is responding to these challenges by pursuing a global energy policy on several fronts. The aim is to enhance the countrys energy security so as to reduce its vulnerability to fuel shortages or price shocks. The end result is a zerosum energy strategy based on a strongly neomercantilist approach and aimed at acquiring direct control over overseas oil and gas reserves. This is to be achieved first through the purchase of foreign oil and gas fields by the three major Chinese oil companies, cnpc, Sinopec, and cnooc, and second through the conclusion of pipeline agreements with neighboring countries providing for oil and gas to be supplied directly to China. Beijings proactive energy diplomacy seeks to forge closer ties with leading oil and gas exporters through an extensive program of two-way visits and financial and economic assistance aimed at expanding trade and intensified military contacts. The main focus of this diplomatic drive is, of course, the Persian Gulf, along with Central Asia, Russia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as, more recently, Canada. As a result of these efforts, the Chinese government has concluded strategic energy alliances with at least eight countries over the past five years. The results of Chinas energy diplomacy are being watched with growing unease, especially in Asia but in other parts of the world as well. In many quarters the dramatic increase in oil prices is attributed to Chinas huge and growing appetite for fuel. It is certainly true that the 14 percent rise in Chinas demand for fuel in 2004 alone contributed to the latest hikes in oil prices. Nevertheless, China accounted for only around 30 percent of last years 2.8 million bpd increase in global oil demand, a figure in line with its average contribution to the rise in global oil demand over the past decade. Between 2000 and 2004 demand for oil in China rose by 1.5 million bpd, only slightly above the 1.3 million bpd increase in U.S. demand. This strong growth in world demand for oil is due first and foremost to the economic recovery under way since mid-2003. The main reason for the current high oil price is the lack of new production capacity coupled with continuing refining bottlenecks. Another aspect of Chinas drive for energy security may be of greater significance. One element of Beijings neomercantilist oil strategy is its attempt via Chinese oil companies to gain direct control of oil production in major oil-exporting countries. The aim is to ensure that the output of oilfields under Beijings control is exported directly to China and not sold on the world oil market as the output of most oil multinationals is. If China succeeds in the attempt to meet its energy needs by turning certain countries into its own exclusive suppliers, the capacity of the world oil market to respond flexibly to sudden shortages or increased demand will be significantly reduced. The 197374 oil shock taught the Western industrialized countries that playing a zero-sum game in a crisis merely makes matters worse, as the effect is to diminish the markets scope to respond to oil shortages flexibly and efficiently. It was due to this insight that the iea was established with the aim of preventing a scramble for oil that would pit one country against another and cause only worse shortages and even higher prices. The main focus of Western strategy ever since has been to diversify oil production and ensure that as much as possible reaches the world oil market, where allocation is regulated by market forces. There is a danger that Chinas neomercantilist strategy to bolster energy security by gaining direct control both of oil and gas fields and supply routes could result in escalating tensions in an already volatile region that lacks regional institutions for conflict resolution and is in the midst of a difficult transition process, which is due in fact to the rise of China. Competition for energy is exacerbating existing rivalries between China and a number of its neighbors. For some time now, China and Japan have been engaged in intense diplomatic efforts to secure their own preferred routes for a new Russian pipeline to bring oil from eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast. They are also embroiled in a dispute over a small offshore gas field in the East China Sea to which both have laid claim. These issues have heightened existing tensions between Tokyo and Beijing and caused a further deterioration in their relations. To view this scramble for energy as a purely Chinese phenomenon would be mistaken, however. (cont.)

