Day: July 24, 2001

Female Genital Mutilation has received a lot of attention over the past decade for very good reasons — the practice is abominable. Another dangerous form of genital mutilation doesn’t receive as much attention, however — traditional initiation rituals in some developing countries that often involve ritual circumcision under extremely unsanitary and dangerous conditions.

The Daily Telegraph (UK) recently reported that just in South Africa 20 boys died from various causes while undergoing such initiation rites. Several of the boys died from complications related to botched circumcisions. According to the Telegraph,

Some children have been dumped at local hospitals with advanced gangrene of the penis, leading the national health department to draw up guidelines for those who carry out circumcisions to learn the rudiments of surgical hygiene.

Other boys died from starvation, pneumonia and other problems related to the often-harsh conditions under which male initiation ceremonies are conducted. A major concern of health authorities is that often ritual circumcision ceremonies will circumcised many boys with a single knife, posing major risks of spreading disease.

This problem is hardly unique to South Africa. This practice is common throughout much of Africa and other parts of the developing world. So far, though, it hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

Sources:

Kenya’s unkindest cut. Muliro Telewa, The BBC, August 14, 200.

Coming of age in South Africa remains a deadly ordeal. Tim Butcher, The Daily Telegraph (UK), July 23, 2001.

Supposedly there’s this free trade agreement between the United States and Mexico, but that doesn’t stop the United States from fighting a war on illegal imports of a clearly dangerous product — cheese.

Due to protectionist laws in the United States, cheese is very expensive here. As the Associated Press notes, a wedge of cheese that might sell for $6 in the United States can be had in a Mexican shopping market for $1.50. Moreover, many Americans in Texas prefer the Mexican cheese to the AMerican variety, saying its fresher and tastier as it tends to come from small-scale cheese makers.

As a result, many people buy the cheese at $1.50/wedge or so in Mexico and resell it at $4/wedge in the United States. Which, of course, is completely illegal.

“They don’t want to meet food and drug administration requirements for imports,” Customs supervisor John Deputy told the Associated Press, who notes that people often try to smuggle 50-100 pounds of cheese into the country (what angers the FDA is that the cheese is often made from unpasteurized milk).

Of course what the smugglers really don’t want to do is pay the high tariffs that one has to pay when bringing cheese across the “free trade” zone.

Source:

Cheese smuggling prevalent at Texas Border Points. Associated Press, July 18, 2001.

Today’s USA Today has a brief blurb quoting Alanis Morrisette, of all people, as being concerned about music “conglomerates apply[ing] their same business practices to the Net” which would apparently result in only a few popular artists getting radio airplay and selling lots of albums.

Which is a bit odd coming from someone who is the property of one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, AOL Time Warner. Just once I’d like to see these people put their careers where their ideologies are and foresake their large record contracts for life as an indie artist.

Or is Alanis too concerned that without the payola and other perks Warner Music provides her and other musicians, that she’d be stuck in Fugazi land? Come on Alanis — DIY or stop complaining.

Researchers from 11 countries recently announced the formation of the Global Musa (Banana) Genomic Consortium to sequences the 500 to 600 million genes that comprise the banana genome. When finished, the banana would become only the third plant species to have its entire genome sequenced, joining rice and the weed Arabidopsis thaliana.

According to The BBC, the banana is the fourth most important plant source of food in the developing world, constituting up to a quarter of the calories consumed by people in some parts of Africa (though the species of banana there is more potato-like than the sweet Cavendish version popular in Western industrialized nations).

Unfortunately the banana is increasingly vulnerable to disease, with new strains of a fungus called Black Sigatoka presenting a severe threat to banana yields — in some parts of the world, fungus attacks can claim 50 percent of the crop, while combating it requires expensive chemicals which few developing world farmers can afford.

Unlike other food crops, ancient farmers cultivated sterile banana crops so, as banana expert Emile Frison told The BBC, “Cultivated bananas have, therefore, been at a near evolutionary standstill for thousands of years and lack the genetic diversity need to fight off disease.”

And therefore providing a perfect opportunity to use genetic modification techniques to improve the plant.

Source:

Banana targeted by code crackers. the BBC, July 19, 2001.

Much like the Green Revolution before it, genetic modification of food crops has plenty of critics in the West who maintain that it will never meet its potential of feeding more people more cheaply. Critics were wrong about the Green Revolution, which played a major role in improving the food situation in countries like India, and according to a recent United Nations report, the critics are wrong about genetically modified food as well.

UN Development Program’s Mark Malloch Brown said, “These varieties have 50% higher yields, mature 30 to 50 days earlier, are substantially richer in protein, are far more disease and drought tolerant, resist insect pests and can even out-compete weed. And they will be especially useful because they can be grown without fertilizer or herbicides, which many poor people can’t afford anyway.”

The main obstacle to such advances right now is the often irrational opposition to genetically modified food in rich, Western countries.

Source:

UN says GM crops could rescue world’s poor. Ananova, July 10, 2001.

After all these months I’m still get several e-mails a week saying something like: “Have you seen BonsaiKitten.Com. How could anyone be that cruel? How can we get this site taken down.” I’m still genuinely surprised that people actually believe that BonsaiKitten.Com is serious.

But a NewsNet5 report on the web site that was recently carried on Yahoo! helps explain how people fall for it. The site quoted a cat lover named Sandee Robertson saying,

I’m sure it must be [real]; they’ve got a Web site for it. There must be an interest for it. It’s disgusting and it’s sick, but there are people out there (who) would do things like that.

They’ve got a web site for it, so it must be real — wow! I guess I expect significantly better critical thinking skills from adults.

Source:

Bonsai Kittens Causing Worldwide Uproar. NewsNet5, July 24, 2001.