Advantage Toolkit (ADI)

ADI 2008 p2
Advantage Toolbox
Index
Index........................................................................................................................................................................1
Environmental Doomsayers are Wrong! 1/2.......................................................................................................4
Environmental Doomsayers are Wrong! 2/2.......................................................................................................5
.................................................................................................................................................................................5
CAFO Pollution Squo Solvency – Genetically Modified Animals.....................................................................6
CAFO Pollution Squo Solvency – A2 GMOs are Dangerous.............................................................................7
Aff CAFO Answers to GMOs Alt Solvency.........................................................................................................8
Multiple causes for species loss – Alt Cause 1/2..................................................................................................9
Multiple causes for species loss – Alt Cause 2/2................................................................................................10
A2 over fishing Advantage ..................................................................................................................................11
A2 Water Pollution ..............................................................................................................................................12
Water Pollution - Alt Cause ...............................................................................................................................13
...............................................................................................................................................................................13
Resource wars will not happen...........................................................................................................................14
Resource Wars, Alt Cause .................................................................................................................................15
Oil dependence decreasing now..........................................................................................................................16
Oil dependence decreasing now..........................................................................................................................17
Oil dependence inevitable, Aff cant solve..........................................................................................................18
A2 Water Wars ....................................................................................................................................................19
Water Wars – Will not happen 1/2....................................................................................................................20
Water Wars – Will not happen 2/2.....................................................................................................................21
Water Wars Cooperation Turn 1/3.....................................................................................................................22
Econ Resilient - Energy Specific........................................................................................................................25
Economy Resilient................................................................................................................................................26
Economy Strong ..................................................................................................................................................27
Econ ↓ Does Not Cause War...............................................................................................................................28
Competitiveness – Inevitable – Education ........................................................................................................29
Competitiveness – Inevitable – Workers 1/2.....................................................................................................30
Competitiveness – Inevitable – Workers 2/2.....................................................................................................31
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Competitiveness – Inevitable – Science and Tec................................................................................................32

Competitivenes – Oil Key Turn..........................................................................................................................33
Trade Bad – Agriculture specific .......................................................................................................................34
Trade Bad –causes war 1/3..................................................................................................................................35
Trade Bad –doesn’t stop conflict .......................................................................................................................38
Trade bad – environment 1/2..............................................................................................................................39
Trade bad – environment 2/2..............................................................................................................................40
Trade – Disease.....................................................................................................................................................41
...............................................................................................................................................................................41
Food Prices – High now.......................................................................................................................................42
Terrorism – Threat Exaggerated........................................................................................................................43
Terrorism – No Attack 1/2...................................................................................................................................44
Terrorism – No Attack 2/2...................................................................................................................................45
Terrisorism – US Winning WTO .......................................................................................................................46
Soft Power/Hegemony Bad..................................................................................................................................47
Heg/Soft Power – decline inevitable 1/4.............................................................................................................48
................................................................................................................................................................................48
International Credibility – Alt Cause.................................................................................................................52
Environmental Leadership – Alt Cause ............................................................................................................53
Environmental Leadership – No Solvency 1/2..................................................................................................54
Environmental Leadership – No Solvency 2/2..................................................................................................55
US/EU....................................................................................................................................................................56
African Democracy – Not Effective ...................................................................................................................57
African Democracy – Political Issues ................................................................................................................57
African Democracy – Poverty ............................................................................................................................59
African Democracy – Corruption ......................................................................................................................60
African Democracy – Education.........................................................................................................................61
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African Democracy – Healthcare ......................................................................................................................62

African Democracy– Military ............................................................................................................................63
African Democracy Bad – Power relations........................................................................................................64
African Democracy Bad – Conflict 1/4..............................................................................................................65
African Democracy Bad – Economy .................................................................................................................69
African Democracy Bad – Human Rights ........................................................................................................70
African – Poverty ................................................................................................................................................71
Disease – Alt Cause .............................................................................................................................................72
Famine – Africa ...................................................................................................................................................73
Poverty – Cant Solve 1/3 .....................................................................................................................................74
Poverty – Cant Solve 2/3......................................................................................................................................75
Poverty – Cant Solve 3/3......................................................................................................................................76
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Environmental Doomsayers are Wrong! 1/2

There is no evidence of large-scale, significant biological destruction
William K. Stevens, 1991. The New York Times
While species constitute a "valuable endowment" and should be protected, there is "a total lack of evidence" of a
biological holocaust, said Dr. Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist. He is perhaps better known for arguing
that the world's resources, coupled with human ingenuity, can support a surging population. "We're being asked to take the
entire scenario on faith" and on the judgment of those who advance it, he said. The warnings of mass extinction, he said,
"seem like guesswork and hysteria."
Other dissenters say there is a problem, but that its dimensions simply cannot be known at the moment. No one even
knows the true number of species in the world, they say. This is acknowledged by Dr. Wilson and others who share his
view.
Only 1.4 million species have been identified worldwide, but estimates of South American species alone range from 5
million to 50 million, and estimates of global species range up to 100 million.
"When you deal with that kind of error, it's hard to say what's happening," said Dr. Michael A. Mares, a zoologist at the University of
Oklahoma who is an expert on neotropical habitats.
Claims of Environmental doomsday are drastically overblown
Dutton, 2001, Dennis October 21, , [professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Greener than you
think, The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A12789-
2001Oct18]
That the human race faces environmental problems is unquestionable. That environmental experts have regularly tried to
scare us out of our wits with doomsday chants is also beyond dispute. In the 1960s overpopulation was going to cause
massive worldwide famine around 1980. A decade later we were being told the world would be out of oil by the 1990s.
This was an especially chilly prospect, since, as Newsweek reported in 1975, we were in a climatic cooling trend that was
going to reduce agricultural outputs for the rest of the century, leading possibly to a new Ice Age.
Bjorn Lomborg, a young statistics professor and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, knows all about the enduring appeal -- for journalists,
politicians and the public -- of environmental doomsday tales, having swallowed more than a few himself. In 1997, Lomborg -- a self-described left-winger and former
Greenpeace member -- came across an article in Wired magazine about Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist. Simon claimed that the "litany" of the Green
movement -- its fears about overpopulation, animal species dying by the hour, deforestation -- was hysterical nonsense, and that the quality of life on the planet was
radically improving. Lomborg was shocked by this, and he returned to Denmark to set about doing the research that would refute Simon.
He and his team of academicians discovered something sobering and cheering: In every one of his claims, Simon was correct. Moreover, Lomborg found on close
analysis that the factual foundation on which the environmental doomsayers stood was deeply flawed: exaggeration,
prevarications, white lies and even convenient typographical errors had been absorbed unchallenged into the folklore of
environmental disaster scenarios.
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Environmental Doomsayers are Wrong! 2/2
Environmental threats are grossly exaggerated and ignore evidence of improvement
Gordon 95, Richard, professor of mineral economics at Pennsylvania State University, “Ecorealism Exposed”
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv18n3/reg18n3-readings.html
Easterbrook's argument is that although environmental problems deserve attention, the environmental movement has
exaggerated the threats and ignored evidence of improvement. His discontent causes him to adopt and incessantly
employ the pejoratively intended (and irritating) shorthand "enviros" to describe the leading environmental
organizations and their admirers. He proposes-and overuses-an equally infelicitous alternative phrase, "ecorealism,"
that seems to mean that most environmental initiatives can be justifited by more moderate arguments. Given the mass,
range, and defects of the book, any review of reasonable length must be selective.
Easterbrook's critique begins with an overview of environmentalism from a global perspective. He then turns to a
much longer (almost 500- page) survey of many specific environmental issues. The overview section is a shorter, more
devastating criticism, but it is also more speculative than the survey of specific issues. . In essence, the overview
argument is that human impacts on the environment are minor, easily correctable influences on a world affected by far
more powerful forces. That is a more penetrating criticism than typically appears in works expressing skepticism about
environmentalism. Easterbrook notes that mankind's effects on nature long predate industrialization or the white
colonization of America, but still have had only minor impacts. We are then reminded of the vast, often highly
destructive changes that occur naturally and the recuperative power of natural systems. The points Easterbrook makes
are standard ones. He is simply reminding us that environmentalism ignores much basic science and history. As was
typical throughout, Easterbrook was worst with things with which I am familiar. For example, Easterbrook inserts a
feeble discussion of natural law; in it, he contrasts the Hobbesian view of brutish nature with what he takes to be the
natural-law vision: that society is corrupt and nature benign. Apparently, Easterbrook cannot distinguish among Locke,
Hume, and Rousseau.
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CAFO Pollution Squo Solvency – Genetically Modified Animals

Genetically modified animals solve for environmental problems of CAFOs and are heading to market
now
Clarren, 2008. [Rebecca, “Should biotech piggy go to market?” salon.com, March 4,
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/04/animal_cloning/index.html?source=newsletter]
Normal pigs can't break down phytate, a phosphorus-rich compound in their gut. When manure lagoons on hog factories
overflow or breach into nearby rivers or seep into groundwater, the high phosphorus content creates algae blooms, killing
fish and other marine life. Trademarked the Enviropig, these genetically modified pigs produce 60 percent less
phosphorus in their manure than their conventional cousins.
Although they've been raised at Guelph for seven years, the miracle pigs haven't made it out of the lab. They have been
hogtied by American and Canadian regulatory agencies, which have not written regulations for genetically engineered
animals' entrance into the marketplace. But thanks to a landmark law recently passed by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, these little piggies may soon be headed to market.
There are a number of animals in development to combat problems with large-scale industrial farms
Enviropigs aren't the only transgenic animals being developed as a way to eliminate the problems associated with
large-scale industrial farms. Scientists at Virginia Tech are trying to clone cattle that would be genetically incapable of
developing mad cow disease, a deadly brain-wasting illness spread by feeding cows, normally herbivores, the meat and
bone meal of infected cattle. Researchers in Virginia would protect cattle from the fatal disease by producing animals
that lack prions, a naturally occurring protein that appears to be the main conductor of the pathogens.
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CAFO Pollution Squo Solvency – A2 GMOs are Dangerous

Hundreds of scientific studies found no significant nutritional or toxicological differences in the meat or
milk from GMOs

The U.S. agency reached the decision after reviewing hundreds of scientific studies that found no significant
nutritional or toxicological differences in the composition of the meat or milk of cloned cows, pigs and goats from
those of their more traditional brethren. In the short term, that means that breeders of cows, pigs and goats can now
genetically copy their most prized animals as a way to take the guesswork out of breeding. Within an undisclosed
period of time, food from clones and their descendants can be sold at grocery stores and restaurants without any special
labels. In the long term, the decision is the first step to the regulation and commercialization of genetically engineered
animals.
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Aff CAFO Answers to GMOs Alt Solvency

FDA claims of safety for genetically modified animals is based on faulty studies – it’s a pathetic risk
assessment

Hanson and other watchdog groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Consumers Union, have been
critical of the FDA's research review that led to its approval of cloning, claiming that the agency dismissed studies that
raised questions about safety. "It was a pathetic risk assessment," says Michael Hansen of Consumers Union. "There
were small sample sizes and the studies weren't designed properly. For controls, they used cows in other fields, not
raised under the same husbandry conditions."
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Multiple causes for species loss – Alt Cause 1/2

Multiple causes for species loss – Aff doesn’t solve them all
1. Human expansion
Stevens 91 [William K. Stevens, “Species Loss: Crisis or False Alarm,” New York Times. August 20, 1991. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=
9D0CE1D61E3EF933A1575BC0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all] AP
<RATS, weeds, cockroaches and other hardy, ubiquitous "tramp" species may never inherit the earth. But some scientists
say they could make a run for global ascendancy if humans, as many biologists fear, precipitate a mass annihilation of less
adaptable creatures. In this scenario, the actions of an exploding human population are sundering the ecological webs
that support life by setting off a worldwide wave of extinctions comparable to the one in which the dinosaurs perished
some 65 million years ago.
2. deforestation
Butler 06 degree in economics/management science. graduated from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) with a BS in Economics/Management
Science in 1999. [Rhett A. Butler. “Diversities of Image – rainforest Biodiversity.” January 9, 2006. http://rainforests.mongabay.com/0801.htm]
Despite increased awareness of the importance of these forests, deforestation rates have not slowed. Analysis of
figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) shows that tropical
deforestation rates increased 8.5 percent from 2000-2005 when compared with the 1990s, while loss of primary
forests may have expanded by 25 percent over the same period. Nigeria and Vietnam's rate of primary forest
loss has doubled since the 1990s, while Peru's rate has tripled. Overall, FAO estimates that 10.4 million
hectares of tropical forest were permanently destroyed each year in the period from 2000 to 2005, an increase
since the 1990-2000 period, when around 10.16 million hectares of forest were lost. Among primary forests,
annual deforestation rose to 6.26 million hectares from 5.41 million hectares in the same period. On a broader
scale, FAO data shows that primary forests are being replaced by less biodiverse plantations and secondary
forests. Due to a significant increase in plantation forests, forest cover has generally been expanding in North
America, Europe, and China while diminishing in the tropics. Industrial logging, conversion for agriculture
(commercial and subsistence), and forest fires—often purposely set by people—are responsible for the bulk of
global deforestation today.
C. Overpoopulation
Kermond 96 [Journalist for the Age [Clare Kermond. “Expert warns of overpopulation threat.” The Age. Pg 6. December 9, 1996.]
The environmentalist Professor David Bellamy yesterday urged the green lobby to learn from its success with the ozone-
layer campaign and use it as a model to tackle more urgent issues. Professor Bellamy said lessons from the campaign's
success should be used to force action on overpopulation, over-fishing and the spread of the world's deserts. He said the
world was fast heading for a population of 6 billion, and if overpopulation was not tackled "we might as well all fiddle
while Rome burns". Speaking at the Mount Buller International Conference on Environmental Radiation at La Trobe
University, he said the world was facing an environmental crisis and overpopulation was "the number one issue". "Once
you're overpeopled and there's not enough space for animals you either totally do away with animals or you have to do
something about it . . ." By early next year, 6000 species of vertebrate animals would be extinct except for those in zoos,
he said.
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Multiple causes for species loss – Alt Cause 2/2
Rivet theory wrong – not all species worth saving.
Possingham 07 - professor of mathematics in the spatial ecology group at the University of Queensland [Hugh Possingham. “Triage: Not all endangered
species worth saving says scientist: cost-efficiency decisions needed.” October 17, 2007. http://gmarkets.wordpress.com/2007/10/17/triage-not-all-endangered-
species-worth-saving-says-scientist-cost-efficiency-decisions-needed/]
<More training in mathematics needed: Professor Possingham’s proposal had raised eyebrows at the inaugural University
of Queensland Federation Fellows Public Lecture in Brisbane last month. He had told the audience his proposal
represented “an unpalatable proof of triage; that is the highest risk species are not necessarily the species we work on. (It
is) an economically rational allocation of funds to maximize final outcome given fixed resources.” Possingham had said
the conservation industry did not have the training in applied maths and economics to make good decisions. Universities
should offer masters in quantitative wildlife management, he had said. “It’s hard to convince people in first year that
maths is relevant but by third year they realize that all of science is quantitative.” Saving condor cost $US20 million:
Possingham, professor of mathematics in the spatial ecology group at the University of Queensland, said: “The
Californian condor has been recovered from the brink of extinction, but it cost $US1O million to $US20 million. That $20
million could have been used to secure large tracts of rainforest to save hundreds of species. We hand out our money to
the species that are most likely to go extinct and we ignore the cost.” He said that took away the money that could be
spent on others. “We spend a lot of money saving the basket cases but while you’re doing that all the things that aren’t
basket cases become basket cases.” Cost-efficiency decision: Possingham, whose background is in applied mathematics
and biochemistry, said it was a cost-efficiency decision. Lose another species of beetle or grasshopper and the cost would
be low. But the cassowary, the giant flightless bird of the far north Queensland rainforests, was worth saving. “If they go
extinct, the forests of far north Queensland will change forever because the cassowaries disperse the seeds of a whole
range of trees and they might diminish,” he said. “And for every tree, there’s probably 20 species of insect. It would cause
an extinction cascade of 100 to 1000 other species.”>
No impact to species loss – Puerto Rico proves
Stevens 91 –Journalist of the New York Times [William K. Stevens, “Species Loss: Crisis or False Alarm,” New York Times. August 20, 1991.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res= 9D0CE1D61E3EF933A1575BC0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all] AP
Puerto Rico's Experience Some dissenters have also said that the experience of Puerto Rico casts doubt on the doomsday
scenario. There, they say, there are as many species now, or more, than before the arrival of Columbus. Yet the island was
largely deforested at the turn of the century. "That's probably true," said Dr. Wilson, "but it has been loaded up with
tramp species, cockroaches, weeds and so forth. Everywhere you go, you get them, and they're the same ones you get in
Caracas and Lagos and Miami." Meanwhile, he said, some of the local species have been lost, and those are "gone from
the global roster." That, he said, is the direction in which the world is going, "as we wipe out very rich assemblages of
local, endemic species that have taken millions of years to build up, in many cases wiping them out before we have put
scientific names on them."
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A2 over fishing Advantage