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There is abundant evidence for the spread of a virulent form of energy nationalism right across Asia, which is fueling long-standing rivalries. To enhance the security of fuel imports and supply routes, all of Asias major economic players alongside China Japan, India, and South Korea and, increasingly, a number of Southeast Asian countries as well have opted for neomercantilist and/or nationalistic policies that hinder the emergence of cooperative and marketoriented approaches aimed at developing joint responses to the energy security problem, which for all of them poses a similar challenge. Chinas increasing reliance on foreign oil imported from unstable regions over huge distances via sea lanes that are difficult to control has had a notable impact on its military planning. According to some Western experts, Beijing is intent on expanding its naval capacity well beyond what is required to protect its coasts and the Straits of Taiwan. In support of this view they point to the sizable submarine fleet Beijing has built up as well as its efforts to conclude agreements on the use of port facilities along the tanker routes in the South China Sea and in Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Such moves could cause friction if China fails to seek cooperation with other Asian countries with similar concerns and above all the United States, on which, at least until the second half of the century, the security of the worlds sea lanes will depend. Through its active energy diplomacy, China has in recent years become a major actor in a large number of commodity- and energy-rich countries and regions. It has concluded energy alliances with and in many cases invested heavily in a whole series of international pariahs, including Sudan, Iran, Myanmar, Venezuela, and Uzbekistan. Chinas largest investments in the outside oil sector are in Sudan. Beijing has been accused of undermining the un sanctions imposed on Khartoum in response to massive human rights violations in Darfur and opposing moves to increase their severity and scope. In Myanmar China is continuing to expand its activities; with Uzbekistan it recently concluded a deal on substantial investments in the countrys energy industry; and with Venezuelas populist and anti-American President Chavez it has signed a strategic energy alliance. Looking beyond oil to commodities in general, it is striking to see what efforts China is also putting into intensifying relations with Robert Mugabes Zimbabwe, another international pariah. This clearly runs counter to everything the international community is doing to promote respect for human rights and good governance. In the medium term, Chinas efforts to enhance its energy security are likely to increase its influence in the Middle East. This will pose a challenge to U.S. dominance of this part of the world and further complicate the already difficult relations the U.S. has with a number of countries in the region, notably Iran, as the current dispute over Irans nuclear ambitions also viewed in Europe as a threat has amply demonstrated. Even today almost two-thirds of Middle East oil is destined for Asia, a trend likely in future to become still more marked. A number of Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, are following Irans example and actively expanding their relations with China in order to reduce their one-sided reliance on the United States. Another important focus of Chinas energy diplomacy is Russia and Central Asia. The new Sino- Russian rapprochement of recent years has been driven partly by Chinas interest in Russian armaments but mainly by its insatiable appetite for energy. From Moscows point of view, the current Sino-Japanese competition for Russian oil (and gas) greatly enhances its prospects for an Asian comeback. Given its concerns over Chinas new stature and growing economic and political clout as well as the pressures exerted on Siberia and throughout the Far East by Chinas expanding population, Moscow is determined to employ its energy trump card as effectively as possible. That is the real motive for Moscows decision to pipe its oil to the Pacific coast through its own territory, a decision that caused visible frustration in Beijing even though Moscow has now agreed to build a branch pipeline to China. China meanwhile, keenly aware of the vast energy reserves of Central Asia and mindful of the stability of the five Central Asian countries and the importance of securing its fuel imports from the region, has been steadily expanding the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. It has invested heavily in the Khazakh energy sector and recently outbid an Indian company for the Canadian-based PetroKazakhstan. Together with Kazakhstan, Beijing is in the process of building a large pipeline to western China. What is to be done? Chinas rising demand for oil and Beijings drive for energy security are a political challenge of global dimensions. Failure to persuade China of the need for a cooperative approach in this area could have disastrous consequences not only for the environment, and especially the world climate (global warming), but also for the vitality of the world economy, stability and peace in Asia and elsewhere, and indeed the international order as a whole. China clearly needs assistance if it is to improve energy efficiency and make greater use of renewables, for that is the only way to check the soaring rise in energy consumption, the main cause of the prevailing sense of insecurity about the nations fuel supplies.

