Month: June 2001

For the past few years the United States has applied special tariffs to, of all things, imports of chilled or frozen lamb meat. In May the World Trade Organization ruled that the tariffs were inconsistent with the WTO agreement and gave the United States 60 days to lift the tariffs.

Almost all lamb meat imports come from Australia and New Zealand. In order to protect farmers who claim they can’t compete with the imports, the United States imposed a 9 percent tariff in 1999, a 6 percent tariff in 2000, and a 3 percent tariff in 2001. Those tariffs, however, were for an initial quota. Lamb imports beyond the quota were taxed at a rate beginning at 40 percent in 1999 and falling to 24 percent this year.

A country such as the United States, which complains that developing nations hurt their economic prospects through protectionist tariffs for local industries, has no excuse for such blatant protectionism.

Source:

WTO urges US to lift lamb tariffs. The BBC, May 2, 2001.

For the past several years there has been a worldwide boom in farm crops, making it difficult for many American farmers to survive. And for the fourth year in a row Congress has done the single dumbest thing imaginable to deal with the plight of farmers — it passed a massive bill to provide emergency payments to farmers.

The problem is that the low price of farm commodities means that least efficient producers should switch to some other commodity, but instead Congress is going to reward the least efficient producers meaning they’ll go on with producing crops even though they can’t possibly recoup their costs, much less make a decent profit.

According to Fox News, opposition from the Bush administration kept the bill from being even higher. Rep. Larry Combest (R-Texas) wanted to up the price tag to $6.5 billion but apparently abandoned that effort when advisers to George W. Bush said they would recommend the president veto the bill if it were higher than $5.5 billion.

But the principle here is exactly the same as the various proposals and schemes for controlling energy production — market interference merely encourages inefficiency and, while it might feel good and be politically palatable now, will only cause further problems in the future.

Source:

House approves billions in farm aid. Associated Press, June 26, 2001.

Scientists in Great Britain recently announced the development of a more accurate test for tuberculosis.

The new test is able to diagnose the disease much more quickly. Great Britain recently suffered a small outbreak of tuberculosis in which 60 people linked to a school became ill. Had they been able to diagnose the disease earlier, far fewer people would have been exposed to the disease.

About 8 million people contract tuberculosis each year, and about 8 million people die from the disease.

Source:

More accurate TB test unveiled. The BBC, June 22, 2001.

There have been a number of stories in recent days about the failure of the UN to raise the $10 billion it wants for its AIDS fund. Salon.Com’s Daryl Lindsey recently conducted an interview with public health expert Carole Collins which does a pretty good job of outlining why the AIDS fund will have very little effect on the pandemic even if it comes close to the $10 billion. As Bill Clinton might have put it, It’s the poverty, stupid.

Unfortunately, Carole Collins can’t quite see the forest for the trees and falls back on the old “we need more foreign aid” saw. That strategy will work only if the aid can be routed around the corrupt regimes that have caused the poverty in the first place. If you want to do something about AIDS in Zimbabwe, for example, the last thing you want to do is allow Robert Mugabe anywhere near the money (Mugabe’s taken Zimbabwe from a shining example of what is possible on the African continent down to the depths of economic disaster).

In fact, when you look at the countries that have the highest incidence of AIDS, the tend to be those nations in Africa that are the most non-democratic. Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Namibia, Malawi (Botswana and South Africa break the rule here, but the legacy of apartheid has made it extremely difficult for those countries to respond to the AIDS crisis).

The New York Times recently profiled the sterilization program used by the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh which has proven extremely successful, but also controversial.

India’s fifth largest state has seen a dramatic rise in the number of sterilizations. Five years ago, a little over 500,000 people were sterilized. Last year, more than 800,000 were sterilized. More than half the women in Andhra Pradesh have their tubes tied — one of the highest rates in the world. As a result of the massive increase in sterilization, Andhra Pradesh’s population growth has been falling faster than any other large Indian state.

The methods to achieve the high rates of sterilization are, however, controversial. The state sets specific quotas for the number of sterilizations and uses incentives to persuade recalcitrant people to agree to sterilization. People who are sterilized after having their first or second children move the front of the line for loans, housing and other government assistance.

The Times describes, for example, that the Vizianagaram district was short of its quota of 25,000 sterilizations near the end of the year. So it enlisted civic groups to donate clocks, steel, pots and other goods which it then offered as an incentive to encourage people to get sterilized. As a result the district did meet its targets.

Women’s groups and some health experts are highly critical of the policies saying they verge on coercion in such a poor area. One activist told The Times, “I’ve met people who work in villages there who tell me women were offered gold chains to get their tubes tied. if that isn’t coercion, what is?”

The sterilization efforts are also reminiscent of sterilization camps that were set up in the 1970s after Indira Ghandi suspended democracy in India. Many people believe Indian men were forcibly sterilized in such camps.

Source:

Relying on hard and soft sells, India pushes sterilization. Celia Dugger, The New York Times, June 22, 2001.