No Impact to Fish Death – High Reproductive Rate
FishNet USA 2000, 6-10 http://www.fishingnj.org/netusa13.htm
Marine fish and shellfish are characterized by their high fecundity, particularly when judged by terrestrial standards. Many
release millions of eggs, and even the sharks - whose supposedly “low” reproductive potential puts them, in the conservationists agenda, in danger
of overfishing - produce from several to dozens of fully functional young every year. Needless to say, this high reproductive
potential is balanced, is in fact required, by naturally high mortality levels. If it weren’t, in fairly short order we’d be up to our ears in
dogfish or codfish or scallops. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that at least 99.99% of all marine organisms spawned in the world’s
oceans never come close to reaching maturity. As far as the biological success of those species are concerned it doesn’t
matter what the source of that mortality is. On the average one spawning pair of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico will produce two mature red snapper.
Millions of fertilized eggs, hundreds of thousands of larvae, thousands of juveniles and hundreds of immature snapper
produced by these spawners will die every year. Whether they become dinner for a larger fish, are a casualty of “catch and
release” recreational fishing size limits, or end up on the deck of a shrimper makes no difference to the overall red snapper
population.
Alt Cause, Too many boats
VOA.com 2008, 5-8 http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-05-08-voa15.cfm
There are a 100,000 fishing boats in Vietnam - too many, say conservation experts, who warn of overfishing in Vietnam's
coastal waters. But Vietnamese fishermen are hurting from rising fuel prices. To help them, the government is offering subsidies to build even
more boats. Matt Steinglass reports from Hanoi. Vietnamese fisherman works on a basket-shaped boat locally called Thuyen Thung at a fishing village in Danang,
Vietnam (File photo) Deputy Agriculture Minister Nguyen Van Thang told Vietnamese fishermen this week that the government will lend them a hand. Thang says
any fisherman who buys a new boat with an engine of 90 horsepower or more will get a subsidy of about $3,500 a year.
Thang says the subsidies will help fishermen to switch to more powerful boats that can fish further from shore. He says they
will also soften the pain of high fuel prices.But the new policy seemed to contradict Vietnam's official strategy of shrinking its fishing fleet. Vietnam
has nearly a 100,000 fishing boats. That is far too many, according to wildlife experts like Keith Symington of the
international conservation group WWF, who say stocks of fish are declining. "In 2001, for tuna, on average 25 kilograms of tuna could be
caught with 100 hooks on a long-line tuna boat. And in 2005, on average, that number's gone down to about 15. You have to fish harder to catch the
same amount," said Symington. Overfishing like this could severely damage Vietnam's fisheries."In scientific terms they call it serial depletion. Which means
you'll eventually hit a point where there's no recruitment of baby fish," he added. "And then there's really a crisis. The fishery
can become quickly commercially extinct."
Alt. Cause, Warming
Oceana 2008 http://www.oceana.org/climate/impacts/depleted-ecosystems/
Scientists predict many ecosystems will be greatly altered or collapse altogether as a response to global warming. The
spread of diseases will increase as warmer climates create more hospitable environments for disease carrying agents. Some
species may shift to cooler areas in an attempt to avoid rising temperatures, these forced migrations will cause the interlinked elements within ecosystems to become
vulnerable or fall apart. Other species that are unable to shift, or find themselves without food because their food sources have shifted, may become extinct.
Experts suggest that one quarter of the world's species may face extinction by 2050. As species are forced out of their
habitats by changing conditions, it is likely that pest and nuisance species will move in and take their place, disrupting
ecosystems even further. The future of many marine ecosystems as we know them is in question. Because of global warming ecosystems are
likely to become less diverse and will be less able to deal with other threats, such as over-fishing and bottom trawling, which could
result in their destruction.
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A2 Water Pollution
Water pesticide levels are too high to clean up the water, impacts inevitable
Utility Week 6/2708 - "WATERPesticide and nitrate levels too high.(Features)." Utility Week 121 (June 27, 2008): NA. General
OneFile. Gale. University of Michigan – Ann Arbor <http://find.galegroup.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/itx/start.do?prodId=ITOF>
Almost half of OECD member countries, including many in Europe, have potentially dangerous nutrient and pesticide
concentrations in drinking water sources, a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development
(OECD) has claimed. Tests carried out on surface water and groundwater monitoring sites in agricultural areas showed
these pollutants often "exceed national drinking water recommended limits", said the OECD in its report on the
environmental impact of farming. It said: "Of concern is agricultural pollution of groundwater drawn from shallow wells
and deep aquifers, especially as natural recovery rates from pollution can take many decades." In the UK, 30 per cent of
monitored sites in agricultural areas had nitrates in surface water and groundwater above national drinking water threshold
values. The OECD said the annual clean-up bill could be as high as [euro]345 million. Some other countries fared worse:
Portugal (37 per cent), Belgium (41 per cent) and the Netherlands (71 per cent). Agriculture was held responsible for more
than half the nitrates in surface fresh water in nine European OECD countries: Ireland, Denmark, France, Italy, Poland,
the UK, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Alt cause; Sewage dumping causes water pollution
Grinning Planet 05, http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/09-06/water-pollution-causes-article.htm
In developing countries, an estimated 90% of wastewater is discharged directly into rivers and streams without
treatment. Even in modern countries, untreated sewage, poorly treated sewage, or overflow from under-capacity
sewage treatment facilities can send disease-bearing water into rivers and oceans. In the US, 850 billion gallons of raw
sewage are sent into US rivers, lakes, and bays every year by leaking sewer systems and inadequate combined
sewer/storm systems that overflow during heavy rains. Leaking septic tanks and other sources of sewage can cause
groundwater and stream contamination.
Beaches also suffer the effects of water pollution from sewage. The chart below shows the typical reasons that about
25% of the beaches in the US are put under water pollution advisories or are closed each year. It's clear that sewage is
part of the problem, even in what is supposedly the most advanced country in the world.
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Water Pollution - Alt Cause
Alt Cause, plastic
Jeantheau 05 [Jeantheau, Mark, writer for Grinning Planet website, “ATOMIC CANNONBALL OFF THE HIGH DIVE” Grinning Planet, September 6, 2005,
http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/09-06/water-pollution-causes-article.htm]
Plastics and other plastic-like substances (such as nylon from fishing nets and lines) can entangle fish, sea turtles, and
marine mammals, causing pain, injury, and even death. Plastic that has broken down into micro-particles is now being
ingested by tiny marine organisms and is moving up the marine food chain. Sea creatures that are killed by plastic readily
decompose. The plastic does not—it remains in the ecosystem to kill again and again.
Alt cause, sediment
When forests are "clear cut," the root systems that previously held soil in place die and sediment is free to run off into nearby streams,
rivers, and lakes. Thus, not only does clearcutting have serious effects on plant and animal biodiversity in the forest, the increased
amount of sediment running off the land into nearby bodies of water seriously affects fish and other aquatic life. Poor farming
practices that leave soil exposed to the elements also contribute to sediment pollution in water.
Alt cause, mining
Mining causes water pollution in a number of ways: * The mining process exposes heavy metals and sulfur compounds
that were previously locked away in the earth. Rainwater leaches these compounds out of the exposed earth, resulting in
"acid mine drainage" and heavy metal pollution that can continue long after the mining operations have ceased. *
Similarly, the action of rainwater on piles of mining waste (tailings) transfers pollution to freshwater supplies. * In the
case of gold mining, cyanide is intentionally poured on piles of mined rock (a leach heap) to chemically extract the gold
from the ore. Some of the cyanide ultimately finds its way into nearby water. * Huge pools of mining waste "slurry" are
often stored behind containment dams. If a dam leaks or bursts, water pollution is guaranteed. Perhaps the worst offense
in the category of mining vs. water pollution causes: Mining companies in developing countries sometimes dump mining
waste directly into rivers or other bodies of water as a method of disposal. Developed countries are not immune from such
insanity: The US government in 2003 reclassified mining waste from mountaintop removal (a type of coal mining) so it
could be dumped directly into valleys, burying streams altogether.
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Resource wars will not happen
Scarcity of resources doesn’t cause conflict – no evidence otherwise
Salehyan 07 [Idean Salehyan, assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas, “The New Myth About Climate Change”, Foreign
Policy, August 2007, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3922]
First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing
environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is
more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies
has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace Research
Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some
100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming
causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in
Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N.
World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several
years. But famine-wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed
hundreds of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter,
food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to
an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural
disasters.
Corruption makes resource scarcity conflicts inevitable
Salehyan 07 [Idean Salehyan, assistant professor of political science at the University of North Texas, “The New Myth About Climate Change”, Foreign
Policy, August 2007, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3922]
Be resourceful: Good governments don’t allow environmental crises to spiral into humanitarian disasters. Few serious individuals still
contest that global climate change is among the most important challenges of our time. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming is a very real
phenomenon, that human activity has contributed to it, and that some degree of climate change is inevitable. We are no longer arguing over the reality of climate
change, but rather, its potential consequences. According to one emerging “conventional wisdom,” climate change will lead to international and civil wars, a rise in the
number of failed states, terrorism, crime, and a stampede of migration toward developed countries. It sounds apocalyptic, but the people pushing this case are hardly a
lunatic fringe. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for instance, has pointed to climate change as the root cause of the conflict in Darfur. A group of high-
ranking retired U.S. military officers recently published a report that calls climate change “a threat multiplier for instability.” An earlier report commissioned by the
Pentagon argues that conflicts over scarce resources will quickly become the dominant form of political violence. Even the Central Intelligence Agency is reportedly
working on a National Intelligence Estimate that will focus on the link between climate change and U.S. national security. These claims generally boil down to an
argument about resource scarcity. Desertification, sea-level rise, more-frequent severe weather events, an increased geographical range of tropical disease, and shortages
of freshwater will lead to violence over scarce necessities. Friction between haves and have-nots will increase, and governments will be hard-pressed to provide even
the most basic services. In some scenarios, mass migration will ensue, whether due to desertification, natural disasters, and rising sea levels, or as a consequence of
resource wars. Environmental refugees will in turn spark political violence in receiving areas, and countries in the “global North” will erect ever higher barriers to keep
culturally unwelcome—and hungry—foreigners out. The number of failed states, meanwhile, will increase as governments collapse in the face of resource wars and
weakened state capabilities, and transnational terrorists and criminal networks will move in. International wars over depleted water and energy supplies will also
intensify. The basic need for survival will supplant nationalism, religion, or ideology as the fundamental root of conflict. Dire scenarios like these may
sound convincing, but they are misleading. Even worse, they are irresponsible, for they shift liability for wars and human
rights abuses away from oppressive, corrupt governments. Additionally, focusing on climate change as a security threat that
requires a military response diverts attention away from prudent adaptation mechanisms and new technologies that can
prevent the worst catastrophes.
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Resource Wars, Alt Cause

alternate causes for resource wars – aff doesn’t solve them all
1. globalization
Klare 08 (Michael T., Professor of Security Studies at Hampshire College Internationally renowned expert on resource conflict,
http://pawss.hampshire.edu/topics/resource/index.html, EA)
Economic globalization: The growing internationalization of finance and trade is having an effect on many worldwide
phenomena, including the demand for and consumption of basic resources. Globalization increases the demand for
resources in several ways, most notably thought the spread and acceleration of industrialization. As nations become
industrialize, their need for many resources—especially energy, timber, and minerals—grows substantially. Most
manufacturing processes require large supplies of energy plus a wide range of raw materials. With globalization,
therefore, we have seen a substantial increase in the consumption of these materials by the newly-industrialized countries
(NICs). For example, the consumption of energy by the developing countries is rising by 3.7 percent per year—nearly
three times the rate for the older industrialized countries (source: U.S Dept. of Energy, International Energy Outlook
2002). This means that the competition for access to energy supplies (and other vital materials) will grow ever more
intense in the years ahead.
2. poopulation growth.
Klare 08 (Michael T., Professor of Security Studies at Hampshire College Internationally renowned expert on resource conflict,
http://pawss.hampshire.edu/topics/resource/index.html, EA)
Population growth: The world’s human population is expected to grow by about three billion people between now and
2050 (rising from 6.2 billion people in 2002 to about 9.3 billion in 2050). Obviously, all of these additional humans will
require food, shelter, clothing, energy, and other necessities. Theoretically, the early as a whole possesses sufficient stocks
of the necessary materials to satisfy these needs, but unfortunately many of the countries with the highest levels of
population growth are located in areas where the where the availability of some vital resources is in doubt. This is
especially true for two critical materials: water and arable land. Severe scarcities of both have already developed in parts
of Africa, Asia, and Latin America where population rates are especially high. This could lead to intense competition for
access to these resources in the years ahead. In particular, it could provoke conflict over the distribution of shared water
resources in such areas as the Nile and Jordan river basins, where water is already scarce and the combined population is
expected to triple over the next 50 years.
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Oil dependence decreasing now

Oil demand decreasing – OPEC forecasts
Swartz 08 [Spencer Swartz. Journalist for the Wall Street Times.“OPEC Hints at Less Need for More Oil in Months.” The Wall Street Journal. July 15, 2008.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121613041442654459.html? mod=googlenews_wsj]
The group said demand for OPEC crude, which meets about 40% of the world's daily oil consumption, could
decrease by around 700,000 barrels a day next year amid rising output of non-conventional oil and natural gas
liquids and rising oil conservation in consuming nations amid high energy prices. A drop in demand for OPEC
crude by that amount would be the biggest since 2002, it said. OPEC cut its 2008 global oil demand forecast by
100,000 barrels a day and forecast the rate of growth in oil consumption in 2009 to be 10% weaker relative to
this year. The 13-nation group maintained the mantra that financial market "speculators" are behind record oil
prices.> Non-OPEC producers like Russia are expected to pump 900,000 barrels a day more next year but all of
that is forecast to be offset by consumers. The threat, OPEC said, is that rising fuel efficiencies and increased
output of non-conventional fuel sources, like heavy oil, which is costly and technically challenging to process,
will permit oil inventories to build too much -- threatening to push crude prices lower.
Oil demand decreasing – fear of weak economy
Mouawad 08[Jad Mouawad. Journalist of the New York Times, Slowdown Fears Push Oil Prices Down; Stocks Soar.” The New York Times. July 17, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/business/worldbusiness /17 oil. html?hp]
Fears that an economic slowdown in the United States could spread to other parts of the world and lead to lower
energy consumption pushed oil prices down sharply for the second day on Wednesday. The drop in price
contributed to a jump on Wall Street with the major markets all rising more than 2.5 percent. The two-day
decline in oil prices might signal a break in the oil price rally that began more than six years ago, although it
remains unclear how far prices will fall or whether the respite is temporary. Oil futures closed down fell $4.14
to settle at $134.60 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That followed a $6.44 drop on Tuesday, the
biggest one-day decline since 1991.
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Oil dependence decreasing now

Oil demand decreasing by 2009 – OPEC predicts
Ziemba 7/18/08 [Rachel Ziemba. writer for RGE monitor “Have We Passed the Turning point for Oil.” RGE monitor. http://www.rgemonitor.com/econo-
monitor/253051/have_we_passed_ the_turning_point_for_oil]
Until now mostly its been a supply story, but the demand side may now be drawing more attention - or rather the prospect
of lower demand. U.S. economic weakness, and a build in crude oil (and gasoline) inventories this week looked pretty
bearish to some. News that the U.S. was considering opening an interests section in Iran may have removed some of the
geopolitical premium which escalated in recent weeks. Also this week OPEC suggested that a decrease in demand was
imminent for 2009, the first such decline in demand for its oil since 2002. The big story of the past few years has been
the steady slowing of supply growth (particularly lackluster non-OPEC growth) and erosion of OPEC surplus capacity at
the same time that demand continued to grow sharply, driven in large part by emerging markets in Asia and increasingly
from oil exporters themselves. This erosion of surplus capacity made any supply disruptions (especially any concerning
light sweet crude) that much more concerning. So the prospects of more supply in the short term as demand falls, plus the
potential strategic opening between Iran and the U.S. may have contributed to this weeks sell-off.
Gasoline consumption decreasing – U.S. proves
Mouawad 08[Jad Mouawad. Journalist of the New York Times, Slowdown Fears Push Oil Prices Down; Stocks Soar.” The New York Times. July 17, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/business/worldbusiness /17 oil. html?hp]
Consumers have sharply reduced their gasoline consumption in the face of record prices. Gasoline demand in the United States, for example, fell 5.2
percent last week, according to a nationwide survey by MasterCard, its 12th consecutive weekly drop. Despite the falling price of oil, gasoline is still rising.
Retail gasoline, on a nationwide average, set a record at $4.11 a gallon on Wednesday, according to AAA. Diesel also touched a new high of $4.84 a gallon. As a
result of these higher prices and reduced demand, refiners are using less oil. Instead of falling as refiners draw on their inventories, oil
stocks built up. Oil stocks rose 2.95 million barrels to 296.9 million barrels last week, a report by the Department of Energy showed on Wednesday. Analysts had
expected inventories to drop by about 2.2 million barrels.> Most analysts expect global oil demand to slow this year and
next. OPEC on Tuesday cut its forecast for the growth in oil consumption next year by 100,000 barrels a day to 900,000 barrels a day. The oil
cartel suggested that prices might also ease as more supplies come on the market. “The decline in demand for OPEC
crude combined with increasing OPEC capacity should further ease market conditions and likely help moderate prices,” the
report said. “Whether the market will fully benefit from the softening fundamentals will depend on other factors such as geopolitical tensions, financial markets
developments and downstream constraints.”
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Oil dependence inevitable, Aff cant solve

Energy Independence is impossible – can’t produce enough alternatives
Hadar 2008 (Leon –3-28, Washington correspondent, Business Times Singapore, “Facts don’t back notion of US energy independence,” Lexis-Nexis, EA)
Mr Bryce demolishes the many 'false promises' that are promoted by those calling for energy independence. For example:
That energy independence will reduce or eliminate terrorism. (Terrorism is not dependent on oil: terrorist groups have
operated for years without petrodollars.) That big push for renewable and alternative fuel will mean energy independence.
(In 2006, the US produced about five billion gallons of corn ethanol, and 250 million gallons of bio-diesel. But that was
only 90 per cent of the energy demands of a single airline - American Airlines. And using the entire existing crops of
soybeans and corn to make ethanol and bio-diesel would still only displace about 7.5 per cent of America's oil imports.)
Or that energy independence will cause a collapse of global oil prices that will benefit the US. (The collapse of oil prices
could result in the collapse of America's domestic oil production and increase its reliance on foreign oil.) The reality is
that the world, and the energy business in particular, is becoming more interdependent, and that interdependence is likely
to only accelerate as new supplies of fossil fuel become more difficult to find and more expensive to produce.
Notwithstanding all the concerns about oil shortages, global warming, wars in the Persian Gulf, and terrorism, 'the plain
and unavoidable truth is that US, along with nearly every other country on the planet, is married to fossil fuel', a reality
that is not going to change in the next 30 to 50 years, Mr Bryce says. That means that American politicians and business
executives will need to be actively engaged with the energy-producing economies of the world, especially in the Middle
East. They will need to embrace the global market for energy while acknowledging the limits on the ability to develop
new sources of energy that could displace fossil fuels and nuclear reactors.
Solving dependence takes decades
Klare 06 (Michael T., 6-10, Professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, “The
Permanent Energy Crisis,” CommonDreams, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0210-20.htm, EA)
"Up to this point," Senator Richard G. Lugar told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on November 16, "the main issues surrounding oil have been how
much we have to pay for it and whether we will experience supply disruptions. But in the decades to come, the issue may be whether the world's supply
of oil is abundant and accessible enough to support continued economic growth…. When we reach the point where the
world's oil-hungry economies are competing for insufficient supplies of energy, oil will become an even stronger magnet for conflict than it
already is." Averting Environmental Catastrophe In addition to this danger, we face the entire range of environmental perils associated with our continuing reliance on
fossil fuels. Consider this: The DoE predicted in July 2005 that worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide (the principal source of the "greenhouse gases" responsible for
global warming) will rise by nearly 60% between 2002 and 2025 -- with virtually all of this increase, about 15 billion metric tons of CO2, coming from the
consumption of oil, gas, and coal. If this projection proves accurate, the world will probably pass the threshold at which it will be possible to avert significant global
heating, a substantial rise in sea-levels, and all the resulting environmental damage. The surest way to slow the increase in global carbon
emissions is to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels and accelerate the transition to alternative forms of energy. But
because such alternatives are not currently capable of replacing oil, gas, and coal on a significant scale (and won't be, at
present rates of investment, for another few decades), the temptation to increase reliance on fossil fuels is likely to remain
strong. We are, in fact, caught in a conundrum: the world needs more energy to satisfy rising global demand, and the only
way to accomplish this at present is to squeeze out more oil, gas, and coal from the Earth, thereby hastening the onset of
catastrophic climate change. In turn, the only way to avert such change is to consume less oil, gas, and coal, which would involve severe economic costs of a
sort that most national leaders would be reluctant to consider. Hence, we will be trapped in a permanent crisis brought on by our collective
addiction to cheap energy.
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A2 Water Wars
There is no link between water scarcity and political tension – two reasons
Wolf 99, [Aaron T. Wolf, Ph.D., works in the Department of GeosciencesOregon State University,“Water and Human Security”, Universities Council on Water
Resources, http://ucowr.siu.edu/updates/pdf/V118_A5.pdf]
An increasingly prevalent viewpoint about water and security is best summed up by Ismail Serageldin, vice-president of the World Bank: “The wars of the next century
will be about water” (quoted in the New York Times 10 August 1995). The view that water will lead to acute international conflict, one that is
often tied to causal arguments of environmental security, unfortunately
is gaining ground in both academic and popular literature. Someauthors
assume a natural link between water scarcity and acute conflict, suggesting that “competition for limited . . . freshwater . .
. leads to severe political tensions and even to war” (Westing 1986). Others, often citing examples from the arid and hostile Middle East, assume
that “history is replete with examples of violent conflict over water” (Butts 1997). Still others, combining this “natural” connection between water and conflict with
assumed historic evidence, forecast: “The renewable resource most likely to stimulate interstate resource war is river water” (Homer-Dixon 1994). There are two
major problems with the literature that describes water both as a historic and, by extrapolation, as a future cause of acute
international conflict: 1.There is little historic evidence that water has everbeen the cause of international warfare; and
2.War over water seems neither strategically rational, hydrographically effective, nor economically viable. One component of
the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database Project2 at Oregon State University has been an assessment of historic cases of international water conflicts. In order
to counter the prevailing anecdotal approach, researchers associated with the project utilized the most systematic collection of international conflict – Brecher and
Wilkenfeld’s (1997) International Crisis Behavior data set – and supplemented their investigation with available primary and secondary sources. This search
revealed a total of seven cases in which armies were mobilized or shots were fired across international boundaries – in
every case, the dispute did not degrade into warfare.3 According to our findings, with one exception (now almost 4,500
years old),4 there has not been a war fought over water. It is, however, disingenuous to base a discussion about the future solely on history. Part of
the basis for predictions of future “water wars,” after all, is that we are reaching unprecedented demand on relatively decreasingclean water supplies. But there are
other arguments against the possibility of “water wars.”5They might include: A Strategic Argument If one were to launch a war over water, what would be the goal?
Presumably, the aggressor would have to be both downstream and the regional hegemony – an upstream riparian nation
would have no cause to launch an attack and a weaker nation would be foolhardy to do so. An upstream riparian nation,
then, would have to initiate an action, which decreases either quantity or quality, knowing that doing so will antagonize a
stronger down-stream neighbor. The down-stream power would then have to decide whether to launch an attack – if the
project were a dam, destroying it would result in a wall of water rushing back on down-stream territory. Were it a
quality-related project, either industrial or waste treatment, destroying it would probably result in even worse quality
than before. Furthermore, the hegemony would have to weigh not only an invasion, but an occupation and depopulation
of the entire watershed in order to forestall any retribution – otherwise, it would be simple to pollute the water source of
the invading power. It is unlikely that both countries would be democracies, since the political scientists tell us that democracies do not go to war against each
other, and the international community would have to refuse to become involved (this, of course, is the least far-fetched aspect of the scenario). All of this effort
would be expended for a resource that costs about one U.S. dollar per cubic meter to create from seawater.
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Water Wars – Will not happen 1/2

