Day: July 5, 2000

Species Preservation and Animal Rights

    The animal rights activists tend to hate the idea that animals are considered property, but property rights-based plans for managing endangered species are the most likely to produce long-term success. Whether assigning property rights to individuals or, more commonly, to communities, property rights schemes promote the viability of a species by making it in its owners’ interest to properly manage and grow the population.

    A good example of this is the Peruvian vicuna which is finally on the road to recover after being listed as endangered in 1974. The vicuna is a relative of the llama and is prized for it wool which is among the finest in the world. One kilogram of fleece from the vicuna costs about $390 and requires five animals to produce.

    At such high prices, the vicuna was endangered primarily by poachers. The species was hunted so heavily that only 8,000 of the animals were thought to exist throughout the Andes region. The problem with poachers didn’t really start to decline until 1993 when a property rights plan was developed that gave poor communities in the Andes an economic interest in preventing poaching and encouraging the recovery of the species.

    The communities are given the right to capture and shear 1,500 animals in an annual ceremony which re-enacts an Incan religious ceremony. The wool is then transformed into garments bearing the “Vicunandes” trademark. The only garments made out of vicuna wool that are legal to own or sell must bear that trademark. Of course the Andes communities also have an additional interest in preventing poaching since any illegal taking of the animals cuts into their potential profits.

    This is a wonderful case of a win-win in species preservation. The animal species is allowed to thrive, while a poor community gets additional income that it needs. The only losers are the poachers. And, of course, the animal rights activists, since most animal rights philosophies at their core oppose this sort of human/non-human interaction as inherently exploitative.

Sources:

Shy creatures provide windfall for Andeans. The BBC, July 3, 2000.

"Chicken Run" and Vegetarianism

    The Associated Press ran a story the other day on whether or not the movie “Chicken Run” might motivate some audience members to stop eating chicken, or go entirely vegetarian. Does a movie have the power to change people’s dietary habits? I doubt it.

Those who claim that people do change their diets based on movies are typically like the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’s Neal Barnard who tells the Associated Press:

If people run from the theater screaming for a veggie burger, I’d be thrilled. It’s what happened with “Babe.” I can’t tell you how many people saw that movie and happened to sit down to a pork chop and were so overcome with guilt, they said, “Make mine the veggie platter, please.”

When Barnard says he can’t tell you how many people went vegetarian after seeing “Babe,” that’s probably one of the more honest statements, because he probably doesn’t have a clue. How would you even begin to measure this? Pork prices fell during the last half of the 1990s, but that was due largely to overproduction rather than any fall in demand for pork products. There certainly hasn’t been any enormous social movement toward vegetarianism in the last 5 years.

And why should there be based on a movie? If I ever met a chicken as articulate as those starring in “Chicken Run,” I’d have to think twice before having a chicken sandwich. Or if I ever met a talking pig like Babe those pork chops might not be so appealing. But outside of the movie theater, chickens and pigs don’t talk, they don’t use language at all, and they certainly don’t have the sophistication to make coordinated escape plans.

If moral lessons should be drawn from fictional depictions of non-human beings, then perhaps the activists should start campaigning for animated creatures that appeared in “Antz” and “A Bug’s Life,” or perhaps even start up an offshoot organization to advocate for computer and robot rights in the wake of screening “The Iron Giant.” That would make about as much sense as giving up chicken based on an animated cartoon.

Central Planning Is Healthy

    How do you tell if your country has a good health-care system? Does it give individuals few choices over treatment? Does it rely heavily on central planning and rationing of health care? If so, it’s top notch. Anything else falls short of the ideal.

    That, at least, is the distinct impression given by a recent World Health Organization report which ranked the nations of the world by the quality of their health-care system. France’s heavily socialized system came it at number one, while the United States was way down the list at number 37.

    Why? Largely because in the United States, health care spending is done by individuals and corporations rather than the state. To the WHO, if an individual spends $100 out of his or her pocket on health care, that’s a travesty, but if the government taxes a citizen $100 and then spends that money to pay for a doctor visit, that’s the hallmark of a great health care system.

    To WHO it also depends who the health care dollar is spent on. The WHO report includes a measure of “disability-adjusted life expectancy” which is the average number of years a person lives without a serious illness. Essentially that means that to WHO every $1 spent on providing care for people with long-term chronic illnesses is an inefficient expenditure. This is a value judgment there that spending money on the disabled wastes resources that might go to say reducing infant mortality (this is a common value judgment

    The fatal flaw in the United States system is the one area where it excels, according to the WHO report — the United States ranks number one in the world using WHO’s criteria for responsiveness to patients. There aren’t any long waiting lists to receive medical treatment as there are in many countries. The state doesn’t dictate which medications can be prescribed or forbid people over a certain age from having certain treatments. Unfortunately that very element of choice interferes with the ability of the state to plan the “correct” outcomes.