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Seen in this light, it would be important to explore ways of encouraging China to have greater confidence in the world oil market and view it as a cooperative alternative to its neomercantilist energy diplomacy, for the danger of its current strategy is that the efficient functioning of the market could be undermined in the medium term to the detriment of all concerned. Thought should likewise be given to how best to integrate China into global arrangements for collective oil stocks and reserves management, in which the iea plays a pivotal role. At key locations along its eastern coast, China is planning to build four new oil depots, which will be used to store part of its strategic reserve. It would surely make sense for China to coordinate these efforts and its contingency plans with the iea so as to ensure that these reserves are put to the best possible use in the event of a crisis. One way to address the security implications associated with the trend toward energy nationalism in Asia might be to develop regional energy institutions to promote multilateral energy projects and regional cooperation. Various existing institutions apec, arf, and asem could provide a platform for a really useful dialogue on energy and offer the further advantage that their membership includes players from outside the region, such as the U.S. and the eu, which have a stake in the regions stability. A whole series of initiatives are under way aimed at involving China in international cooperation in the energy sector (g8, notably Gleneagles and follow-up; eu, notably the eu-China summit; a host of bilateral activities, also by Germany, on renewables; the International Energy Forum under iea auspices). These efforts must be taken forward with all possible speed, for the challenge posed by Chinas appetite for energy is a challenge of global dimensions. If energy issues are not dealt with by constructive cooperation, or if cooperation fails, the risk is high that they will become a source of competition, misperceptions, mistrust, and excuses for obstructing one anothers interests. If Beijing believes that the U.S. and others are trying to use energy politics as a means to contain China, then it should not be surprising that it will be trying to use its growing energy influence to undermine Western foreign and security policies. This could include increasing hoarding of oil and gas fields and supplies, even closer ties to and ever more investments in pariah states, the promotion of security cooperation with anti-Western governments, and possibly a politization of global energy markets. Such an environment could very well increase the influence of hard-liners within the Chinese leadership who perceive the U.S. as a threat to Chinas rise and want to increase military strength and in particular develop blue water capabilities in order to challenge the U.S. control of the sea lanes of communications through which Chinas growing imports of oil (and lng) are flowing and generally decrease American influence in the region. Such a move would greatly concern other Asian powers from Japan and South Korea in Northeast Asia, over the asean countries in the Southeast, to India in South Asia. Not only an arms race, but a wide range of negative outcomes could be imagined. Therefore, it is in the best interests of all China, the U.S., European and Asian countries to try to understand each others energy insecurities and develop new ways for cooperation.

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China DA Uniqueness
China doesnt perceive the US as playing a major role in Africa Brea, 06 (Jennifer, writer on the political and economic development of Africa, China turns towards Africa,
http://jenbrea.typepad.com/africabeat/2006/07/china_turns_tow.html#more, vc) China's interests in Africa have long been known, but in the last six months, there has been an amazing proliferation of "China goes to Africa" articles in the international media. While the rest of the world often views Africa in the context of a donor-recipient relationship, China views Africa as a central part of its strategic plan, most notably for its oil reserves (Chinas demand for oil far outstrips its supply) and for its markets for manufactured goods. The Chinese perceive American influence in Africa to be less entrenched than it is in the rest of the world, thus offering unique opportunities for China to pursue its economic interests. China perceives increase USAID as a threat