Water wars won’t occur within the next 100 years – instead the result is cooperation and peace
Deen-06 (Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service’s U.N. Bureau Chief since 1992, IPS, POLITICS, "Water Wars are a myth, say experts," 25 August 2006,
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34465)
In reality, Ghosh told the meeting in Stockholm, there are plenty of bilateral, multilateral and trans-boundary agreements for water-sharing -- all or most of which do
not make good newspaper copy. Asked about water wars, Prof. Asit K. Biswas of the Mexico-based Third World Centre for Water
Management, told IPS: "This is absolute nonsense because this is not going to happen -- at least not during the next 100 years." He said
the world is not facing a water crisis because of physical water scarcities. "This is baloney," he said. "What it is facing is a crisis of bad
water management," argued Biswas, who was awarded the 2006 international Stockholm Water Prize for "outstanding achievements" in his field. The presentation
ceremony took place in Stockholm Thursday. According to the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), one-third of all river
basins are shared by more than two countries. Globally, there are 262 international river basins: 59 in Africa, 52 in Asia, 73 in Europe, 61 in Latin America and the
Caribbean, and 17 in North America. Overall, 145 countries have territories that include at least one shared river basin. Between 1948 and 1999, UNESCO says, there
have been 1,831 "international interactions" recorded, including 507 conflicts, 96 neutral or non-significant events, and most importantly, 1,228 instances of
cooperation. "Despite the potential problem, history has demonstrated that cooperation, rather than conflict, is likely in shared basins," UNESCO
concludes. The Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) says that 10- to 20-year-old arguments about conflict over water are still being recycled. "Such
arguments ignore massive amounts of recent research which shows that water-scarce states that share a water body tend to find cooperative solutions
rather than enter into violent conflict," the institute says. SIWI says that during the entire "intifada" -- the ongoing Palestinian uprising against Israel in
the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza -- the only thing on which the two warring parties continued to cooperate at a basic level was
their shared waters. "Thus, rather than reaching for arguments for the 'water war hypotheses,' the facts seem to support the idea that
water is a uniting force and a potential source of peace rather than violent conflict." SIWI said. Ghosh, co-author of the UNDP study, pointed
out several agreements which were "models of cooperation", including the Indus Waters Treaty, the Israel-Jordan accord, the Senegal River Development Organisation
and the Mekong River Commission. A study sponsored by the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars points that despite newspaper
headlines screaming "water wars are coming!", these apocalyptic warnings fly in the face of history. "No nations have gone to war specifically over water
resources for thousands of years. International water disputes -- even among fierce enemies -- are resolved peacefully, even as
conflicts erupt over other issues," it says. The study also points out instances of cooperation between riparian nations -- countries or provinces bordering the
same river -- that outnumbered conflicts by more than two to one between 1945 and 1999. Why? "Because water is so important, nations cannot afford
to fight over it. Instead, water fuels greater interdependence. By coming together to jointly manage their shared water resources,
countries can build trust and prevent conflict," argues the study, jointly co-authored by Aaron Wolf, Annika Kramer, Alexander Carius and Geoffrey
Dabelko.
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Water Wars – Will not happen 2/2
No risk of water wars – conflict will be deflected through cooperation

Dyle 2006-environmental correspondant for Reuters, 2006 (Alister Doyle, Global Policy Forum, "Water Wars Loom? But None In The Past 4,500 Years?," 17
September 2006, http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/water/2006/0917wwars.htm)
With a steady stream of bleak predictions that "water wars" will be fought over dwindling supplies in the 21st century, battles between two Sumerian city-states 4,500
years ago seem to set a worrying precedent. But the good news, many experts say, is that the conflict between Lagash and Umma over irrigation rights in what is now
Iraq was the last time two states went to war over water. Down the centuries since then, international rivals sharing waters such as the Jordan River, the Nile,
the Ganges or the Parana have generally favoured cooperation over conflict.
So if history can be trusted, things may stay that way. "The simple explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over," said
Aaron Wolf, a professor at Oregon State University. "Nations often go to the brink of war over water and then resolve their differences."
Since the war between Lagash and Umma, recorded on a stone carving showing vultures flying off with the heads of defeated Umma warriors, no wars have been
fought and 3,600 international water treaties have been signed, he said. Yet politicians regularly warn that water shortages caused by surging populations and climate
change could trigger conflicts this century in a world where a billion people in developing countries lack access to clean drinking water.
"Fierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in 2001. The English word
"rival" even comes from the Latin "rivalis" meaning "someone sharing a river". Other experts say international "water wars" are unlikely. "I don't really
expect wars over water because ... the benefits of collaboration are so great," said Frank Rijsberman, head of the International Water
Management Institute (IWMI). And still others say water might be one factor in future conflicts. Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment
Programme (UNEP), says this is particularly true in border regions where countries share rivers. "I am not somebody who believes that our third world war will be over
water, but I think the potential for conflict will grow as we are faced with water scarcity," he told Reuters.
Rijsberman led a U.N.-backed report in August that said one in three people lives in a region where water is scarce and that demand could almost double by 2050 -- led
by farming which absorbs 74 percent of all freshwater used by humans. Planting extra crops to produce biofuels and global warming -- which could bring more erosion,
droughts and floods -- could add new pressures, the report said. But it added that there was enough water to go around, with better planning. "If there is a war between
two countries the 15th reason could be water but the first 14 reasons will have absolutely nothing to do with water," said Asit Biswas, head of the Third World Center
for Water Management in Mexico City. "But if I want to get in the media the easiest thing is to say that a water war is about to break out in the Middle East," he said.
"The last war over water was thousands of years ago." A problem, he said, was that water was often viewed as a commodity like oil, which cannot be re-
used. Water in the Colorado River, for instance, can get used seven times for hydropower, drinking water or irrigation.
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Water Wars Cooperation Turn 1/3
Turn – water scarcity solves wars by sparking cooperation
A Shared Interest Argument <What is it about water that tends to induce cooperation even among riparian nations that are hostile over
other issues? The treaties negotiated over international waterways offer some insight into this question. Each treaty shows sometimes
exquisite sensitivity to the unique setting and needs of each basin, and many detail the shared interests a common waterway will bring. Along
larger waterways, for instance, the better dam sites are usually upstream at the headwaters where valley walls are steeper and where, incidentally, the environmental
impact of dams is not as great. The prime agricultural land is generally downstream, where the gradient drops off and alluvial deposits enrich the soil. A dam in the
headwaters, then, not only provides hydropower and other benefits for the upstream riparian nation, it also can be managed to evenly control the flow for the benefit
of downstream agriculture, or to enhance water transportation for the benefit of both riparian nations. Other examples of shared interests abound: the development of
a river that acts as a boundary cannot take place without cooperation; farmers, environmentalists, and recreational users all share an interest in seeing a healthy
stream-system; and all riparian nations share an interest in high quality water. An Institutional Resiliency Argument Another factor adding to the political stability of
international watersheds is that once cooperative water regimes are established, they turn out to be tremendously resilient over
time, even between otherwise hostile riparian nations, and even as conflict is waged over other issues. For example, the
Mekong Committee has functioned since 1957, exchanging data throughout the Vietnam War. Secret “picnic table” talks have been held between Israel and Jordan,
since the unsuccessful Johnston negotiations of 1953-55, even as these riparian nations were in a legal state of war until recently. And, the Indus River Commission
not only survived through two wars between India and Pakistan, but treaty-related payments continued unabated throughout the hostilities. Any of these arguments, in
and of itself, might not convince one of the unlikelihood of “water wars.” The combination of all of these factors, though – a historic lack of evidence combined with
strategic, interest-based, and institutional irrationality of acute international hydro- conflicts – should help convince us to think of water as a vehicle for
reducing tensions and encouraging cooperation even between otherwise hostile co-riparian nations. Undala Alam (1998) has
aptly dubbed this concept of water as a resource that transcends traditional thinking about resource-related disputes, “water rationality.”
WATER WARS won’t happen – cooperation is likely
CONCLUSIONS: The global water crisis has led to a large and growing literature warning of future “water wars,” and pointing to water not
only as a cause of historic armed conflict, but as the resource which will bring combatants to the battlefield in the 21st century. The historic reality has been
quite different – we have not, and probably will not, go to war over water. In modern times, only seven minor skirmishes have been
waged over international waters. Conversely, over 3,600 treaties have been signed over different aspects of international waters – 145
in this century on water qua water – many showing tremendous elegance and creativity for dealing with this critical resource. This is not to say that armed conflict has
not taken place over water, only that such disputes generally are between tribes, water-use sectors, or states/provinces. What we seem to be
finding, in fact, is that geographic scale and intensity of conflict are inversely related.
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Water used as a tool for international cooperation
These apocalyptic warnings fly in the face of history: no nations have gone to war specifically over water resources for thousands of years.
International water disputes—even among fierce enemies—are resolved peacefully, even as conflicts erupt over other issues. In fact, instances of cooperation
between riparian nations outnumbered conflicts by more than two to one between 1945 and 1999. Why? Because water is
so important, nations cannot afford to fight over it. Instead, water fuels greater interdependence. By coming together to jointly manage
their shared water resources, countries build trust and prevent conflict. Water can be a negotiating tool, too: it can offer a
communication lifeline connecting countries in the midst of crisis. Thus, by crying “water wars,” doomsayers ignore a
promising way to help prevent war: cooperative water resources management. Of course, people compete—sometime violently—for
water. Within a nation, users—farmers, hydroelectric dams, recreational users, environmentalists—are often at odds, and the probability of a mutually acceptable
solution falls as the number of stakeholders rises. Water is never the single—and hardly ever the major—cause of conflict. But it can
exacerbate existing tensions. History is littered with examples of violent water conflicts: just as Californian farmers bombed pipelines moving water from Owens Valley
to Los Angeles in the early 1900s, Chinese farmers in Shandong clashed with police in 2000 to protest government plans to divert irrigation water to cities and
industries. But these conflicts usually break out within nations. International rivers are a different story. The world’s 263 international river basins cover 45.3 percent of
Earth’s land surface, host about 40 percent of the world’s population, and account for approximately 60 percent of global river flow. And the number is growing, largely
due to the “internationalization” of basins through political changes like the breakup of the Soviet Union, as well as improved mapping technology. Strikingly, territory
in 145 nations falls within international basins, and 33 countries are located almost entirely within these basins. As many as 17 countries share one river basin, the
Danube. Contrary to received wisdom, evidence proves this interdependence does not lead to war. Researchers at Oregon State University
compiled a dataset of every reported interaction (conflictive or cooperative) between two or more nations that was driven by water in the last half century. They
found that the rate of cooperation overwhelms the incidence of acute conflict. In the last 50 years, only 37 disputes involved violence, and
30 of those occurred between Israel and one of its neighbors. Outside of the Middle East, researchers found only 5 violent events while 157 treaties were negotiated and
signed. The total number of water-related events between nations also favors cooperation: the 1,228 cooperative events dwarf the 507 conflict-related events. Despite
the fiery rhetoric of politicians—aimed more often at their own constituencies than at the enemy—most actions taken over water are mild. Of all the events, 62 percent
are verbal, and more than two-thirds of these were not official statements. Simply put, water is a greater pathway to peace than conflict in the
world’s international river basins. International cooperation around water has a long and successful history; some of the
world’s most vociferous enemies have negotiated water agreements. The institutions they have created are resilient, even when relations are
strained. The Mekong Committee, for example, established by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Viet Nam in 1957, exchanged data and information on the river basin
throughout the Viet Nam War.
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UNESCO will foster cooperation over water and prevent conflict
United Nations-2006(United Nations, 10 Stories the World Should Hear More About, "From Water Wars to Bridges of Cooperation: Exploring the Peace-
building Potential of a Shared Resource," http://www.un.org/events/tenstories_2006/story.asp?storyID=2900)
Water, a vital source of life, has been known for centuries to be a major cause of tensions or conflict -- within countries, as well as among nations. With world demand
for water increasing six-fold over the 20th century, there was no let-up in disputes over transboundary water issues, prompting some experts to predict that the wars of
the 21st century will be fought over water. While freshwater's propensity to strain relations among countries frequently makes headlines, the other side of the coin -
water as an agent of cooperation - rarely gets sufficient attention. Nevertheless, research has shown much more historical evidence of
water playing the role of a catalyst for cooperation, rather than a trigger of conflict. There are examples of workable accords on water reached even
by States that were in conflict over other matters, including the cases of India and Pakistan, and Israel and Jordan.
With more than the 260 water basins in the world transcending national borders, it is hardly surprising that the situation is widely perceived as being fodder for hostility.
On the other hand, as UN experts point out, given water's importance for practically every aspect of life - health, environment, economy, welfare, politics
and culture - it is well beyond the scope of any individual country to resolve many of the issues unilaterally. This offers an opportunity to
transform a situation fraught with conflict into an opening for mutually advantageous solutions. What are the practical ways of reaching that
goal? In an effort to find answers to this question, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched a project, From
Potential Conflict to Co-operation Potential (PCCP), as part of a UN-wide initiative to promote water security in the 21st century. The project
aims to foster cooperation between stakeholders in the management of shared water resources, while helping to ensure that potential
conflicts do not turn into real ones. Addressing the challenge of sharing water resources primarily from the point of view of
governments, it focuses on the development of tools for the anticipation, prevention and resolution of water conflicts.
There are more than 3,800 unilateral, bilateral or multilateral declarations or conventions on water: 286 are treaties, with 61 referring to over
200 international river basins.
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Econ Resilient - Energy Specific
US economy is less resilient – and energy concerns aren’t as big anymore – Bernanke proves
Powell 6-4 – 08 [Alvin Powell, Harvard News Office Writer, “Bernanke touts nation’s economic resilience: Despite similar economic uncertainty, today better
than ’75,” Harvard University Gazette Online, http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/06.05/99-classday.html]
Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said Wednesday (June 4) that education is both the best hedge against economic uncertainty and a student’s
greatest asset, and urged Harvard College’s Class of 2008 to use their education to live rewarding lives and make the world a better place. Bernanke, who was this
year’s Class Day speaker, took his audience for a walk down the U.S. economy’s memory lane during a speech before the Class of 2008 and their family members, who,
under gloomy overcast skies and steady rain, crowded into Harvard’s Tercentenary Theatre and into the drier confines of Science Center lecture halls. Bernanke, a
member of the Harvard College Class of 1975, hearkened back to his own commencement during inflation-weary, oil-shocked 1975, and told the graduating
seniors that things aren’t so bad. Despite today’s ample gloomy economic news, the last 33 years have created a more resilient
economy, largely due to a decline in the energy intensity of many activities, wiser government economic policies, and a
consistently tougher anti-inflation stance, he said. But there are some parallels between 2008 and 1975, Bernanke added, citing a rapid increase in oil prices,
rising prices for food and other commodities, and slow economic growth. But Bernanke said the differences between today and 1975 are crucial
and “provide a basis for optimism about the future.” “Today’s situation differs from 33 years ago in large part because our
economy and society have become much more flexible and able to adapt to difficult situations and new challenges,”
Bernanke said. “Economic policymaking has improved as well, I believe, partly because we have learned well some of the hard
lessons of the past.”
US economy able to handle higher energy prices
Perry 5/5/08 [Matthew J. Perry, professor of economics and fianance @ the University of Michigan, “Our energy efficent can handle $112 oil” May 5, 2008
http://seekingalpha.com/article/75644-our-energy-efficient-economy-can-handle-112-oil/]
Compared to the early 1970s, the U.S. economy is now twice as energy efficient, requiring only about 1/2 of the energy consumption
per dollar of real GDP in 2007 (8.78 BTUs per dollar of real GDP) as in 1973 (17.44 BTUs per dollar of real GDP), according to data just released by the
Energy Information Administration. The energy-efficient economy of today is much better able to absorb higher energy prices than in the
past. Although high oil prices crippled the economy in the 1970s and early 1980s, and contributed to three serious recessions between
1973-1982, the energy-efficient Goldilocks Economy of the 21st Century just keeps humming along, recession-free.
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Economy Resilient
US economy can withstand slowdowns
Stelzer 1/8/08 [Stelzer, Irwin, Director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Economic Policy “Resilient US economy has weathered many storms,” The Examiner,
January 8, 2008, http://www.examiner.com/a-1144203~Irwin_Stelzer__Resilient_U_S__economy_has_weathered_many_storms.html
My guess is they will begin pegging their own currencies to a basket of currencies that includes the dollar, but in which the euro is importantly represented as well. We
know two other things. The first is that the U.S. economy will indeed slow, at least in the first half of 2008. The second is that
America will elect a new president pledged to retreat from the nation’s historic position in favor of free trade. Doha and other trade deals, if not already
dead, will breathe their last and be buried. But these are all small things compared to the really big thing that we also know: The
American economy is an amazingly resilient and flexible machine. Remember the dot-com bust, now cited as the model for
what we are about to go through? Since that dreary period, the U.S. economy added 8 million jobs. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, the value of
the goods and services produced in America is about 15 percent higher than during the dot-com bust. And even after the precipitous drops of recent days, the leading
share-price indices are healthily up over dot-com bust levels. If you need any further proof of the ability of the U.S. economy to thrive
after taking a blow, consider the speed with which output, employment and every other indicator rose soon after the
devastating attack on Sept. 11, 2001. Or after Hurricane Katrina.
US economy is resilient
Landers 7/16/08 [Landers, Kim, Washington correspondent for ABC news “Bush says US banking system is ‘sound’,” ABC NEWS, July 16, 2008,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/16/2304733.htm?section=business
US President George W Bush says the American economy is remarkably resilient and that the country's banking system is
"sound". In a rare press conference at the White House, Mr Bush has tried to dispel economic storm clouds by offering reassurance
about the American economy. "Despite the challenges we face, our economy has demonstrated remarkable resilience and
the economy continued to grow in the first quarter of this year," he said. Despite the troubles of two of America's biggest
mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the President said the nation's banking system was "basically sound". Earlier this
week US mortgage lender IndyMac Bancorp was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), the second largest financial institution to close in US
history.
US economy resilient long-term
Zakaria 6/24/08 [ Zakaria, Tabassum, staff reporter for Reuters “White House: U.S. economy resilient long term,” Reuters, June 24, 2008,
http://www.reuters.com/article/pressReleasesMolt/idUSWBT00926120080624
The White House said on Tuesday, after data showing U.S. consumer confidence fell to a 16-year low, the long-term
resiliency of the U.S. economy was very strong. "We know that Americans are concerned about the economy, we have been concerned about the
economy," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. But she also said it was going to take a while for the economic stimulus package to take effect and for that to
be reflected in economic data, such as retail sales. "We are confident that it will have the impact that we thought it would toward the
latter half of the year. We believe that the long-term resilience of our economy is very strong," Perino said.
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Economy Strong
Economy Strong – Figures Show Growth
The Kiplinger Letter 5-25/07[“Expect recession talk to rev up soon,” Vol. 84, No. 21]
No. Recent figures overstate weakness. Notably, a surprise import surge in Feb.-March likely took the wind from first-quarter growth. But import
gains cut two ways. They also show that domestic demand isn't about to crash. Even so, economic growth will be meager for the rest of this year, hovering
around 2%. Consumers are feeling the strain as refinery woes jack up gasoline prices. That compounds the sting from housing's slump. Housing will be shaky well
into 2008, despite April's spike in sales of new homes. Average prices look set to fall 4% this year, and starts will total only about 1.45 million. Pump prices will dent
purchasing power. The $1-a-gallon jump since Jan. is the equivalent of an $80-billion tax on consumers. Soaring food prices will likely levy $30 billion more.
Consumer spending growth is dialing down to a 2%-2.5% pace from nearly 4% in the first quarter...the main fuel in the economic mix. But the business sector is
showing unexpected resilience. Business-to-business orders remain strong, helped in large part by exports, as economies in Europe and Asia
Managers in manufacturing are upbeat about the months ahead. To prepare, firms are adding to inventories...a
shine and the dollar falls.
boost to economic growth. Companies will continue to hire more workers, albeit cautiously. The economy is still on course to add about 1.3 million jobs this
year. Of course, some sectors will fare far better than others in an economy that continues to trudge along at a sluggish pace. Principal losers: Makers of big-ticket
consumer products... autos, home electronics...which households can easily delay purchasing. Also businesses that depend on home building...mortgage finance,
furniture and fixtures, electrical services, plumbing and lumber supply. But the energy sector will thrive amid brisk global demand. Same goes
for producers of specialty chemicals, primary metals and steel. Other winners: Major export industries, such as heavy machinery and aerospace.
Plus health care, brokerages and business outsourcing.
Economy Strong – Consistent Job Growth
Novak 7-17/08 [Michael Novak, George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy “Our ‘Horrible’ Economy,” American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research, http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28339/pub_detail.asp]
Yet two basic points make it difficult for this amateur to see just why our current economy is so horrible. For me, the
most important issue in any
economy of any democratic republic is job growth. In 1976, I wrote speeches for Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson (D., Wash.), in which the three
main priorities of his campaign were identified, in this order, as "Jobs, jobs, jobs!" The second-most-important thing for a democratic society, to my mind,
is that there be consistent economic growth. The reason is that the most destructive of all human social passions is envy. If there is no growth, the
only way people have to vaunt themselves is to tear others down. (In nearly all static societies, envy sparks immense social frictions.) In a growing
economy, by contrast, people have a chance to stop comparing themselves with their neighbors (and tearing them down). Instead, they can
work as hard as they can to meet their own goals. If their own position tomorrow will be significantly closer to their heart's desire than it is today, then they
don't need to care how their neighbor is doing. Growth is the necessary condition for the pursuit by each of his own happiness. A happy society is a more generous and
loving society. A republic like the United States simply must defeat envy, and focus on a better future for each family. The only way that can be accomplished is by
reasonably consistent and gently upward economic growth. Growth is the necessary condition for the pursuit by each of his own happiness. A happy society is a more
generous and loving society. In this light, the U.S.--with a growing GDP from the year 2000 until today, along with a steady
growth in the number (and percentage) of people employed--is better off than almost all nations in Europe. Whatever else is
happening in the U.S. economy today, these are very good indicators. U.S. output today is just about 40 percent higher than
it was when President Clinton left office. The nominal GDP has grown from $10 trillion at the end of 2001 to $14 trillion at the end of January 2008. In other
words, the U.S. has added to its national wealth an equivalent to the whole nominal GDP of China (in 2007, $3.25 trillion). The U.S. today is as big as it
was in 2001, plus the whole GDP of China.
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Econ ↓ Does Not Cause War
US slowdowns don’t impact the global economy
Merrill Lynch 9 -18 -06[“US Downturn Won’t Derail World Economy, financial advisory and management company” Merrill Lynch, Septmeber 18,
2006, http://www.ml.com/index.asp?id=7695_7696_8149_63464_70786_71164
A sharp slowdown in the U.S. economy in 2007 is unlikely to drag the rest of the global economy down with it, according
to a research report by Merrill Lynch’s (NYSE: MER) global economic team. The good news is that there are strong sources of
growth outside the U.S. that should prove resilient to a consumer-led U.S. slowdown. Merrill Lynch economists expect U.S. GDP
growth to slow to 1.9 percent in 2007 from 3.4 percent in 2006, but non-U.S. growth to decline by only half a percent (5.2 percent versus 5.7 percent). Behind this
decoupling is higher non-U.S. domestic demand, a rise in intraregional trade and supportive macroeconomic policies in many of the world’s economies. Although some
countries appear very vulnerable to a U.S. slowdown, one in five is actually on course for faster GDP growth in 2007. Asia, Japan and India appear well
placed to decouple from the United States, though Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are more likely to be impacted. European countries
could feel the pinch, but rising domestic demand in the core countries should help the region weather the storm much
better than in previous U.S. downturns. In the Americas, Canada will probably be hit, but Brazil is set to decouple.
Economic decline won’t cause war
Deudney 91 [Daniel, Hewlett Fellow in Science, Technology, and Society at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, april]
Poverty Wars. In a second scenario, declining living standards first cause internal turmoil. then war. If groups at all levels of affluence protect their standard of living
by pushing deprivation on other groups class war and revolutionary upheavals could result. Faced with these pressures, liberal democracy and free market systems
could increasingly be replaced by authoritarian systems capable of maintaining minimum order.9 If authoritarian regimes are more war-prone because they lack
democratic control, and if revolutionary regimes are warprone because of their ideological fervor and isolation, then the world is likely to become more violent. The
record of previous depressions supports the proposition that widespread economic stagnation and unmet economic
expectations contribute to international conflict. Although initially compelling, this scenario has major flaws. One is that it
is arguably based on unsound economic theory. Wealth is formed not so much by the availability of cheap natural resources
as by capital formation through savings and more efficient production. Many resource-poor countries, like Japan, are very
wealthy, while many countries with more extensive resources are poor. Environmental constraints require an end to economic growth based
on growing use of raw materials, but not necessarily an end to growth in the production of goods and services. In addition, economic decline does not
necessarily produce conflict. How societies respond to economic decline may largely depend upon the rate at which such
declines occur. And as people get poorer, they may become less willing to spend scarce resources for military forces. As
Bernard Brodie observed about the modein era, “The predisposing factors to military aggression are full bellies, not empty ones.”’”
The experience of economic depressions over the last two centuries may be irrelevant, because such depressions were
characterized by under-utilized production capacity and falling resource prices. In the 1930 increased military spending
stimulated economies, but if economic growth is retarded by environmental constraints, military spending will exacerbate the problem.
Power Wars. A third scenario is that environmental degradation might cause war by altering the relative power of states; that is, newly stronger states may be tempted
to prey upon the newly weaker ones, or weakened states may attack and lock in their positions before their power ebbs firther. But such alterations might not lead to war
as readily as the lessons of history suggest, because economic power and military power are not as tightly coupled as in the past. The
economic power positions of Germany and Japan have changed greatly since World War 11, but these changes have not been accompanied by war or threat of war. In
the contemporary world, whole industries rise, fall, and relocate, causing substantial fluctuations in the economic well-
being of regions and peoples without producing wars. There is no reason to believe that changes in relative wealth and
power caused by the uneven impact of environmental degradation would inevitably lead to war. Even if environmental degradation were to
destroy the basic social and economic fabric of a country or region, the impact on international order may not be very great.
Among the first casualties in such country would be the capacity to wage war. The poor and wretched of the earth may be able to
deny an outside aggressor an easy conquest, but they are themselves a minimal threat to other states. Contemporary offensive military
operations require complex organizational skills, specialized industrial products and surplus wealth.
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Competitiveness – Inevitable – Education