    And central planning is really what constitutes a good health care system for the WHO. An article on the rankings in the Washington Post captured the flavor and intent of the report when it noted the poor ranking given to China’s health care system:

    A generation ago, China emphasized disease prevention and universal primary care. (It was one of the first Third World countries to eradicate smallpox and was famous for its “barefoot doctors.”) With the arrival of a market economy in the 1980s, medical care became financed largely by out-of-pocket payment by consumers. Today it ranks 188th out of 191 nations in the WHO assessment’s “fairness of financing” measure.

    The erosion of organized planning for health may be one reason Chinas’s life expectancy has barely budged in the past 20 years, despite the huge growth in its national wealth, a traditional driver of health improvement, [WHO’s Julio]Frenk said.

    The WHO report and rankings reflect the values of bureacrats who long for the sort of power and control over people’s lives that a country like China exerted at the height of its centralized planning.

AIDS, South Africa and Scientific “Intolerance”

    By all accounts, South Africa has one of the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates in the world. Up to 10 percent of all South Africans are infected with the virus, and that could double by the end of this decade. This is a disaster in the making and could destroy South Africa’s region-leading economy.

    The AIDS crisis in South Africa is compounded by political leaders who apparently want to bury their heads in the sand. The chief ostrich at the moment is South African president Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki has made public statements that he doesn’t think HIV causes the AIDS virus, and has included HIV “dissidents” such as Peter Duesberg on a panel charged with solving the AIDS crisis.

    Duesberg and others believe, among other things, that a) HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS, b) anti-AIDS drugs such as AZT actually cause AIDS, and c) lifestyle choices such as homosexuality or recreational drug use also can cause AIDS.

    Obviously the treatment recommendations from Duesberg’s claims about AIDS are drastically different from the traditional view of AIDS, and South Africans are already paying the price for that. AZT therapy, for example, is usually prescribed for mothers who are pregnant as it has been show to drastically cut the risk of a mother passing on AIDS to her baby. According to Mbeki, almost certainly following Duesberg’s line, AZT therapy is dangerous and ineffective and he refuses to allow the drug to be used with pregnant women.

    As it was in the early years of the epidemic in the United States, getting the message about AIDS out to high risk individuals is already difficult enough, and is only made more difficult when the president of South Africa endorses the view that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS.

    In advance of an international AIDS summit in Durban, South Africa, close to 5,000 scientists and doctors signed a statement asserting that the best scientific evidence supports the view that HIV is caused by AIDS and that “it is unfortunate that a vocal minority continues to doubt the origins of AIDS . . . we declare once and for all time, that HIV is unequivocally the cause of AIDS.”

    This brought a swift reaction from South Africa’s health minister who called the declaration “intolerant” and labeled it as Western “elitism.”

    Meanwhile, the situation is even worse in Nigeria where the head of the army recently endorsed a quack doctor who claims to have found a cure for AIDS. General Victor Malu, chief of army staff, told a news conference that 90% of HIV-positive soldiers who received Dr. Jeremiah Abalaka’s “cure” are in better health.

    Abalaka is a classic quack who claims to have found a cure for the disease, which he’ll gladly sell to Nigerians for the equivalent of hundreds of dollars, but refuses to allow the Nigerian Health ministry to test scientifically. With about 5% of Nigerians suffering from AIDS, and the Health ministry fearing the country is on the verge of a wider epidemic, claims of a cure are extraordinarily irresponsible and could have long term effects on people’s willingness to change their behavior in order to avoid spreading the disease.

    Africa appears headed for a serious AIDS-related crisis, and so far its leaders seem singularly unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

Sources:

South Africa strikes back at pre-conference AIDS declaration. CNN. July 3, 2000.

Stigma of AIDS lingers over South Africa. The Associated Press, July 4, 2000.

African AIDS advisory panel convenes second meeting. The Associated Press, July 3, 2000.

International scientists, doctors reaffirm HIV causes AIDS. CNN, July 1, 2000.

AIDS threatens to devestate South African economy. Ravi Nessman, The Associated Press, July 3, 2000.

Nigerian army salutes ‘Aids cure’. The BBC, July 4, 2000.

North Korea Still Suffers From Food Shortages

    Six years have passed and North Korea is still having problems feeding its people. Ever sine natural disasters in 1995 set back food production, North Korea has had enormous difficulties producing enough food. The main problem is not the temporary changes caused by severe climate but rather the closed nature of the North Korean economy which depended largely on the former Soviet Union to sustain itself. Without the aid it received from the USSR, North Korea’s combination of state control and collectivized agriculture all but guarantee food shortages.

    The only thing that has kept famine in North Korea from being even more severe has been massive amounts of aid from other countries and aid agencies. This year the World Food Programme and other agencies will spend more than $200 million on assistance to North Korea.

Source:

Chronic food supply problems persist in DPR Korea suggesting continued dependence on large scale food assistance. United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, June 7, 2000.