Month: July 2000

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Capitalism Magazine’s Andrew West (Pirates of the Internet) comes out strongly against Gnutella, Napster and the whole panoply of tools that people are using to trade MP3 and others files over the Internet and takes to task those who “praise the piracy-enabling Internet software as “brilliant” while panning industry attempts to require and enable customers to pay for their products as cumbersome.” Unfortunately the case against Napster and Gnutella is not nearly that cut and dried.

    First, let me emphasize that I think people trading MP3 versions of songs and albums on the Internet, whether using Napster or plain-old fashioned FTP, is wrong. On the other hand, like many observers West seems to want to throw the baby out with the bath water.

    There are, after all, real world analogues to MP3 and Napster, the most obvious being the VCR and UPS. The VCR lets anyone with a little technical know how to make copies of pretty much any copyrighted videotape (there are anti-piracy mechanisms in most VCRs, but they are pathetically easy to bypass), and services like UPS allow anyone to ship a pirated videotape to anywhere in the world. In fact, there is an underground of tape traders who traffic in pirated videotapes of movies that have been long out of print or are extremely hard to find.

    Yet no one in his right mind would suggest that there is something inherently wrong with the VCR — well, except for the content companies that West mentions in his article who in fact sued Sony to try to stop production of the VCR. Their argument was similar to the argument against Napster. Since the VCR makes it easy for people to violate the intellectual property rights of content owners. Fortunately, U.S. courts rejected this market and allowed the marketing of VCRs without more onerous copy protection schemes.

    Napster is very similar. All Napster ultimately does is let user share files amongst each other. The current problem is that what most people on Napster are sharing is pirated MP3s. The solution is straightforward — content producers should take legal action against the individuals transmitting the illegal MP3s rather than going after the network, in the same way they would go after illegal pirates rather than the shipping companies they use to distribute their products.

    Or to stick to high technology, what the content producers are asking is akin to arguing for a ban on CD recorders which now come with many computers because they can be used to make exact duplicates of compact disks (and, in fact, many people use them for just that purpose). A highly useful tool would be then relegated to the dustbin to stop pirates. Doesn’t sound like a very good tradeoff for me.

    Finally, although as I said I oppose the trading of illegal MP3s online, West’s claim that “global companies like the ones above [EMI, Sony] are developing innovative methods to enable online sales and digital distribution of their works” is bizarre. The only reason MP3s are so popular is precisely because the music industry is definitely not interested in this. After having first using their clout in Congress to re-write copyright laws in ways that the Framers of the Constitution wouldn’t have recognized, they seem intent on moving to a licensing scheme for music where users have to pay for every device they play music on. Currently, for example, I can take a CD I buy and play it in my home stereo, my car stereo or my computer. I can further encode the music for storage on my hard drive so I can listen to the music on my laptop when away from home. The music industry hates this and all of the “innovative” technologies West mentions are designed primarily to force users to pay a licensing fee for each and every one of those uses.

    The big media content companies are dinosaurs who deserve to be replaced, but the way to do that is by inventing alternative companies and distribution methods. Go after the pirates, but leave Gnutella and Napster alone.