Competitiveness inevitably tanked - education
Evers, 4/17/07 [Joris, [Staff Writer, CNET News.com]Experts: Education key to U.S. competitiveness, http://news.cnet.com/Experts-Education-key-to-U.S.-
competitiveness/2100-1022_3-6176967.html]
CUPERTINO, Calif.--Innovation and U.S.

competitiveness will suffer if kids don't get a better education, a panel of experts said Tuesday. In
particular, science, technology, engineering and math education in kindergarten through 12th grade needs a boost, according to panelists
speaking at an event here that's part of a National Governors Association initiative. K-through-12 education has traditionally been a focus of governors because much of
a state's budget is spent there. "In technology and engineering we're really doing nothing. In math and science we're basically teaching the
same things we taught when I was in school and we're teaching it the same way," said Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who
turns 50 this year. Photo: An innovation initiative As current chair of the National Governors Association, Napolitano established the "Innovation America"
initiative. The goal is to come up with a list of policies and strategies governors across the U.S. can use to enhance the innovative capacity of their states and their
ability to compete in this global economy, she said. Calling for improvements to U.S. education isn't new. Others, including Microsoft co-
founder Bill Gates, have made similar pleas to help the U.S. stay competitive. The Innovation America effort goes beyond lower education. It also
aims to establish links with higher education and suggests incentives for entrepreneurship, such as tax credits for early investors and businesses that do research with
universities, Napolitano said. "What is going to keep us competitive and what is going to help us in-source jobs? That is the investment in
human capital and that is the investment in innovation," Napolitano said. The focus from governors is needed as countries including
China and India increase their roles in the global marketplace. "The world is shrinking and now we're really competing for people all
across the world," said Sean Walsh, special adviser to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. California has attracted smart people
from across the globe, but that actually points to shortcomings in the U.S. education system, Walsh said. "In technology and engineering we're
really doing nothing. In math and science we're basically teaching the same things we taught when I was in school and we're teaching it the same way." --Arizona Gov.
Janet Napolitano "We are attracting the best and the brightest from all around the world, but that's making up for the fact that we're not
necessarily producing some of the best and the brightest because our education is not up to snuff," he said. Silicon Valley in particular is at a
crossroads, said Dennis Cima, vice president of education and policy at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which is made up of businesses in the
area. "The crisis is really how America maintains its competitive edge and how Silicon Valley maintains its competitive edge...The
availability of talent is a real huge issue," he said. One possible solution to the talent problem is promoting math and science among
groups that typically don't pick those subjects, said John Thompson, chief executive at Symantec, which hosted the event. "Science,
technology, engineering and math (education) is such an important issue for our company and our country, more should be done by
every single organization to convince young women and minorities to participate and pursue careers in math and science," Thompson
said. "It does represent an opportunity for us to expand the talent pool quite rapidly."
Can’t compete now – lacks of educated workers
BARTLETT 8 – 23 - 06 [David L., president of the Global Economics Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota“Building A Competitive Workforce:
Immigration And The US Manufacturing Sector,” http://www.ilw.com/articles/2006,0823-bartlett.shtm]
At the same time, demographic and economic factors are constraining the supply of native-born manufacturing employees possessing these skills. Retirements
of Baby Boom generation workers-a trend already underway and expected to peak in 2012-are depleting the ranks of experienced
equipment operators in the U.S. manufacturing sector. The science and engineering (S&E) labor force is also declining: 26 percent of
S&E workers in the United States are over 50, and growing numbers of these individuals will retire in the next two decades. [5] The
U.S. educational system is not producing enough highly educated native-born manufacturing workers to replenish the supply. The rate of growth in the number of
S&E college graduates exceeds that of the overall U.S. labor force, which is projected to grow by just 1.1 percent annually through 2010. But production of scientists
and engineers with university degrees in the United States lags behind growth in S&E occupations. [6] Meanwhile, lagging output of technical/ vocational
schools-compounded by unfavorable views of manufacturing held by many young Americans-leaves gaps in skilled production jobs
vacated by retiring workers. Even during the 2000-02 recession, during which 2.8 million manufacturing jobs disappeared, high-
salaried positions for machinists, tool and die makers, and welders went unfilled owing to a paucity of qualified applicants. NAM
estimates that U.S. manufacturers will face a deficit of 10 million skilled workers by 2020 if these trends go unchecked. [7] Gains in
manufacturing productivity, which grew at double the rate of overall U.S. productivity in the 1990s and reached 4.5 percent in 2001,
have softened the impact of the declining supply of qualified workers. [8] But the erosion of the math and science skills of young Americans relative
to their international counterparts-a phenomenon amply documented in recent empirical studies [9]-raises doubts about the sustainability of that productivity growth.
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Competitiveness – Inevitable – Workers 1/2

Manufacturing can’t compete – lack skilled workers – NAM study proves
BARTLETT 8 – 23 - 06 [David L., president of the Global Economics Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota “Building A Competitive Workforce:
Among the findings of this report: In 2005, 90 percent of manufacturers surveyed by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) reported
"moderate to severe" shortages of skilled production workers, while 65 percent indicated "moderate to severe" shortages of scientists and engineers. In
order to hedge against worker shortages, and in response to mounting global competition, American manufacturers are boosting investments in
industrial automation, robotics, and other labor-saving equipment that requires a high level of skill to operate. These developments are raising demand
for highly educated manufacturing workers. Even during the 2000-02 recession, during which 2.8 million manufacturing jobs disappeared, high-salaried
positions for machinists, tool and die makers, and welders went unfilled owing to a paucity of qualified applicants. NAM estimates that U.S. manufacturers
will face a deficit of 10 million skilled workers by 2020 if these trends go unchecked. In 2004, immigrants represented large shares of advanced-
degree holders in technology-intensive manufacturing industries: machinery (65.4 percent), measurement/control instruments (48.2 percent), electronic components
(44.6 percent), computers/peripherals (44.4 percent), communications equipment (39.8 percent), and medical equipment (37.3 percent). Between 2001 and 2004, the
number of foreignborn workers with advanced degrees rose in 7 industries (machinery, electronic components, aircraft, computers/peripherals, measurement/control
instruments, motor vehicles, and aerospace) and declined in 3 (pharmaceuticals, communication equipment, and medical equipment).
Alternative Cause – Industries Need Workers to Boom
Grant Thornton 2K8 [“Top energy executives resilient in face of industry challenges”
http://www.grantthornton.com/portal/site/gtcom/menuitem.550794734a67d883a5f2ba40633841ca/?vgnextoid=44700491ccb97110VgnVCM1000003a8314acRCRD&v
gnextchannel=dee3de38ad818110VgnVCM1000003a8314acRCRD]
"Our industry's greatest challenge continues to be labor," says Richard J. Alario, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Key
Energy Services. "Specifically, we regularly search for the best ways to recruit, train and retain a new work force that is willing to
perform the dirty, dangerous and uncomfortable jobs we offer and that our customers demand." As young adults are lured into safe, comfortable office
positions with lucrative salaries; the oil and gas industry will continue to struggle to find ways to persuade this generation into the oil fields.
Eighty-five percent of respondents anticipate difficulties in hiring and retaining employees - up significantly from 69 percent in 2007 and 65 percent two years go.
Alario sums up the challenge by saying, "We will have to pay very well, be loyal and care very much if we are to reverse the base feelings the Y-genners have about our
industry. We must now pay the price for the graying of our industry and the unstable employment for which it was so well known in slower times.
Luckily, today we can afford it."
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Competitiveness – Inevitable – Workers 2/2
Inevitably lose to other markets - Weak work force & higher costs
BARTLETT 8 – 23 - 06 [David L., president of the Global Economics Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota “Building A Competitive Workforce:
Implications For US Manufacturers Any decrease in the supply of skilled foreign workers exacts a severe penalty on U.S. manufacturers who
face growing competition from lower-cost manufacturers in Asia, Eastern Europe, and other emerging markets. Many of these same emerging
market rivals of the United States are reaping the competitive advantages that come with the global diffusion of process technologies and
operational best practices. Therefore, the prospect of reverse brain drain is particularly daunting for American manufacturers. In
addition, many U.S. manufacturers do not have the option of offshoring their operations. As a result of the IT revolution, which has permitted the
rapid and secure transmission of large information blocs across national borders, a growing share of back office business functions (finance, customer service, human
resources) and professional services (legal, accounting, consulting, medical diagnostics) can be performed remotely. [37] Some large OEMs have outsourced wide
swaths of their manufacturing operations to contract manufacturers (a phenomenon especially visible in consumer electronics), while others have become global supply
chain integrators more than manufacturers (e.g., Dell). These economic and technological changes have lowered the threshold for global
operations, enabling some small- and mid-sized U.S. manufacturers to undertake foreign activities previously reserved for
multinational-sized companies. But for most small/medium U.S. manufacturers-which are major sources of job creation and which fill market niches that are too
small to be interesting to global OEMs-manufacturing remains a local activity requiring a skilled local labor force. Facing global rivals possessing
unassailable cost advantages, U.S. manufacturers must attract employees with advanced training in science and engineering to meet
the technical demands of modern manufacturing. Foreign-born professionals constitute a crucial part of the S&E workforce, underscoring the inextricable
links between U.S. immigration policy and American manufacturing competitiveness.
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Competitiveness – Inevitable – Science and Tec
No Solvency for competitiveness- US is falling behind in the scientific and technical workforce
BOHELERT et al 7 – 21 – 05 [Sherwood, Chair – House Committee on Science Chairman, U.S. COMPETITIVENESS: THE INNOVATION
CHALLENGE, HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES]
While the supply and demand of future scientists and engineers is notoriously difficult to predict, most experts believe that the
transition to a knowledge-based economy will demand an increased quality and quantity of the world's scientific and technical
workforce. As is the case with R&D figures, trends in the distribution of the world's science and engineering workforce are also unfavorable
to long-term U.S. competitiveness. The world is catching up and even surpassing the U.S. in higher education and the production of
science and engineering specialists. China now graduates four times as many engineering students as the U.S., and South Korea,
which has one-sixth the population of the U.S., graduates nearly the same number of engineers as the U.S. Moreover, most Western
European and Asian countries graduate a significantly higher percentage of students in science and engineering. At the graduate level, the
statistics are even more pronounced. In 1966, U.S. students accounted for approximately 76 percent of world's science and engineering
Ph.D.s. In 2000, they accounted for only 36 percent. In contrast, China went from producing almost no science and engineering Ph.D.s in 1975 to
granting 13,000 Ph.D.s in 2002, of which an estimated 70 percent were in science and engineering. Meanwhile, the achievement and interest
levels of U.S. students in science and engineering are quite low. According to the most recent international assessment, U.S. twelfth graders scored
below average and among the lowest of participating nations in math and science general knowledge, and the comparative data of math and
science assessment revealed a near-monopoly by Asia in the top scoring group for students in grades four and eight. These students are not on track to study
college level science and engineering and, in fact, are unlikely ever to do so. Of the 25–30 percent of entering college freshmen with
an interest in a science or engineering field, less than half complete a science or engineering degree in five years. All of this is
happening as the U.S. scientific and technical workforce is about to experience a high rate of retirement. One quarter of the current
science and engineering workforce is over 50 years old. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Labor projects that new jobs
requiring science, engineering and technical training will increase four times higher than the average national job growth rate.
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Competitivenes – Oil Key Turn