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The affirmative views famine as a failure in technology and assumes that further management is the only potential solution however it is modernity itself which produces the conditions for famine the affirmatives strategy of aid only engages in a form of biopolitical control which makes the existence of persons in Africa bare life Edkins, Fellow at the Department of International Politics at U of Wales, 2000
(Jenny, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid, page: xv-xvi gjm) Famines seem anachronistic. They appear to belong to an era more primitive and less technologically advanced than our own. During the Ethiopian famine of the r98os there was surprise that a crisis of this sort could take place at all in the twentieth century. It seemed biblical in its scale and imagery. Famines are seen as failures of development and modernization and, what is more, failures that can be overcome by progress and more advanced technology. There are disagreements as to where the difficulty lies, whether in the agricultural system, in economic distribution, or in population growth. There is even recognition that political breakdown can cause famines, too, and that what we find these days are not famines as much as "complex political emergencies." But whatever the nuances of emphasis, there is widespread agreement that what is at stake is how we are to refine and improve our techniques for the analysis and management of famines in the light of these difficulties. Famines are seen as technical problems that modern social and natural science will eventually resolve. In this book I take issue with this position. Famines in the contemporary world are not the antithesis of modernity but its symptom. What this means is that rather than being something that modernization will solve, famines are produced by and symptomatic of modernity. Modernity are a distinctive form of life and a particular way of Resolving the questions that being human entails. It is a way of life that involves historically contingent political formations and a specific regime of truth. The political systems of modernity revolve around the legal authority of the sovereign state, with its corresponding view of the individual as citizen. This configuration of politics has been called "biopolitics," and the form of life to which the citizen is reduced has been called "bare life."-3 In the modern era, bare life becomes central to the calculations of state power. Sovereign power is concerned with the governance of populations and biological life. No longer is a politically qualified life the subject of politics, but life itself, as opposed to death. In this sense, politics is depoliticized: we are concerned with the preservation of life as such, rather than the continuance of a specific political way of life. Aid processes treat lives to be saved as bare life, not as lives with a political voice. Modernity's regime of truth is based on scientific method. What makes knowledge legitimate (and powerful) in the modern world is not tradition or divine authority but a particular scientific mode of validation.4 In a Westernized modernity, truth no longer derives from religious faith. What counts as true is what scientific research can demonstrate. This is a particular mode of knowing: calculable, generalizable, and objective. Not only are contemporary understandings of famine produced in this way, attempts at ending hunger are also framed within the same discourse. Both the problem of famine and its solutions are constituted within the horizons of modernity.

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Representations of famine allow it to be removed from any historical context the labeling of the 1AC justifies victimization which deprives the people of sub-Saharan Africa a political voice justifies control of populations and inaction Edkins, Fellow at the Department of International Politics at U of Wales, 2000
(Jenny, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid, page: 53-55 gjm) The constitution of famine as a disaster has certain power effects, as Barbara Hendrie points out. Narrating famine in this way produces it as an event and "enables it to be detached from its embeddedness within a set of historically specific and locally based economic and political processes." This decontextualization is what I am calling depoliticization or technologization. The specificities of time and place can be bracketed out and famine can be removed into "the realm of regulation and control by humanitarian institutions."' Or rather, because the regime of truth of modernity is based around a scientific form of knowledge

that seeks generalizable, universal laws, famine, in all its specificity and with all its "disturbing implications"6" must inevitably be seen as a disaster if it occurs in modernity. The alternative, as I have argued, is to regard it as

anachronistic and not part of the modern. Either way, famine is technologized. Famine as failure, as disaster, produces victims. Victims need welfare provision or aid, not a political voice. Vulnerable or at-risk households are produced as subjects on whom data can be collected. They are then controlled by administrative mechanisms of food distribution or food aid. The process depoliticizes famine and constitutes it as a site for intervention and control. The "famine as failure" narrative has a role in the reproduction of the international system. It is deeply enmeshed in the third world/ first world discourse. The solution to the problems of Africa, for example, is seen as coming from the benevolence of the economically rich countries of the North. Africa is produced as a region that is almost depoliticized by virtue of its status as a recipient of advice, concern, and aid, and existing global structures of power are buttressed. Famine is technologized. Neither food shortage nor entitlement theories provide a historical account nor explore the processes of change that occur during a famine. Preventing famine, as a technical malfunction, favors expert knowledge and expensive (and profitable) technological solutions. It is linked with the centralization of power/knowledge in international organizations or research institutes. In Foucauldian terms, the science of famine produces the starving Subject as a subject of knowledge within a regime of truth
produced by the institutions and practices of development studies. The coping strategies of households in famine situations are Studied; victims of famine and refugees from famine are interviewed categorized, and counted. The numbers that died in a particular famine are counted, though how this is possible when conditions in famines are often such that there is eve no means of burying the deat, we are left to imagine. A second point of intersection that food shortage and entitlement theories share is