High oil boosts competitiveness – forces manufacturers to stay in the US
Alfonsi 6/24/08 [Sharon Alfonsi, staff writer @ ABCnews “Oil prices rising: jobs coming home” June 24, 2008 http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=5235731”
While it once cost $3,000 to ship a container from a city like Shanghai to New York, it now costs $8,000, prompting some businesses
to look closer to home for manufacturing needs. Furniture designer Carol Gregg used to have her signature Chinese chests assembled in China, but such a
luxury no longer seems viable, considering that some of her pieces now cost five times more to ship. So now Gregg is having the chests made in North Carolina,
simply because its cheaper. Some large companies like Crown Battery are cutting expenses by moving jobs from Mexico to Ohio. And hair care
company Farouk Systems plans to shift all of its production from China to Houston this summer bringing with it 1,000 jobs. The rise
in transportation costs are fueling what some economists are calling "reverse globalization." For instance, DESA, a company that
makes heaters to keep football players warm, is moving all its production back to Kentucky after years of having them made in China.
"Cheap labor in China doesn't help you when you gotta pay so much to bring the goods over," says economist Jeff Rubin. Some local manufacturers have suddenly
found themselves in the thick of boom times. "In December, we had three employees here. We were just getting set up. Now it's 14," says Casey Hearn, who owns a
furniture manufacturing business in North Carolina. Other sectors of U.S. manufacturing may see a boost in jobs as well. Rubin says the U.S. steel
industry is poised to reap benefits.
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Trade Bad – Agriculture specific

Free Trade kills agriculture – destroys biodiversity and creates monoculture
Mittal 2/22/2007(Anuradha Mittal with John Feffer Executive director of the Oakland Institute and Gawain Kripke of Oxfam, Internationally renowned expert
on trade, agriculture, development, and human rights (editor) – [Foreign Policy in Focus, “Free Trade Doesn’t Help Agriculture,” http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4021, EA)
Agriculture is the source of livelihood for over 40% of people on earth. Most of these producers are small-scale and subsistence farmers who
constitute 75% of the world's poor. This fact lends strategic urgency to the need to change an agricultural subsidy system in the North that shores up an unjust and
unsustainable corporate controlled industrial food system. First we need to dismantle one of the great myths that free trade helps farmers and the
poor. It does not! Attempts to leave farmers at the mercy of the free market only hasten their demise. The focus on export crops for trade has
meant increasing yields, with farmers becoming dependent on chemical inputs. Many have stopped rotating their crops, instead devoting every acre to
corn, wheat, or some other commodity crop and creating vast monocultures that require still more chemicals to be sustained. This has
destroyed our biodiversity. Vast industrial farms require costly equipment for planting and harvesting, increasing the capital intensity of agriculture. As costs rise,
prices fall in markets flush with surplus. As prices fall, farmers need subsidies, which are available to big growers and agribusiness only. Land values and cash rents
increase. This encourages heavy borrowing. Rich landowners get richer and young farmers cannot afford to get started. An agricultural bubble
economy is created. Inevitably it crashes as subsidies fail to keep pace with falling crop prices. Farms go bankrupt. Free trade in agriculture
starves our farmers. Our right to food has been undermined by dependence on the vagaries of the free market promoted by the
international financial institutions. Instead of ensuring the right to food for all, these institutions have created a system that prioritizes export-oriented
production and has increased global hunger and poverty while alienating millions from productive resources such as land, water, and seeds. The "world market" of
agricultural products simply does not exist. What exists is an international trade of surpluses in grain, cereals, and meat dumped primarily by the EU, the
United States, and members of the Cairns Group. Behind the faces of trade negotiators are powerful transnational corporations such as Cargill and Monsanto, which are
the real beneficiaries of domestic subsidies and international trade agreements. Fundamental change in this repressive trade regime is essential. Not surprisingly
then, farmers organizations and social movements around the world have denounced the liberalization of farm products promoted by the WTO and
other regional and bilateral free trade agreements. Instead of trade, small farmers movements prioritize healthy, good quality, and culturally appropriate
subsistence production for the domestic market and for the sub-regional or regional markets.
Loss of genetic diversity will cause global extinction

Fowler and Mooney 90 – Senior Officer at UN Food and Agriculture Organization; and Staff Member at Rural
Advancement Fund International [Cary and Pat, Shattering: food, politics, and the loss of genetic diversity, p. ix] jh
While many may ponder the consequences of global warming, perhaps the biggest single environmental catastrophe in human history
is unfolding in the garden. While all are rightly concerned about the possibility of nuclear war, an equally devastating time bomb is
ticking away in the fields of farmers all over the world. Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture—silent, rapid, inexorable—is leading
to a rendezvous with extinction—to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have
done in agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. In reducing the diversity of life,
we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious.
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Trade Bad –causes war 1/3
Globalized free trade will cause global nuclear war.
STAPLES 2000 (Steven, Chair of the International Network on Disarmament and Globalization“The Relationship Between Globalization and Militarism”,
Social Justice magazine, Vol. 27, No. 4, available at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Globalization/Globalization_Militarism.html)
Proponents of global economic integration argue that globalization promotes peace and economic development of the Third World.
They assert that "all boats rise with the tide" when investors and corporations make higher profits. However, there is precious little evidence that this is
true and substantial evidence of the opposite. The United Nation's Human Development Report (U.N. Development Programme, 1999: 3)
noted that globalization is creating new threats to human security. Economic inequality between Northern and Southern nations has
worsened, not improved. There are more wars being fought today-mostly in the Third World-than there were during the Cold War. Most
are not wars between countries, but are civil wars where the majority of deaths are civilians, not soldiers. The mainstream media frequently
oversimplify the causes of the wars, with claims they are rooted in religious or ethnic differences. A closer inspection reveals that the underlying source of such
conflicts is economic in nature. Financial instability, economic inequality, competition for resources, and environmental degradation-
all root causes of war-are exacerbated by globalization. The Asian financial meltdown of 1997 to 1999 involved a terrible human
cost. The economies of Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia crumbled in the crisis. These countries, previously held up by neoliberal economists as the darlings of
globalization, were reduced to riots and financial ruin. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in to rescue foreign investors and impose austerity programs that
opened the way for an invasion by foreign corporations that bought up assets devalued by capital flight and threw millions of people out of work. Political upheaval
and conflict ensued, costing thousands of lives. Meanwhile, other countries watched as their neighbors suffered the consequences of
greater global integration. In India, citizens faced corporate recolonization, which spawned a nationalistic political movement. Part of
the political program was the development of nuclear weapons-seen by many as the internationally accepted currency of power.
Nuclear tests have put an already conflict-ridden region on the brink of nuclear war.
Trade doesn’t insure peace – it can make war more likely
Rosecrance and Tompson 03 (Richard and Peter, ’03 Department of Political Science @ U of California for the Annual Review of Political Science, 2003
Vol. 6 Iss. 1, p.377-9, “Trade, Foreign Investment, and Security,” EBSCO or http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdf?vid=10&hid=5&sid=7c36f65c-6f5f-46a7-b6dd-
ecf69768b0be%40SRCSM1 to access the .pdf) EA
The relationship between international economic ties and security has been much mooted and remains controversial. Economic
relationships between countries affect their security links, but how important they are is uncertain. Among developed nations, trade may forge a closer
security relationship, reducing the likelihood of military conflict; yet, there are notable exceptions. Developed states linked by trading ties have
sometimes gone to war with one another. Less developed countries dependent on more developed nations have been taken over (Hirschman 1945) or they
have sought to cut ties with advanced countries. In the nineteenth century, advanced nations undertook imperialist expansion to conquer dependent colleagues. In the
1960s and 1970s there was a dependencia reaction that led some southern countries to think that they might be better off decoupling themselves from the North
(Cardoso 1979, Galtung 1971, Gunder Frank 1966). The opponents of northern domination assumed, however, that if the relationship could be made more equal, it
would facilitate cooperation and economic exchange beneficial to both sides (Russett & Oneal 2001). The critics of globalization today call for greater equality,
contending that the increased international flow of factors of production has benefited the rich more than the poor (Stiglitz 2002, Soros 2002). Yet, there are few
prospects of a dissociation of southern countries from trade with the North. The argument for trade as an enhancement of international security contends that if countries
can dependably acquire needed assets or goods from other nations through trade, they do not need to seek them through military expansion.1 Under conditions of
international openness, trade benefits both parties. The traditional economic argument for free trade presumes that international specialization and trade produce welfare
benefits to both even where those benefits are based only on comparative, not absolute, advantage (Ricardo 1817, Caves & Jones 1999). Commerce under these
conditions leads to a beneficial interdependence of trading partners. Developing this argument further, Mundell (1957) showed that factor flows of investment could also
compensate for trade, benefiting both parties and overcoming the prior effects of a tariff. Factor flows are movements of capital or labor between countries. Yet,
despite the correlation between trade as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) and peace (Russett & Oneal 2001), it seems clear that
trade is only one of many factors that may help to produce peace and that sometimes it may actually favor war (Barbieri & Schneider 1999).
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Trade causes war
Saul ‘99 [John, Ph.D., at King's College, University of London, Economist and Nonfiction author, Companion of the Order of Canada, Queen Elizabeth II Golden
Jubilee Medal, Order of Arts and Letters “Democracy and Globalisation,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Transcript of Lecture, EA)
Look at the whole question of trade, free trade as it's called. What is being called for is not free trade as opposed to protectionism. We haven't had
protectionism of any consequence for 40 years. I mean the level of tariffs has been nothing for 30-40 years and it's been less and less every year because of
various international agreements. It's free trade versus regulation. But what we've known for 2,500 years in the West is that if you want to
have prosperity you have to have extremely strict straightforward regulations which will bring the kind of stability, long-term stability,
long-term competition which will bring prosperity. We know that if you don't have that kind of regulation you get boom and bust cycles which end up in terrible
depressions. We've learnt that already once in this century in the '30s and it's as if we've forgotten it. A very famous lobbyist courtier said last year that history shows
us quite clearly that trade and direct investment are powerful catalysts for economic liberalisation, democratisation and the improvement of domestic social conditions.
And I hope you listened to that really important statement. If you actually look at history in a calm sort of way look at history, that isn't what history tells you. It just
isn't what history tells you. Trade does not necessarily lead to all those sorts of improvements. In fact, the principle which underlies this theory
is that all trade is good, all investment is good, we must do as much of it as possible because it will be good, it will produce democracy, it will produce
liberalisation, it will produce better social conditions. But when you actually look at history what you find is the exact opposite. For example this
person has also said as do, you'll hear it on a regular basis probably once a week or once a day if you spend your time listening to the radio and television, you'll hear
as part of this argument that "people who trade with each other don't fight each other", and you've all heard this, it's a central argument of the last 25
years. And yet you look at the history of the British empire and you discover that the whole core idea of the British empire was you
move in and start trading and then when you're not getting what you want in trade you go in and beat the hell out of them. It's trade, which
led to the construction of the British and the French and the German, and the Italian empires. The war that led to the independence of the United States - the UK-
American war was a war about trade. The Falklands War was all really a war between two hundred and fifty year old close trading
partners. Argentina's most loved trading partner was Britain. The US-Iraq war a few years ago was all about trade and oil. The United
Kingdom went to war twice in this century, world wars with Germany - Germany, their closest industrial trading partner. Italy, Yugoslavia, the Sino-Japanese war at the
beginning of this century. Hannibal, you know, Hannibal tried to take Rome. Why did he do it? It was about the wheat trade of course. So if you were going to make
a kind of banal simplistic generalistic ideological argument that we've been forced to listen to for the last 25 years, then you would have to argue that the principle or
leading cause of war is trade. I'm not going to make that argument, even though it seems to be related in some way. What in fact I am saying by giving you that bit of
history is that economic dissatisfaction or greed, or dissatisfaction arising out of trade leads to war. Not an argument against trade, but an argument,
which says that interest based societies, societies which perceive themselves as being interest-based, end up in violence. This is a natural outcome of the natural
imbalance of markets. So if you give in to the natural imbalance of markets - you'll notice that I'm not going to get a Nobel Prize for Economics by saying that - if
you give in to the idea of a natural imbalance of markets you will indeed have war because of trade. What prevents war isn't
economics, what prevents war is a shared understanding of the common good. That's not an idealistic idea, it's a practical idea. Over the centuries
we know that countries that don't go to war with each other are countries which have worked very very hard to find something, which they have in common, and to find
practical ways of evoking what they have in common. That's what France and Germany took out finally, rather late in the day, out of the Second World War. That they
simply couldn't go on killing each other over economic territorial military racial reasons, that they had to in fact think about what they had in common in spite of all
that. And even the Manichean idea of protectionism versus freedom, free trade is dubious, a dubious idea. When you talk about the role of competition, Joseph Stigler,
senior vice-president and chief economist of the World Bank - see all my quotes are very very respectable - just last year I think said regarding competition and free
trade, "the usual argument that protectionism itself stifled innovation was somewhat confused". Yeah, they gave them all those Nobel Prizes. Governments could have
created competition among domestic firms, which would have provided incentives to import new technology. It was the failure to create competition more than
protection from abroad that was the cause of the stagnation. I'm sorry it's really boring but it's interesting in a funny kind of way. Trade liberalisation that's going on,
trade liberalisation is neither necessary nor sufficient for creating a competitive and innovative economy. I didn't say that.
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Globalization amplifies instability – insecurity is inevitable and turns their offense.
Washington Post 7/16/2008 [(Robert Samuelson – Staff writer on the economy since 1969“A Baffling Global Economy,” Page A17,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/15/AR2008071502428.html, EA)
We've been having the wrong discussion about globalization. For years, we've argued over whether this or that industry and its workers might suffer
from imports and whether the social costs were worth the economic gains from foreign products, technologies and investments. By and large, the answer has been yes.
But the harder questions, I think, lie elsewhere. Is an increasingly interconnected world economy basically stable? Or does it generate periodic crises that harm
everyone and spawn international conflict? These questions go to the core of a great puzzle: the yawning gap between the U.S. economy's actual performance (poor,
but not horrific) and mass psychology (almost horrific). June's unemployment rate of 5.5 percent, though up from 4.4 percent in early 2007, barely exceeds the average
of 5.4 percent since 1990. Contrast that with consumer confidence, as measured by the Reuters-University of Michigan survey. It's at the lowest point since 1952 with
two exceptions (April and May 1980). Granted, the present U.S. economic slowdown -- maybe already a recession -- stems mostly from familiar domestic causes,
dominated by the burst housing "bubble." The Bush administration's rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the struggling government-sponsored housing enterprises,
is the latest reminder. Still, global factors, notably high oil and food prices, have aggravated the slump. The line between what's local and what's global
seems increasingly blurred, and there is a general anxiety that we are in the grip of mysterious worldwide forces. The good that
globalization has done is hard to dispute. Trade-driven economic growth and technology transfer have alleviated much human misery. If present economic
trends continue (a big "if"), the worldwide middle class will expand by 2 billion by 2030, estimates a Goldman Sachs study. (Goldman's definition of middle class:
people with incomes from $6,000 to $30,000.) In the United States, imports and foreign competition have raised incomes by 10 percent since World War II, some
studies suggest. Job losses, though real, are often exaggerated. But a disorderly global economy could reverse these advances. By disorderly I mean an
economy plagued by financial crises, interruptions of crucial supplies (oil, obviously), trade wars or violent business cycles. This is
globalization's Achilles' heel. Connections among countries have deepened and become more contradictory. Take oil producers. On one hand, high oil prices hurt
advanced countries. But on the other, oil countries have an interest in keeping advanced countries prosperous, because that's where much surplus oil wealth is invested.
Vast global flows of money threaten unintended side effects. Foreigners own more than $1 trillion of debt issued or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, reports economist Harm Bandholz of UniCredit. In the past six years, he notes, foreigners have purchased $5.7 trillion of U.S. stocks and bonds. Bandholz
says the inflow of money cut U.S. interest rates by 0.75 percentage points. So: Surplus savings from Asia and the Middle East, funneled into U.S. financial markets,
may have abetted the "subprime" mortgage crisis by encouraging sloppy American credit practices. Too much money chased too few good investment opportunities. A
loss of confidence in U.S. financial markets could be calamitous; that was one reason for the rescue of Fannie and Freddie. But just possibly, we're at a crucial -- and
desirable -- turning point. For several decades, the U.S. economy has been the world's economic locomotive. Americans borrowed and shopped; the U.S. trade deficit
ballooned to $759 billion in 2006, stimulating exports from other countries. The trouble is that this pattern of growth could not continue indefinitely,
because it required that Americans raise their debt burdens indefinitely. Now, China and other emerging markets may be moving beyond export-led
growth. Unfortunately, that shift could abort, if high inflation (8 percent in China and India) derails domestic expansion. Today's global economy baffles experts --
corporate executives, bankers, economists -- as much as it puzzles ordinary people. Countries are growing economically more interdependent and
politically more nationalistic. This is a combustible combination. The old global economy had few power centers (the United States, Europe, Japan),
was defined mainly by trade and was committed to the dollar as the central currency. Its major countries shared democratic values and alliances. Today's global
economy has many power centers (including China, Saudi Arabia and Russia), is also defined by finance and is exploring currency alternatives
to the dollar. Major trading nations now lack common political values and alliances. It is no more possible to undo globalization than
it was possible, in the 19th century, to undo the Industrial Revolution. But our understanding of international markets, shaped by impersonal economic
forces and explicit political decisions, is poor. Countries try to maximize their advantages rather than make the system work for everyone. Considering how much could
go wrong, the record is so far remarkably favorable. Alas, that's no guarantee for the future.
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Trade Bad –doesn’t stop conflict
Statistical analysis shows free trade doesn’t decrease the probability of war
Gelpi and Greico 05, Associate Professor and Professor of Political Science, Duke University (Christopher, Joseph, “Democracy, Interdependence, and the
Sources of the Liberal Peace”, Journal of Peace Research)
Clearly these results do not support hypotheses 2, 3, or 4. That is, the net impact of challenger trade dependence remains slightly negative but does not approach
statistical significance across the full range of variation in target trade dependence. This pattern of 17 coefficients suggests two central conclusions
about the impact of trade on conflict. First, trade dependence on the part of a potential challenger does not – either by itself or in
combination with trade dependence on the part of the potential defender – reduce the probability that the potential challenger will
initiate a dispute. And second, challenger trade dependence also does not exacerbate the incidence of dispute initiation.
Free trade threatens democracy – cedes political control to multinational corporations.
Kuttner 4/22/2001(Robert, Editor of the American Prospect, The Boston Globe, “NAFTA-Style Trade Bad for Democracy,” CommonDreams,
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0422-01.htm, EA)
NAFTA pays lip service to labor and environmental protections, but the weak laws on Mexican lawbooks are honored more in the breech. As a result, American
companies that shift production to Mexico outrun hard-won labor and environmental protections in the United States. Business, in
other words, is keen to harmonize property rights, but not labor, environmental, or consumer rights. And if NAFTA becomes a
hemisphere-wide arrangement, the social balance tilts even more dramatically to business, at the expense of both sovereignty and
social regulation. Brazil, for example, takes a very different view of pharmaceutical patent protections than the United States. Brazil treats life-saving drugs as
social goods. American pharmaceutical companies, not surprisingly, treat Brazilian policy as patent infringement. It is the defiance of the big global drug companies by
Brazil (and by India) that has sharply brought down the cost of AIDS drugs in the Third World. But if NAFTA is extended, Brazil and its independent drug companies
could be more easily sued by American rivals who have a very different set of public health priorities. Beneath the proposed Free Trade Area of the
Americas and kindred arrangements lurks an intriguing new ideology. This ideology holds that corporations are really agents of the
spread of democracy. I recently participated in a debate at Columbia University sponsored by the Reuters Foundation, on the health of democracy. One debater
was Nancy Boswell, the managing director of a worldwide organization called Transparency International. This well-intentioned group, funded by businesses, banks,
and foundations, has branches in some 80 countries. It sees itself as fighting corruption in Third World countries and thereby alleviating poverty, by pressing for US-
style corporate accounting, enforceable strictures against bribery, and the openness to investment characteristic of the United States. In this view, nothing
promotes democracy as much as the spread of free-market capitalism. It's an audacious claim, and it may even be half-true. In Mexico, NAFTA
probably hastened the downfall of the single-party regime. But in South Korea, a reformist government had to abandon half of its social program to reassure foreign
investors. Historically, democracy has been spread mostly by social movements, not by corporations. The free-market ''transparency''
promoted by business actually promotes a narrow brand of democracy that is a sanitized version of American capitalism, circa 1890 - full
rights for investors and for corporations, at the expense of laws that protect labor, the environment, and consumers. Today, some business leaders are cautious reformers
and business is beginning, grudgingly, to accept some minimal social standards as part of free trade agreements, but only because of strenuous citizen and labor
organizing. However, this social rebalancing works much more effectively within one country, where voters and social movements can be
direct counterweights to corporations by recourse to democratic politics. There are no citizens of the republic of NAFTA. That's why
these trade deals threaten democracy, even as they claim to spread it.
Increased trade has no effect on decreasing risk of conflict between nations
Gelpi and Greico 05, (Christopher, Joseph, Associate Professor and Professor of Political Science, Duke University “Democracy, Interdependence, and the
Sources of the Liberal Peace”, Journal of Peace Research)
As we have already emphasized, increasing levels of trade between an autocratic and democratic country are unlikely to constrain the
former from initiating militarized disputes against the latter. As depicted in Figure 1, our analysis indicates that an increase in trade dependence by an
autocratic challenger on a democratic target from zero to 5% of the former's GDP would increase the probability of the challenger’s dispute initiation from about 0.31%
to 0.29%. Thus, the overall probability of dispute initiation by an autocratic country against a democracy is fairly high (given the rarity of disputes) at 23 nearly .3% per
country per year. Moreover, increased trade does little or nothing to alter that risk. Increases in trade dependence also have little effect on
the likelihood that one autocracy will initiate a conflict with another. In this instance, the probability of dispute initiation remains
constant at 0.33% regardless of the challenger’s level of trade dependence.
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Trade bad – environment 1/2

Free trade kills the environment – studies ignore the pollution cycle of products
Venkat 1/8/04 (Kumar, The National Environment Education and Training Foundation, CommonDreams News Center, “Free Trade: Benefit or Peril for the
Environment?” http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views04/0108-10.htm, EA)
One of the most contentious issues surrounding globalization is the concern that free trade hurts the environment, both locally and
globally. The classic argument for free global trade is that it is efficient for countries to specialize in producing goods where they have a comparative advantage,
which they can then exchange for other goods. But skeptics like ecological economist Herman Daly have questioned this on the grounds that the real costs of
trade -- including depletion of natural resources and pollution -- are hidden and routinely ignored. In the new book “Trade and the Environment:
Theory and Evidence,” economists Brian Copeland and Scott Taylor attempt to replace some of the rhetoric in this debate with systematically produced results.
Based on a study of sulfur dioxide concentrations in over 100 cities around the world from 1971 to 1996, they reach the surprising and provocative
conclusion that free trade can actually be good for the environment. Copeland and Taylor find no evidence for the “pollution haven” hypothesis, which
states that free trade will prompt polluting industries to move to poor countries where environmental regulations are lax. Their results suggest that rich countries have a
comparative advantage in capital-intensive polluting industries, so these industries are likely to stay in rich countries even if environmental regulations are tighter. For
these developed countries, the right environmental policy can produce a net good for the environment. Pollution policy, in the form of regulation or taxes, can lead to
cleaner production methods by encouraging better technologies. The message to developing countries is that environmental problems can be exacerbated if
trade liberalization outpaces environmental policy -- as we will see shortly, therein lies one of the conflicts between trade and the
environment. The complexity of the subject becomes evident as the book leaves a host of questions unanswered. The authors limit their focus to local
pollution caused by production of goods, while ignoring other significant environmental impacts of trade. If a car is manufactured in Japan
and then shipped to the U.S., there would be some local pollution in Japan due to the manufacturing process. Some natural resources -- both
local and imported -- would also be used up in manufacturing the car. There would be additional resource use and pollution from
transporting the car to the U.S., and even more from driving that car year after year. Pollution from transportation and consumption of goods, as well as
resource use throughout the life cycles of products, are all potentially major avenues through which global trade can damage the
environment. When all these effects are combined with production-driven pollution, the final outcome could easily reverse the
optimistic result that trade benefits the environment.
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Trade bad – environment 2/2
That causes extinction

Environmental News Service ’97 [“Nature’s services worth trillions,” 2/18/97, at http://forests.org/archive/general/ecoworth.htm] jh
Ehrlich coined the term "brownlash" to describe the efforts of those trying to confuse the public about the findings of environmental science. Brownlashers, whose
ideas are a backlash against the "green" findings of the scientific community, make a wide variety of claims that he calls "preposterous." These include assertions that
the ozone hole is a hoax, that concern about global warming is unwarranted, that there is no extinction crisis and, most outlandish of all, that continued human
population growth can be supported for 7 billion years." "Those claims are diametrically opposed to the scientific consensus," Erlich said. "Those generating the
brownlash are willing to risk nature's crucial services to continue on a business-as-usual course - a course that may be congenial to their personal financial interests.
Nature's services are supplied free of charge by ecosystems, in which biodiversity - populations of plants, animals and microbes - are vital working parts. The trees,
shrubs and herbs growing on a Washington State hillside, for example, not only help to control erosion and flooding, but they also are involved in maintaining the
balance of gases in the atmosphere, cleaning the air and recycling wastes. "That's why scientists are so concerned with the mass extinction of populations and species
now under way," Ehrlich said. "A balance between human activities and safeguards for the natural systems that provide economic prosperity is essential to human
health, happiness and survival." Humanity is causing widespread losses of biodiversity through destruction and alteration of habitats, transporting organisms to new
locations, and overharvesting living resources such as fishes, Ehrlich said. "Loss of biodiversity is the most irreversible of the kinds of damage Homo sapiens is
inflicting on its environment." Releasing enormous quantities of toxic substances, failing to conserve soils, overexploiting non-living resources such as groundwater,
and modifying large-scale biophysical processes - especially altering climates, thinning the ozone shield and disrupting biogeochemical cycles - also add greatly to the
assault that Homo sapiens is mounting on its own life-support systems, he said. Humanity causes the extinction of at least one species and thousands of populations of
other organisms every day, Erlich wearned. At the same time humans are using up goods that crippled ecosystems will be unable to replenish, for example by causing
the annual loss of some 25 billion tons of soil, and overpumping the southern part of the Ogallala aquifer at roughly 100 times its recharge rate. "We are busily sawing
off the limb on which we are perched - yet that is never mentioned in the brownlash literature that attempts to persuade people that environmental problems are
relatively minor or nonexistent," Ehrlich said. Ehrlich called Daily's new book, "a critically important effort. He hopes it will encourage decision makers to incorporate
the value of nature's services into policy-making. "For instance, the Forest Service should include the costs of floods and mudslides in their calculations of fees for
timber harvesting." "But the dollar value clearly only sets a lower bound on the worth of the services. The value of our ability to feed ourselves or to avoid catastrophic
floods cannot be fully expressed in monetary terms. What is the true cost of hundreds of millions of lives cut short or lived in utter misery? "Although many scientific
uncertainties remain," Ehrlich continued, "more than enough is known to allow humanity to start developing and implementing steps to sustain its life-support systems
and thus preserve civilization.
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Trade – Disease
Trade increases spread of disease
Lederberg, 2001 [ Joshua (Ph.D., Nobel Prize in genetic structure and function in microorganisms, and Sackler Foundation Scholar, The Rockefeller
University) & Jonathan R. Davis (Senior Program Officer Institution of Medicine), Emerging Infectious Diseases from the Global to the Local Perspective: Workshop
Summary, April 15, 2001, http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309071844]
Global Trade and Travel

Global trade has increased 1,000 percent since World War II. Sixty percent of global trade occurs in the Asia-Pacific region alone,
resulting in an incredible movement of merchandise and people. Moreover, 20 percent of global agricultural trade occurs in Asia,
which is the major destination market for U.S. trade goods, with the rate of agricultural product sales increasing 7 percent each year.
As a large fraction of the economies of most developed nations are invested in trade, the level of exchange of goods will continue to
increase.
One of the drawbacks to this movement of goods is that antimicrobial agents and other drug classes used to treat products may result
in alterations in the ways in which people react to infections. Therefore, trade can introduce new pathogens or their vectors into a
region through the shipping of contaminated products. In addition, increased world trade—combined with greater world travel—is
precipitating some infectious disease events. Mitigation of these events requires greater investment in the public health infrastructure,
disease investigation, sanitary infrastructure, strengthening of health ministries and other health agencies within governments, and
coordinated action among the various sectors of society that deal with these issues.
Global travel also affects the transmission of infectious diseases. Nearly 1.5 billion travelers board airplanes every year, and the
proportion of international arrivals among continents is increasing (Figure 5). The resulting effects include the importation of
infectious diseases and infectious disease agents; for example, importation of influenza, pneumonic plague, TB, malaria, and even
poliovirus by air travelers has been reported. In 1996, sporadic cases of yellow fever were diagnosed among travelers returning to the
United States and Switzerland. Beyond tourism, as mentioned previously, migration also contributes to the spread of disease, which
can be exacerbated when immigrants and refugees live in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.
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Food Prices – High now

Food prices are guaranteed to remain high – water scarcity & increasing demand
Pearce 7-5/08 [Fred Pearce, Environment Consultant for New Scientist Magazine, “Water Scarcity: The Real Food Crisis,” Yale Environment 360,
http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=1825]
The immediate cause is declining grain stocks, which have encouraged speculators, hoarders, and panic-buyers. But what are the underlying trends that have
sown the seeds for this perfect food storm? Biofuels are part of it, clearly. A quarter of U.S. corn is now converted to ethanol, powering vehicles
rather than filling stomachs or fattening livestock. And the rising oil prices that encouraged the biofuels boom are also raising food prices by making fertilizer,
pesticides, and transport more expensive. But there is something else going on that has hardly been mentioned, and that some believe is the great slow-burning, and
hopelessly underreported, resource crisis of the 21st century: water. Climate change, overconsumption and the alarmingly inefficient use of
this most basic raw material are all to blame. I wrote a book three years ago titled When The Rivers Run Dry. It probed why the Yellow River in China, the Rio Grande and
Colorado in the United States, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in Pakistan, the Amu Darya in Central Asia, and many others are all running on empty. The confident blue lines in a million atlases
simply do not tell the truth about rivers sucked dry, for the most part, to irrigate food crops. We are using these rivers to death. And we are also pumping out underground water reserves almost
everywhere in the world. With two-thirds of the water abstracted from nature going to irrigate crops — a figure that rises above 90 percent in many arid
countries — water shortages equal food shortages. Consider the two underlying causes of the current crisis over world food prices: falling
supplies from some of the major agricultural regions that supply world markets, and rising demand in booming economies like China and India. Why falling
supplies? Farm yields per hectare have been stagnating in many countries for a while now. The green revolution that caused yields to soar 20 years ago
may be faltering. But the immediate trigger, according to most analysts, has been droughts, particularly in Australia, one of the world’s largest grain exporters, but also
in some other major suppliers, like Ukraine. Australia’s wheat exports were 60 percent down last year; its rice exports were 90 percent down. Why rising demand?
China has received most of the blame here — its growing wealth is certainly raising demand, especially as richer citizens eat more meat. But China
traditionally has always fed itself — what’s different now is that the world’s most populous country is no longer able to produce all its own food.
Food Prices High Now & Inevitable – 6 reasons

Corey 6 - 27 - 08 [Charles W. Corey, Staff Writer at America.gov “Africa: Economists Cite Six Factors for Oil, Food Price Hikes,” America.gov,
http://allafrica.com/stories/200806271178.html]
Members of the group who spoke to America.gov, include Michael J. Dwyer, director and chief economist for the Foreign Agricultural Service;
Daniel B. Whitley, deputy director of that office; and Hui Jiang, a USDA agricultural economist. Normally, Dwyer said, the international system is dynamic
enough to handle one or two simultaneous shocks, but the number of factors in play today "pretty much overwhelms the system's
ability to deal with it, and prices are spiking sharply higher." He and his colleagues outlined six factors. First, higher energy prices
have led to higher input costs for pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides (many of which are petroleum-based), higher processing costs and higher costs
for transportation -- which directly affects the cost of food being shipped overseas. "Right now, to ship a ton of corn out of New Orleans to Asia [costs]
about $130," a dramatic increase from not long ago. "When farmers have to pay more for their fertilizers and other inputs," Dwyer said, "it means these higher food
prices are not all pure profit to a producer because their costs are up as well." Dwyer said it is incorrect to single out the current U.S. biofuels policy, which promotes
the conversion of some corn into biofuels, for driving up prices. "A lot of the world press is covering this issue right now, and it is probably the number one issue in the
newspapers around the world. Unfortunately, a lot of the newspapers have unfairly scapegoated the U.S biofuels policy as the driver behind why corn prices and
commodity prices in general have spiked sharply higher in the last 18 months. "We don't dispute that ethanol has had a role," he said. "What we are saying is that it is a
little more complex than that." U.S. ethanol production is booming, he said, with one-third of the U.S. corn crop expected to be milled for ethanol this year. "We don't
deny that it is having an impact." The second factor is the growing demand for food, particularly emanating from China, India and Southeast Asia, Latin
America, Africa and the Middle East. "As the middle classes are growing in these regions, they want to eat more food and are all entering the
international market at the same time," Dwyer said. "When the new middle class gets new income, they want to spend it on food in much of the developing
world, so the demand-side growth for food is on a rapid growth curve right now." Third, the dollar is at a 30-year low in real terms. "Any time the
dollar goes down in value, any dollar-denominated commodity tends to go up in price," Dwyer said. Like oil, most major food
commodities worldwide are traded in dollars, and a weak dollar contributes to upward pricing pressure. Fourth, bad weather has
reduced global food supplies, particularly wheat out of Australia. The European Union, Canada and Eastern Europe also had shortfalls in the
last two years. "What happens is that you get this strong demand growth, coupled with a supply shock, and you draw your stocks or
inventory down to make up the gap. Anytime your inventory is at a very, very low level the price shoots up at a corresponding rate."
The fifth factor is action by a number of countries that have either restricted or completely shut off exports, particularly of rice, to keep
domestic prices low. The USDA estimates there is enough rice in the world to handle demand. Unfortunately, Dwyer said, rice-export bans prompted logistical problems and pricing
scares. "The people who had it basically did not want to sell it to the people who needed it -- they got 'freaked out' and bid the price sky-high." Dwyer stressed that the United States has not
The final factor cited is increased interest from investors in oil and commodities. In the oil markets alone, up to
shut off any of its food exports.
70 percent of the futures contracts are being held by investors with no intention of taking delivery, up from 30 percent historically, he said. "We do not
have comparable numbers for agricultural commodities, but anecdotally, a lot of these index funds go out and buy all of these commodities. Investors are playing a much, much bigger role in
the commodity markets. So the concern is that investors may be having an undue influence on prices," by heavily moving into these markets, he said.
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Terrorism – Threat Exaggerated

People have an irrational fear of terrorism – we can’t defend everything.
Schneier 9/8/05 [Bruce, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security “Terrorists Don’t Do Movie Plots,” Wired, 9/8/05,
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2005/09/68789]
Sometimes it seems like the
people in charge of homeland security spend too much time watching action movies. They defend against
specific movie plots instead of against the broad threats of terrorism. We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific
threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs.
Before long, we're envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we're scared. Psychologically, this all makes sense. Humans
have good imaginations. Box cutters and shoe bombs conjure vivid mental images. "We must protect the Super Bowl" packs more emotional punch than the vague "we
should defend ourselves against terrorism." The 9/11 terrorists used small pointy things to take over airplanes, so we ban small pointy things
from airplanes. Richard Reid tried to hide a bomb in his shoes, so now we all have to take off our shoes. Recently, the Department of
Homeland Security said that it might relax airplane security rules. It's not that there's a lessened risk of shoes, or that small pointy things are suddenly less dangerous.
It's that those movie plots no longer capture the imagination like they did in the months after 9/11, and everyone is beginning to see how silly (or pointless) they always
were. Commuter terrorism is the new movie plot. The London bombers carried bombs into the subway, so now we search people entering the subways. They used cell
phones, so we're talking about ways to shut down the cell-phone network. It's too early to tell if hurricanes are the next movie-plot threat that captures the imagination.
The problem with movie plot security is that it only works if we guess right. If we spend billions defending our subways, and the terrorists bomb a
bus, we've wasted our money. To be sure, defending the subways makes commuting safer. But focusing on subways also has the effect of shifting attacks toward less-
defended targets, and the result is that we're no safer overall. Terrorists don't care if they blow up subways, buses, stadiums, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, schools,
churches, crowded markets or busy intersections. Reasonable arguments can be made that some targets are more attractive than others: airplanes because a small bomb
can result in the death of everyone aboard, monuments because of their national significance, national events because of television coverage, and transportation because
most people commute daily. But the United States is a big country; we can't defend everything.
Terrorism threat overblown
Mueller 12/13/06 [ Mueller, John, national security expert and author of Overblown “Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate
National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them,” Cato Institute, December 13, 2006, http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=3367
Since September 11, 2001, there have been no terrorist attacks in the United States, even though a single person with a bomb-filled backpack could
carry one out. Why hasn’t it happened? Among the possibilities is that the threat of domestic terrorism is not as great as generally
assumed. In his provocative book Overblown, national security expert John Mueller argues that the capacity of al-Qaeda or of any similar
group to do damage in the United States pales in comparison to the capacity other dedicated enemies have possessed in the past. Our
responses to the terror threat may be more costly than any damage terrorists could do. Indeed, they may play into terrorists’ hands. Mueller argues that it is time to
rethink our approach to terrorism, target resources proportionately to the threat, and avoid the fear-mongering that has been such a staple of post-9/11 public
dialogue. Please join us for a lively discussion with this interesting author and a very distinguished commentator.
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Terrorism – No Attack 1/2