that they both see famine as something with a cause. The problem of famine is situated as a question suitable for theoretical investigation by, in a broad sense, the scientific method. The modern episteme is characterized by its reliance on separation of subject and object, theory and practice, and its choice of quantitative methods. This way of thinking produces a discourse that distances the emotional, humane response and prioritizes the search for causation over the need to respond. Theorizing and empiricizing famine make it the terrain of the expert, the agriculturalist, and the development specialist, just as war can become the terrain of the defense expert, the strategist, and the military commander. Only the experts can tell us how the problem can be tackled and what mechanisms are at work.6'- The reliance on experts produces institutions devoted to the production of knowledge about famine within the framework of progress-oriented discourse. Hard facts are sought, and famine is excluded from political debate. As Kirsten Hastrup points out, this reliance on experts and technical solutions represents a gendered approach.
When famine is looked at in scientific terms, any connection with pain, suffering, or the body is taken away. The relationship between persons is removed. Other approaches, as we shall see in the final chapter, locate famines precisely in this relationship: a relationship between winners and losers. They move beyond the view' of famine as a failure and look instead at the functions of famine and those who benefit from it.

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Furthermore, Attempts to remedy food shortage collapse into a form of bio-political control which assure the destruction of the subject once the affirmative begins its strategy of calculation the persons of sub-Saharan Africa become expendable we should instead reject the affirmatives depictions of famine Edkins, Fellow at the Department of International Politics at U of Wales, 2000
(Jenny, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid, page: 37-39 gjm)
I have argued so far that modernity involved a move from a view of food as socially defined (and defining) to food as fuel for the human organism-a biological view. In Malthus this translates into a vision of survival as a

battle to conquer scarcity, where human technology is pitted against the laws of nature. In modernity conflict is no longer a question of the resolution of political issues or questions concerning how society should be organized. It becomes a contest between man [humans] and nature, and political issues are translated into biological terms; for example, it is a question of resources. This, as Foucault and subsequent writers have argued, is a move to biopolitics, where what is at stake is control of the biological existence of human beings, not their political organization. Giorgio Agamben builds on and extends Foucault's analysis of
governmentality and biopolitics.loz Agamben argues that since Aristotle "politics" has been founded on a separation between zoe (bare life) and bios (a politically qualified life). He describes "bare life" as common to all living beings, but bims as a form of living proper to an individual or a group, a particular way of life. Originally, zoe or bare life was excluded from the polis and confined to the home. Foucault analyzes the transition at the t threshold of the modern era when bare life was included in the mecha_n i s m s M i d calculations of state power. At this point politics needs :I new name to distinguish it from what went before: biopolitics. Whereas for Aristotle, man is a living animal with a capacity for political existence, in modernity [hu]man has become "an animal whose politics calls his

existence as a living being into question." Modernity is the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society's political strategies. There has been a transition from a territorial state to a state of population-rather than governing territory, the state governs people. For Agamben the concentration camp is the exemplary space of modern biopolitics. The famine relief camp is another site, albeit less appalling, where biopolitics is installed. In the relief camp the authorities' concern for
death rates and the bureaucracy of organization obscures any awareness of the refugees' own social and political aims. With the constitution of the modern sovereign state, life as such is reduced to calculability. It becomes bare life, which is "the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed. " 15 This figure of homo sacer has an essential function in modern politics: it becomes "the one place for both the organisation of state power and emancipation from it."'6 Humanitarianism is an example of how sovereignty is maintained
1 4

by the very forces that appear to contest it. Humanitarian action is complicit in the reproduction of sovereign politics, since it maintains the very separation upon which sovereignty depends: The separation
between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organisations ... can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. 107 Famines in modernity

are seen as episodes of mass starvation, where thousands lose their lives for lack of food. Humanitarian aid provides food and the means for bare survival. Life alone, bare life, is what matters, not the continuance of a particular way of life. In a nonmodern view of famine this is not so: preservation of a way of (political) life is vital. ** edited for gendered language **