There will be no major attack- several reasons
Brookings Institution 7 - 18 -08[independent research and policy institute “Have we exaggerated the threat of terrorism?” Brookings Institute, July 18,
2008, http://www.brookings.edu/events/2008/0221_terrorism.aspx
One participant argued that terrorism presents minimal cause for concern. Discounting war zones, studies show that there have been very
few people killed by “Muslim extremists” each year—in fact, more people drown in bathtubs each year in the United States. The FBI
reported in 2005 that it had not found an al-Qaeda presence in the United States. Additionally, terrorism, by its very nature, can be self-defeating: many attacks by
al-Qaeda have caused the group to lose popularity. This participant questioned both the intentions and capability of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden has
threatened many attacks that he has not been able to execute. In specific, this participant thought it unlikely that that al-Qaeda would obtain nuclear
weapons, despite fears to the contrary. Another participant agreed that the fears about terrorism are exaggerated and differentiated between the actual campaign
against al-Qaeda and its supporters and the idea of a general “war on terrorism.” However, participants also detailed the larger problems that terrorism can create,
regardless of the numbers it kills directly: terrorism often leads to insurgencies or civil wars; it could destabilize U.S. allies in the Middle East and the whole Middle
Eastern architecture; terrorism keeps oil prices high; and it has psychological effects beyond the actual death tolls. Additionally, many planned attacks have been
stopped before they were carried out; one participant noted that there have been several near-misses recently. One participant argued that the war on terrorism is actually
about an ideological battle between the United States and its allies and radical forces. Another participant agreed with this assessment of the general struggle between
the United States and “radical Islamic extremism.” This participant noted that the larger struggle is much more complicated to understand than terrorism in specific and
that this leads to a disproportionate focus on terrorism and the accompanying misallocation of resources. Participants highlighted the difference between the risks
presented by terrorism in the United States and around the world. The impact of terrorism in Iraq and Lebanon, for instance, is completely different than the impact in
the United States, which one participant categorized as being essentially psychological. The relevance of the capability of governments at preventing terrorism was also
addressed. Terrorism is particularly dangerous in places where there is weak government capacity and rule of law. Participants discussed why has there not been
another terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001. One participant presented several reasons: the United States has a
supportive domestic Muslim population; the would-be terrorists in the United States are not skilled; and U.S. counterterrorism policy
has made it more difficult for the al-Qaeda core to plan complex attacks. This participant argued, however, that there are risks that this situation may
change going forward. As the al-Qaeda core reconstitutes itself in Pakistan, it may be able to plan more complex attacks again. Additionally, the U.S. Muslim
population may become less supportive overtime as a result of U.S. homeland security policy. However, another participant did not think the attitudes of the U.S.
Muslim community were particularly relevant to this debate.
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Terrorism – No Attack 2/2

Terrorists won’t attack
Mueller 06[Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University Mueller, John, "Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?: The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy"
Foreign Affairs, September/ October 2006, http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20060901facomment85501/john-mueller/is-there-still-a-terrorist-threat.html
For the past five years, Americans have been regularly regaled with dire predictions of another major al Qaeda attack in the United States. In 2003, a group of 200
senior government officials and business executives, many of them specialists in security and terrorism, pronounced it likely that a terrorist strike more devastating than
9/11 -- possibly involving weapons of mass destruction -- would occur before the end of 2004. In May 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that al Qaeda
could "hit hard" in the next few months and said that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on U.S. soil were complete. That fall, Newsweek reported that it was
"practically an article of faith among counterterrorism officials" that al Qaeda would strike in the run-up to the November 2004 election. When that "October surprise"
failed to materialize, the focus shifted: a taped encyclical from Osama bin Laden, it was said, demonstrated that he was too weak to attack before the election but was
marshalling his resources to do so months after it. On the first page of its founding manifesto, the massively funded Department of Homeland Security intones,
"Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon." But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if
terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels,
poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other
vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited? One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the
United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered. HUFFING AND PUFFING
Instead, Americans are told -- often by the same people who had once predicted imminent attacks -- that the absence of international terrorist strikes in
the United States is owed to the protective measures so hastily and expensively put in place after 9/11. But there is a problem with this
argument. True, there have been no terrorist incidents in the United States in the last five years. But nor were there any in the five
years before the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the United States was doing much less to protect itself. It would take only one or two
guys with a gun or an explosive to terrorize vast numbers of people, as the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C., demonstrated in 2002. Accordingly,
the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to
Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that
explanation seems far-fetched. Moreover, Israel still experiences terrorism even with a far more extensive security apparatus. It may well have become more
difficult for terrorists to get into the country, but, as thousands demonstrate each day, it is far from impossible. Immigration procedures have
been substantially tightened (at considerable cost), and suspicious U.S. border guards have turned away a few likely bad apples. But visitors and immigrants continue to
flood the country. There are over 300 million legal entries by foreigners each year, and illegal crossings number between 1,000 and 4,000 a day -- to say nothing of the
generous quantities of forbidden substances that the government has been unable to intercept or even detect despite decades of a strenuous and well-funded "war on
drugs." Every year, a number of people from Muslim countries -- perhaps hundreds -- are apprehended among the illegal flow from
Mexico, and many more probably make it through. Terrorism does not require a large force. And the 9/11 planners, assuming Middle Eastern
males would have problems entering the United States legally after the attack, put into motion plans to rely thereafter on non-Arabs with passports from Europe and
Southeast Asia. If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they
must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest.
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Terrisorism – US Winning WTO
US winning war on terror now
Baker 6/27/08[US Editor and Assistant Editor of The Times of London Baker, Gerard, “Cheer up. We're winning this War on Terror,” The Times, June 27, 2008,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article4221376.ece
And yetthe evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and
the enemy who is in retreat. The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great
French soldier's dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!” Since it
is remarkable how pervasive this pessimism is, it's worth recapping what has been achieved in the past few years. Afghanistan has been a signal success. There has been
much focus on the latest counter-offensive by the Taleban in the southeast of the country and it would be churlish to minimise the ferocity with which the terrorists are
fighting, but it would be much more foolish to understate the scale of the continuing Nato achievement. Establishing a stable government for the whole nation is
painstaking work, years in the making. It might never be completed. But that was not the principal objective of the war there.
Until the US-led invasion in 2001, Afghanistan was the cockpit of ascendant Islamist terrorism. Consider the bigger picture. Between 1998 and 2005 there were five
big terrorist attacks against Western targets - the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, 9/11, and the Madrid and London
bombings in 2004 and 2005. All owed their success either exclusively or largely to Afghanistan's status as a training and planning base for al-Qaeda. In the past three
years there has been no attack on anything like that scale. Al-Qaeda has been driven into a state of permanent flight. Its ability to train jihadists
has been severely compromised; its financial networks have been ripped apart. Thousands of its activists and enablers have been
killed. It's true that Osama bin Laden's forces have been regrouping in the border areas of Pakistan but their ability to orchestrate mass terrorism there is severely
attenuated. And there are encouraging signs that Pakistanis are starting to take to the offensive against them. Next time you hear someone say that the war in
Afghanistan is an exercise in futility ask them this: do they seriously think that if the US and its allies had not ousted the Taleban and sustained an offensive against
them for six years that there would have been no more terrorist attacks in the West? What characterised Islamist terrorism before the Afghan war was increasing
sophistication, boldness and terrifying efficiency. What has characterised the terrorist attacks in the past few years has been their crudeness, insignificance and a faintly
comical ineptitude (remember Glasgow airport?) The second great advance in the War on Terror has been in Iraq. There's no need to recapitulate the
disasters of the US-led war from the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003 to his execution at the end of 2006. We may never fully make up for three and a half lost
years of hubris and incompetence but in the last 18 months the change has been startling. The “surge”, despite all the doubts and derision at the time, has been a
triumph of US military planning and execution. Political progress was slower in coming but is now evident too. The Iraqi leadership has shown
great courage and dispatch in extirpating extremists and a growing willingness even to turn on Shia militias. Basra is more peaceful and safer
than it has been since before the British moved in. Despite setbacks such as yesterday's bombings, the streets of Iraq's cities are calmer and safer than they have been in
years. Seventy companies have bid for oil contracts from the Iraqi Government. There are signs of a real political reconciliation that may reach fruition in the election
later this year. The third and perhaps most significant advance of all in the War on Terror is the discrediting of the Islamist creed and its appeal.
This was first of all evident in Iraq, where the head-hacking frenzy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his associates so alienated the majority of Muslims that it gave rise to
the so-called Sunni Awakening that enabled the surge to be so effective. But it has spread way beyond Iraq. As Lawrence Wright described in an important piece in The
New Yorker last month, there is growing disgust not just among moderate Muslims but even among other jihadists at the extremism of the terrorists. Deeply
encouraging has been the widespread revulsion in Muslim communities in Europe - especially in Britain after the 7/7 attacks of three years ago. Some of the
biggest intelligence breakthroughs in the past few years have been achieved from former al-Qaeda supporters who have turned against
the movement. There ought to be no surprise here. It's only their apologists in the Western media who really failed to see the intrinsic evil of Islamists. Those who
have had to live with it have never been in much doubt about what it represents. Ask the people of Iran. Or those who fled the horrors of Afghanistan under the Taleban.
This is why we fight. Primarily, of course, to protect ourselves from the immediate threat of terrorist carnage, but also because we know that extending the embrace of a
civilisation that liberates everyone makes us all safer. Every death is an unspeakable tragedy. It's right that each time a soldier is killed in action we ask why. Was it
really worth it? The right response to the loss of brave souls such as Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first British woman to die in Afghanistan, is not an immediate call for
retreat. It is, first of all, pride; a great, deep conviction that it is on such sacrifice that our own freedoms have always rested. Then, defiance. How foolish is the enemy
that it might think our grief is really some prelude to their victory? Finally, confidence. We are prevailing in this struggle. We know it. And everywhere:
in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and among Muslims around the world, the enemy knows it too.
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Soft Power/Hegemony Bad
US global image is in the toilet – they can’t garner any uniqueness to their loss of leadership
Yang, 2008. [Jeff, “Brand Aid,” salon.com, March 3, http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/03/03/candidates_branding/index.html?source=newsletter]
There's no way to put this delicately, so I won't: America's global image is in the crapper. Last year, the BBC World Service conducted a poll of over 26,000
individuals in the world's 25 largest countries and found that more than 52 percent thought the U.S. had a "mostly negative" influence on the world. Fifty-three
percent of respondents to a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs felt America could "not be trusted."
Heg doesn’t prevent wars – no proof
Conry 2-5-1997 Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=1126
Global political and military leadership is inadequate, even dangerous, as a basis for policy. The vagueness of "leadership" allows
policymakers to rationalize dramatically different initiatives and makes defining policy difficult. Taken to an extreme, global
leadership implies U.S. interest in and responsibility for virtually anything, anywhere. Global leadership also entails immense costs
and risks. Much of the $265 billion defense budget is spent to support U.S. aspirations to lead the world, not to defend the United
States. There are also human costs. Moreover, it is an extremely risky policy that forces U.S. involvement in numerous situations
unrelated to American national security. There are no concrete benefits that justify the costs and risks of U.S. global leadership.
Advocates' claims that leadership enables Washington to persuade U.S. allies to assume costs the United States would otherwise bear alone and that failure on the part
of the United States to lead would cause global chaos do not hold up under scrutiny.
Turn – heg provokes wars
Eland 11-26-2002 Director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=1318
The idea, however, ignores the fact that today's world bears little resemblance to the one over which Britain or Rome once presided.
Two differences are obvious: First, the world is far more interconnected today, which makes the consequences of sanctimonious,
arrogant, or clumsy international behavior riskier politically, diplomatically, and economically. Second, the potential costs associated
with making enemies today are far greater than they were for empires past. Indeed, the British and the Romans were the targets of assassinations,
arson, and other forms of anti-imperial backlash, but that activity was typically small-scale and took place far from the mother country. Forms of backlash today,
in contrast, could be large-scale and directed at America's homeland. Most of all, the strategy of empire is likely to overstretch and bleed
America's economy and its military and federal budgets, and the overextension could hasten the decline of the United States as a
superpower, as it did the Soviet Union and Great Britain. The strategy could also have the opposite effect from what its proponents claim it would have; that is, it
would alarm other nations and peoples and thus provoke counter-balancing behavior and create incentives for other nations to acquire
weapons of mass destruction as an insurance policy against American military might. “Global leadership" has gained increasing prominence as a
guiding principle for American foreign policy. Yet the concept itself remains largely unexamined. Although "leadership" sounds benign, today's proponents of global
leadership envision a role for the United States that resembles that of a global hegemon--with the risks and costs hegemony entails.
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Heg/Soft Power – decline inevitable 1/4

Heg Decline Inevitable – China, India, globalization
DREZNER 3 – 4 - 2008 Associate Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and the author of
"All Politics Is Global." Foreign Affairs http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070301faessay86203/daniel-w-drezner/the-new-new-world-order.html KW
Throughout the twentieth century, the list of the world's great powers was predictably short: the United States, the Soviet Union, Japan, and northwestern Europe. The
twenty-first century will be different. China and India are emerging as economic and political heavyweights: China holds over a
trillion dollars in hard currency reserves, India's high-tech sector is growing by leaps and bounds, and both countries, already
recognized nuclear powers, are developing blue-water navies. The National Intelligence Council, a U.S. government think tank, projects that
by 2025, China and India will have the world's second- and fourth-largest economies, respectively. Such growth is opening the way
for a multipolar era in world politics. This tectonic shift will pose a challenge to the U.S.-dominated global institutions that have been in
place since the 1940s. At the behest of Washington, these multilateral regimes have promoted trade liberalization, open capital markets,
and nuclear nonproliferation, ensuring relative peace and prosperity for six decades -- and untold benefits for the United States. But unless
rising powers such as China and India are incorporated into this framework, the future of these international regimes will be
uncomfortably uncertain.
Can’t improve heg – global distrust & EU disapproval
DREZNER 3 – 4 - 2008 Associate Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and the author of
"All Politics Is Global." Foreign Affairs http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20070301faessay86203/daniel-w-drezner/the-new-new-world-order.html KW
This unheralded effort is well intentioned and well advised. It is, however, running into two major roadblocks. The first is that empowering
countries on the
rise means disempowering countries on the wane. Accordingly, some members of the European Union have been less than enthusiastic
about aspects of the United States' strategy. To be sure, the EU has made its own bilateral accommodations and has been happy to cooperate with emerging
countries in response to American unilateralism. But European states have been less willing to reduce their overrepresentation in multilateral
institutions. The second problem, which is of the Bush administration's own making, stems from Washington's reputation for unilateralism.
Because the U.S. government is viewed as having undercut many global governance structures in recent years, any effort by this
administration to rewrite the rules of the global game is naturally seen as yet another attempt by Washington to escape the constraints of
international law. A coalition of the skeptical, which includes states such as Argentina, Nigeria, and Pakistan, will make it difficult for the United
States to engineer the orderly inclusion of India and China in the concert of great powers.
End to US Dominance Inevitable- Rise of Sovereign Wealth funds
Haass 5-6-2008 President of the Council on Foreign Relations http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080501faessay87304-p40/richard-n-haass/the-age-of-

nonpolarity.html
GDP growth is hardly the only indication of a move away from U.S. economic dominance. The rise of sovereign wealth funds -- in countries such as
China, Kuwait, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates -- is another. These government-controlled pools of wealth, mostly
the result of oil and gas exports, now total some $3 trillion. They are growing at a projected rate of $1 trillion a year and are an increasingly
important source of liquidity for U.S. firms. High energy prices, fueled mostly by the surge in Chinese and Indian demand, are here to stay for
some time, meaning that the size and significance of these funds will continue to grow. Alternative stock exchanges are springing up and drawing
away companies from the U.S. exchanges and even launching initial public offerings (IPOs). London, in particular, is competing with New York as the world's financial
center and has already surpassed it in terms of the number of IPOs it hosts. The dollar has weakened against the euro and the British pound, and it is likely to
decline in value relative to Asian currencies as well. A majority of the world's foreign exchange holdings are now in currencies other than the
dollar, and a move to denominate oil in euros or a basket of currencies is possible, a step that would only leave the U.S. economy more vulnerable to inflation as well
as currency crises.
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US Heg decline imminent- Oil dependence creates vulnerability

nonpolarity.html
A second cause is U.S. policy. To paraphrase Walt Kelly's Pogo, the post-World War II comic hero, we have met the explanation and it is us. By both what it has done
and what it has failed to do, the United States has accelerated the emergence of alternative power centers in the world and has weakened its
own position relative to them. U.S. energy policy (or the lack thereof) is a driving force behind the end of unipolarity. Since the first
oil shocks of the 1970s, U.S. consumption of oil has grown by approximately 20 percent, and, more important, U.S. imports of petroleum
products have more than doubled in volume and nearly doubled as a percentage of consumption. This growth in demand for foreign oil has
helped drive up the world price of oil from just over $20 a barrel to over $100 a barrel in less than a decade. The result is an enormous transfer of
wealth and leverage to those states with energy reserves. In short, U.S. energy policy has helped bring about the emergence of oil and
gas producers as major power centers.
Heg decline fated- Iraq

nonpolarity.html
The war in Iraq has also contributed to the dilution of the United States' position in the world. The war in Iraq has proved to be an
expensive war of choice -- militarily, economically, and diplomatically as well as in human terms. Years ago, the historian Paul Kennedy outlined his thesis about
"imperial overstretch," which posited that the United States would eventually decline by overreaching, just as other great powers had in the past.
Kennedy's theory turned out to apply most immediately to the Soviet Union, but the United States -- for all its corrective mechanisms and dynamism -- has not
proved to be immune. It is not simply that the U.S. military will take a generation to recover from Iraq; it is also that the United States
lacks sufficient military assets to continue doing what it is doing in Iraq, much less assume new burdens of any scale elsewhere.
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Iraq has decimated U.S. leadership – anti-Americanism is spreading globally
The Irish Times 7 (3/10, “Calamity of Iraq war may push isolated US into wider conflict” L/N)
World View: In a comprehensive critique of George W Bush's war in Iraq and a warning of the dangerous course it could take in Iran, Zbigniew Brzezinski says it
has been an historic, strategic and moral calamity for the US. The war was undertaken on false pretences and driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris. It has
undermined US global legitimacy, especially in Europe, where years of patient effort will now be required to restore US credibility,
writes Paul Gillespie.
Put forcefully in testimony to the US Senate's foreign relations committee on February 1st and in an article for the Los Angeles Times on February 11th, Brzezinski's
case is taken up and put in a wider context in his book published this week, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of the American Superpower. It goes
against the grain of much commentary confined within the parameters of established US thinking on the subject. Brzezinski was national security adviser to Jimmy
Carter from 1976 to 1980 and has been since then a strategic theorist of US superpowerdom, influential during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years and now from his
academic perch at Johns Hopkins University. His speciality is grand geopolitical strategic analysis, with an engaging if brutal candour about the facts of power and
interests in today's world. This often puts him at odds with leaders of the Democratic party he supports, notably on the Iraq war, which he has opposed.
Such realism is exemplified by his reply to a question put by the Nouvel Observateur in 1998, on whether he regretted supporting the Islamic fundamentalists in
Afghanistan, which he justified because they drew the Soviet Union into a Vietnam-like quagmire in 1979."What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the
collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the cold war?" A similarly candid theme runs through
Brzezinski's three books published over the past 10 years. In his 1997 work, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, he spelled out
what would be required to maintain this power for the next generation by purposeful management of the other major states. If the emergence of a direct challenger was
to be prevented, the US would have "to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep subsidiaries pliant and protected, and to keep the
barbarians from coming together". The book is full of shrewd political insights and crisp judgments about how these hegemonic objectives could be achieved on the
"Eurasian Balkan" chessboard. In The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership, published in 2004, Brzezinski is more worried that the US will pursue the
former not the latter path. If its foreign policy relied primarily on the unilateral exercise of sovereign power, along with a self-serving
definition of emerging threats, this could bring "self-isolation, growing national paranoia and increasing vulnerability to a globally
spreading anti-American virus. An anxious America, obsessed with its own security, could find itself isolated in a hostile world." He
extended the Balkan analogy globally to include south and southeast Asia, where most of the world's political injustice, social deprivation, demographic congestion, oil,
gas - and Muslims - are concentrated. The major alternative to such a scenario, he argued, is a strengthened transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe
through the EU and Nato.Brzezinski has long advocated EU and Nato enlargement to consolidate the end of the cold war and create a new relationship with Russia. He
sharply criticised the Bush administration's dismissal and mishandling of the European relationship. This should rather be complementary, allowing the US to be
globally preponderant, but not omnipotent, by harnessing the EU's soft power without provoking it into a dangerous strategic rivalry.Brzezinski's criticisms of the Bush
administration's policies are much sharper and harsher in his latest book. This is largely because he argues that they have fulfilled his earlier predictions by gratuitously
undermining US legitimacy and credibility around the world left in place by Bush snr and Clinton."Though in some dimensions, such as the military, American power
may be greater in 2006 than in 1991, the country's capacity to mobilise, inspire, point in a shared direction and thus shape global realities has significantly declined.
"Fifteen years after its coronation as global leader, America is becoming a fearful and lonely democracy in a politically antagonistic
world."Europe and other regions have been alienated - as shown in successive opinion polls. This, if not corrected, could dramatically
affect US standing, since "if American policy were universally viewed as arrogantly imperial in a post-imperial age, mired in a
colonial relapse in a post-colonial time, selfishly indifferent in the face of unprecedented global interdependence, and culturally self-
righteous in a religiously diverse world, the crisis of American superpower would then become terminal".
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Partisan Wars and Iraq have made countries questions our competence more than ever
St Petersburg Times 7 (6/13 “Bush’s war on terror comes up empty” L/N)