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Finally, this technological control justifies a form of rationality which justifies the worst atrocities in history control of the political and physical body is the root of ethnic violence and imperialism Athanasiou, Social Anthropologist at the University of Thessaly, 2003
(Athena, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14.1, project muse gjm) The challenge, following Foucault, is to rethink technology not as a singularly constituted and reified instrumentality, but rather as a plural, dispersed, and discontinuous engagement as it is enacted in the following registers: biopolitical technologies, whereby an archive of political rationalities, knowledges, discourses, and practices seek to govern both the individual human body and the welfare of population; technologies of the body, whereby at stake is not (or is not only) the memorable image [End Page 144] of
Foucaults publicly tortured body of the condemned in Discipline and Punish, but rather the management of the desiring bodys life and agency; and technologies of the self, which permit individuals to act upon themselves and constitute themselves as (intelligible) self-governing subjects. As Foucault has shown, what is technological about

such modalities of technology is their performative ability to incite into discourse, to call forth desires and prohibitions, and to bring intelligible figurations of human subjectivity into being. As Ronell puts it,
technology has produced man as subject and world as his object (217). The globalized political investment in subjects does not wipe out the modern histories of differentiated subjects as viable or disposable according to certain standards of intelligibility, including class, economic resources, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. If there is anything new about the technoscience of Western postmodern biopolitics, it would be that it complicates, decentralizes, proliferates, and intensifies the differentiation of power involved in the definitions, images, fantasies, and representations of humanity and its thinkable demarcations. Paradoxically, biopolitical discipline tends thus to be less visible,

more subtly dispersed and systematically integrated in the discreet banality of cultural fabric, despite the proliferation of electronic, virtual, digital, and other technologies of surveillance and visual media. This dispersion does not imply that contemporary biopolitics entails necessarily less authoritative violence, but rather that it involves a multitude of recognized and misrecognized techniques of violence through which the conditions of human intelligibility and livability are instituted and confirmed. In the horizon of postcold war biopolitics, the conceptual and political distinctions between criminal and symbolic violence, welfare and warfare, as well as between fatality and legality, are brought into crisis. It is in a genealogical mode that I look at the constitution of epistemes, identifications, discourses, disciplinary techniques, and power practices in the Europe of modernity and postmodernity, in the Europe of humanism, inhumanness, and posthumanity. By epitomizing critical variables of the modern facticity, such as transparency and self-evidence, quantitative formalization came to be indispensable to the emergence of national population in the European eighteenth century as a thematized object of scientific inquiry and administrative control, governmentalized through the phenomena of birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, patterns of hygiene and habitation. Made possible by the late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century epistemological emphasis on standardized quantification, the authority of referentially anchored calculative and [End Page 145] classificatory logic remains part of an imaginary in which numerical normalcy is a crucial characteristic of any nation-state worthy of the name.
The contemporary instances of obdurate enmity between the nation-state and its Others, whether insiders (disenfranchised ethnic, religious, or other minorities) or outsiders (demonized strangers or foes) ought to be viewed, I suggest, not as irrational expressions of innate primordial sentiments, but as political phenomena grounded in modern rational collective imaginations deeply concerned withtechnologically mediatedbiopolitical enumeration and ascription. Not only the highly mediatized explosion of ethnic conflicts in the post-socialist Balkans during the past decade (such as the recent shambles of Kosovo following Yugoslavias demise and the disastrous involvement of the international coalition of the West), but also the smaller-scale and anonymous everyday crimes of xenophobic animosities against guest-worker and immigrant populations in various European capitalist democracies expose the enduring logic of categorical objectification and taxonomic reification in the age of transnational time-space flexibility and unboundedness. The ethnonationalist politics of rape, the ethnic cleansing and bloodletting during the war in

Bosnia-Herzegovina, but also the anti-immigration politics plaguing an increasingly if unevenly integrated postnational Europe are expressions and mutations, but not aberrations, of this powerful truth regime.