Al-Qaida thrives, U.S. says July 12, story
Competence is in doubt all aroundWhat a headline! After almost six years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have managed to lose almost 4,000
American lives, tens of thousands of wounded, and $600-billion. And now the latest intelligence reports are saying that al-Qaida has
recovered to its pre-9/11 strength and has established a stable training ground in Pakistan, our "ally."
We supposedly have the greatest military force in the world and the greatest intelligence gathering community, and this is what it has gotten us?
Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats are fighting each other in partisan wars instead of working together on what would be in the
interests of the United States. No wonder the country is going down the drain.
The question is one of competence. That applies to our "leaders" in both parties and our military. God bless America, because we need
it now more than ever!
From Katrina to Iraq—the US has reversed its moral authority and credibility
St. Petersburg Times 6 (8/6 “US has lost its credibility as a peacemaker” L/N)
With the United States being the only current world superpower, it is our duty to be a peacemaker, which is what we have attempted over the past
few decades with the Middle East peace process. We have always attempted to be morally "right" and impartial in the area in order to have credibility and authority.
However, the Bush administration doesn't seem to be able to make a "right" decision. From Katrina to Iraq, we have lost our
credibility, and the American public is to blame as well for its apathy.
Israel is our ally, yes. But to stand by while the Israelis destroy newly rebuilt Lebanon is reprehensible. Our credibility as a peacemaker can't exist when we
promote only wars that we approve of. The overwhelming reaction to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and another one in the Gaza Strip
indicates a much wider goal by Israel, and yet the United States sits back and does nothing, or worse gives the okay, until the rest of
the world condemns the Israelis' actions and, by extension, ours.
We have lost our moral authority and credibility and reversed years of diplomatic endeavors. One can only hope that the American people will
finally have had enough of our closed-minded administration and are able to become more politically active and elect some true leaders.
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International Credibility – Alt Cause

Obama as President will renew our international credibility – compared to this the plan isn’t even a blip
on the radar
Yang, 2008. [Jeff, “Brand Aid,” salon.com, March 3,
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/03/03/candidates_branding/index.html?source=newsletter]
For Obama, this advantage is almost unassailable. Short of announcing Tiger Woods as a running mate, none of his rivals
has a way to force a recalibration of America's image through peripheral attributes alone. It's a big reason why he's
captivated global attention, to an extent that Americans might not even be aware. Indeed, the very things that snipers from
the right have used to cast doubt on Obama's red-white-and-blue propers -- his schoolboy years in Indonesia, his refusal to
engage in acts of symbolic patriotism, his stated willingness to sit down and engage with enemy world leaders, even the
Drudge-distributed image of Obama in native Somali garb -- these are the things that have the world trembling with
anticipation over an Obama victory in November.
"I was just in Doha, Qatar, for the Brookings Institution's annual U.S.- Islamic World Forum, and one of the moderators
asked the non-Americans in the audience, 'If you could vote for one of the U.S. presidential candidates, who would you
vote for?'" says Keith Reinhard. "The number of hands that shot up for Barack Obama far outnumbered those for anyone
else. So in that part of the world, at least, there's no question at all."
And in other parts of the world as well. "In Germany, they're fascinated with him, they call him 'Der schwarze Kennedy,'
the 'black Kennedy,'" says Dick Martin. "They feel he has the same aura about him." In fact, just a few weeks ago,
Germany's leading newsmagazine Der Spiegel ran a cover feature on Obama, illustrated by a paired set of images --
Barack on the left, JFK on the right -- and asking whether America will "finally have the chance to be loved again." The
issue's cover line raised the stakes to a new level: It read, simply, "The Messiah Factor."
That's because, in Europe, and in Asia, Latin America and Africa as well, the perception is that an Obama presidency
represents the potential for catharsis after nearly a decade of frustration with the U.S. "Our brand has been hammered
recently, but beneath the anger, there's this underlying hope among people around the world that we can do better," says
Patricia Martin. "And we can. We reinvent ourselves. It's what we're known for: We've had more comebacks than Frank
Sinatra. I think that's why you have people in every country eating up every little turn in this election's story. This election,
the whole world is watching."
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Environmental Leadership – Alt Cause

Alternate causality – failure to ratify chemical control treaties tanks environmental credibility.
Schafer 9/6/2006 staff(Kristin S. Foreign Policy in Focus – With other authors and editors, Foreign Policy in Focus, “One More Failed US Environmental
Policy,” http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3492, EA)
Back in 2001, two global toxics treaties offered a rare opportunity for U.S. leadership in the international environmental policy arena.
Today not only is the opportunity for leadership lost, but the United States seems bent on undermining the effectiveness of these
important treaties while the rest of the world moves ahead on implementation. The issues at hand are global elimination of persistent
chemicals and control of trade in toxics, and the two international treaties that address these challenges are the Stockholm Convention
on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in
International Trade. As of August 2006, at least 127 countries had ratified the Stockholm Convention, and 110 had confirmed the Rotterdam
Convention. Both conventions have been in force for more than two years, but the United States has yet to approve either.
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Environmental Leadership – No Solvency 1/2

Plan fails – the world is skeptic of US attempts
Panicker 6/6/2007 (G Panicker, The Business Line Singapore, “Can Bush Follow Through on His Green Policy?” Lexis-Nexis, EA)
WHO looks to President George Bush for leadership on global warming? When he announced his intention last week to set the United
States on to the path of reducing greenhouse gases, the world reacted with scepticism. The sceptics see it as presidential grandstanding which in
effect is intended to stall the Group of Eight nations' talks in Germany this week. That conclave aims to adopt a unified stand on the post-Kyoto round discussions ahead
of a global in Bali later this year. Similar scepticism was heard about the president's announcement last month about setting up an interdepartmental study on vehicle
emissions in the US. Indeed, the Bush administration had to be hauled to the US Supreme Court and its federal Environmental Protection Agency had to be directed to
use its power to rein in emissions. So, President Bush finds himself in a situation of being damned if you do and damned if you don't. After
having spurned the Kyoto Protocol, the main global treaty for cutting emissions, and questioning the very science involved in global warming, Mr Bush has
a hard time convincing the world that he is for real changes on emissions. Earlier, there were sound bites like 'America is addicted to oil'
and there was a tantalising proposal for cellulosic ethanol for the future and with funding increased for research to support technology-backed solutions to greenhouse
gas emissions. But at the same time, immediate action to require more miles from vehicles was shunned. Nor has he abandoned his
opposition to the cap and trade system to control emissions, a central plank of the Kyoto Protocol. Both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair have hailed the fresh gesture from Washington - Ms Merkel not without concern and the ever-faithful Mr Blair wholeheartedly.
No solvency – countries don’t want the US to lead but rather to contribute.
Clifton 4/19/2007(Eli IPS staff – Inter Press Service, “World Opposed to US as Global Cop,” CommonDreams,
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/19/617/, EA)
WASHINGTON - The world public rejects the U.S. role as a world leader, but still wants the United States to do its share in multilateral
efforts and does not support a U.S. withdrawal from international affairs, says a poll released Wednesday.The survey respondents see the United States as
an unreliable “world policeman”, but views are split on whether the superpower should reduce its overseas military bases. The people of
the United States generally agreed with the rest of the world that their country should not remain the world’s pre-eminent leader or global cop, and prefer that it play a
more cooperative role in multilateral efforts to address world problems. The poll, the fourth in a series released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and
WorldPublicOpinion.org since the latter half of 2006, was conducted in China, India, United States, Indonesia, Russia, France, Thailand, Ukraine, Poland, Iran, Mexico,
South Korea, Philippines, Australia, Argentina, Peru, Israel, Armenia and the Palestinian territories. The three previous reports covered attitudes toward
humanitarian military intervention, labour and environmental standards in international trade, and global warming. Those surveys found that the international
public generally favoured more multilateral efforts to curb genocides and more far-reaching measures to protect labour rights and combat climate change than their
governments have supported to date. Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org, notes that this report confirms other polls which have shown that
world opinion of the United States is bad and getting worse, however this survey more closely examines the way the world public would want to see
Washington playing a positive role in the international community. Although all 15 of the countries polled rejected the idea that, “the U.S. should
continue to be the pre-eminent world leader in solving international problems,” only Argentina and the Palestinian territories say it “should withdraw from
most efforts to solve international problems.”
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Environmental Leadership – No Solvency 2/2
Too late to solve – the EU is already the world’s model for environmental leadership.
RECHTSCHAFFEN 1 – 4 - 06 (Clifford Rechtschaffen for the San Francisco Chronicle, Member scholar for Center for Progressive Reform, Professor of
Law at Golden State University , “Will the Environmentalists Find Their voice?”
sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/04/EDGV9GFGJG1.DTL&type=printable, EA)
For U.S. environmentalists, 2005 will be remembered harshly, because it marked the clear and undeniable end of U.S. global environmental
leadership. For three decades, the United States was the world's environmental trendsetter. But now leadership comes from the European Union, a
phenomenon I observed firsthand last spring as a Fulbright scholar teaching comparative environmental law at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. The most
prominent example is global warming. Despite a strong scientific consensus that Earth's temperatures are rising because of human activity, the Bush
administration clings stubbornly to its opposition to mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, most recently evidenced at the Montreal
climate change talks. Meanwhile, in 2005 the EU embarked on an aggressive approach to limiting greenhouse gases, modeled after market-
based strategies to controlling acid-rain emissions pioneered by the United States. About 12,000 industrial facilities are required to limit their emissions of carbon
dioxide (a leading contributor to global warming), but have flexibility in how to achieve these limits. The EU also is on the verge of adopting a "chemicals
policy" embodying the principle of precaution -- a "better safe than sorry" approach. In both the United States and Europe, thousands of chemicals are used
in commerce, even though we know very little about their potential toxic impacts. Under current regulation, chemical producers rarely are required to test chemicals
before using them; instead, the government must demonstrate a toxin is unsafe to halt its use. The EU's new policy shifts the burden of proof. Before chemicals that
raise significant health concerns may be used, producers will have to show, through testing if necessary, that the chemical is safe, or that the benefits of its use outweigh
the risks, including that there are no available substitutes. The EU already has forged the lead in banning polybrominated diphenyl ethers, widely used as
flame retardants in furniture, bedding and other products, after evidence showed rapidly rising levels of these compounds in breast milk. (California imposed a similar
ban in 2003.) Additionally, the EU is leading the way in innovative recycling practices, including laws requiring producers to "take back"
products from consumers at the end of their useful life and to pay for their recycling and disposal. In this way, the price of these products will
reflect the true costs they impose on the environment. Under recent EU directives, consumers can now return computers, electronic equipment and automobiles at the
end of their useful life free of charge to certified collection centers. The United States has no comparable system, although in 2003, California imposed a fee on
electronics purchases to fund recycling facilities. The EU is outpacing the United States with incentives for market-based environmental strategies, including
promoting a reliable market for Earth-friendly products. Unlike the United States, where "green" consumers must sift through a confusing array of labels and
advertising claims, in Europe, certifying boards determine whether products meet environmental goals. Consumers in Europe can shop for green appliances, cleaning
and paper products, home and garden supplies, lubricants, clothing and tourist services. Likewise, large companies in the EU are expected to disclose to
investors and the public far more detailed information about the environmental impact of their activities -- a boost to the socially responsible
investment movement. The record is not one-sided. Our Endangered Species Act, although now under attack, has more teeth than comparable EU laws. The EU has no
equivalent to the federal Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program, despite its thousands of contaminated waste sites. And the culture of strong
environmental enforcement is still only taking root in many EU countries. On balance, however, the EU is tackling its most pressing
environmental problems with a focus and creativity Americans can only envy. As we start the new year, we should learn from the EU's innovative
approaches. (Indeed, California's recent electronic waste law and ban on flame retardants were modeled in part after Europe's system.) By doing so, we can reassert our
role as the world's environmental leader.
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US/EU
US/EU fights inevitable – and no impact
Ahearn, Archick, Belkin 07[Raymond Ahearn, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division, Kristin Archick, Paul Belkin “U.S.-European Union Relations
and the 2007 Summit” may 14, 2007 http://ftp.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS22645.pdf/]
The U.S. Congress and successive U.S. administrations have supported the EU project since its inception as a way to foster a stable Europe, democratic states, and
strong trading partners. The United States has welcomed EU efforts since the end of the Cold War to expand the political and economic benefits of membership to
central and eastern Europe, and supports the EU aspirations of Turkey and the western Balkan states. The United States and the EU share a huge and mutually beneficial
economic relationship. Two-way flows of goods, services, and foreign investment now exceed $1.0 trillion on an annual basis, and the total stock of two-way direct
investment is over $1.9 trillion. Nevertheless, the U.S.-EU relationship has been challenged in recent years as numerous trade and foreign
policy conflicts have emerged. The 2003 crisis over Iraq, which bitterly divided the EU and severely strained U.S.-EU relations, is
most notable, but the list of disagreements has been wide and varied. Although Europeans are not monolithic in their views, many EU member
states have objected to at least some elements of U.S. policy on issues ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to U.S. treatment of
terrorist detainees to climate change and aircraft subsidies. Since 2003, however, both sides have made efforts to improve relations, and
successive U.S.-EU summits have sought to emphasize areas of cooperation and partnership. At the same time, challenges and some
tensions remain in the U.S.-EU relationship.
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African Democracy – Not Effective

Multiple factors will prevent effective democracy in Africa
Ambrose- consultant and has worked in Africa with CUSO, a nongovernmental organization that works on development and human rights issues in the Third
World – 1995 (Brendalyn P., “Democratization and Protection of Human Rights in Africa: Problems and Prospects” p. xvi-xvii, Questia)
The insistence of the West on the establishment of liberal democracy in Africa while ignoring the extent of deprivation on the continent
gives validity to Dumont's contention. The West is asking Africans to build a house for which no foundation has been laid. If the West is serious
about democratization in Africa, they should assist those forces that are struggling to bring about democratic governance from the grassroots
level. In addition, civil and political rights must be juxtaposed with economic rights because hunger and malnutrition kill more than guns
do. Arat makes a similar argument in this statement. "Contrary to liberal theory, civil and political rights cannot prevail if socioeconomic rights are
ignored, and the stability of political democracy (liberal democracy) depends on the extent of balance between the two groups of human
rights." 7 This is the type of arrangement that will lead to the development that Africa so badly needs, and will be the sole liberating mechanism for the majority of
suffering Africans. It will be a long, arduous journey. Democracies take centuries to build, and Africa cannot cross five centuries in fifty years.
Multiple factors will prevent effective democracy in Africa

Ambrose-95 consultant and has worked in Africa with CUSO, a nongovernmental organization that works on development and human rights issues in the Third
World –(Brendalyn P., “Democratization and Protection of Human Rights in Africa: Problems and Prospects” p. xvi-xvii, Questia)
The insistence of the West on the establishment of liberal democracy in Africa while ignoring the extent of deprivation on the continent
gives validity to Dumont's contention. The West is asking Africans to build a house for which no foundation has been laid. If the West is serious
about democratization in Africa, they should assist those forces that are struggling to bring about democratic governance from the grassroots
level. In addition, civil and political rights must be juxtaposed with economic rights because hunger and malnutrition kill more than guns
do. Arat makes a similar argument in this statement. "Contrary to liberal theory, civil and political rights cannot prevail if socioeconomic rights are
ignored, and the stability of political democracy (liberal democracy) depends on the extent of balance between the two groups of human
rights." 7 This is the type of arrangement that will lead to the development that Africa so badly needs, and will be the sole liberating mechanism for the majority of
suffering Africans. It will be a long, arduous journey. Democracies take centuries to build, and Africa cannot cross five centuries in fifty years.
Multiple barriers to effective democracy in Africa

Diamond and Plattner-1999 Diamond is a senior at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Plattner is vice-president for research and studies at the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), codirector of the International Forum for Democratic studies- (Larry and Marc, “Democratization in Africa” p. xxiv)
In the language of the social sciences, Africa’s

past democratic failures and current democratic recession are “overdetermined.” The multiple
obstacles identified in this volume include pervasive poverty, economic ruin, and the near-absence of a true middle class; the depth
and tenacity of ethnic and regional divisions; the weakness of political parties, legislatures, courts, bureaucracies—political
institutions of all kinds; the tradition of deference to “big men” and the larger culture of corruption and neopatrimonialism; state decay
and its attendant rampant “crime, gangsterism, and warfare” (to quote Richard Joseph); and the divisions among powerful forces in the international
community, which have led to the acceptance of pseudodemocracies that fail to meet supposed standards of good governance.
Chronic problems exist inherently in Africa, preventing any substantive democratic change
El-Khawas and Ndumbe 2005– El-khawas is a professor of history and political science at the University of the District of Columbia, Ndumbe is a
assistant editor of Mediterranean Quarterly and associate professor of public administration/policy at the University of the District of Columbia- 200 – (Mohamed and J
Anyu, “Democracy, Diamonds, and Oil: Politics in Today’s Africa” p. 4-5)
The new President, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler, is committed to upholding democracy and to encouraging citizens to have a
role in their government. Althoughhe was reelected for another term in 2003, a stable democracy in Nigeria depends on his ability to solve
many chronic problems, including corruption, ethnic violence, unemployment, and crumbling infrastructure. The real test of Nigerian
democracy will be when there is a civilian-to-civilian transfer of power in this most populous of the African nations.
African Democracy – Political Issues

Africa must restore the strength of its civil society before democracy can be established
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Bradley 2005 Professor of Political science @ Indiana University – 2005 (“‘The Other:’ Precursory African Conceptions of Democracy” International Studies
Review http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2486.2005.00507.x)
There is a wide body of literature on the linkages between civil society and democracy (see, for example, Chazan 1982, 1994; Rothchild and
Chazan 1987; Cohen 1992; Dorman 2002). In a study of global democratization, Diamond (1992) found that mobilization of civil society was a critical
source of pressure for democratic change in Nigeria and a number of other countries. Thus, in order for students of democratization to
understand democratic processes and transitions, we need to investigate the salience of civil society. Indeed, Peter Lewis (1992) contends that
the bilateral interaction of state elites and autonomous associations (civil society) is the only context in which sustainable democratic
governance can be achieved. And even though an active civil society does not guarantee a thriving democracy, civil society actors can strengthen the
infrastructure or environment for civil rights and liberties to ‘‘take off ’’ if not ‘‘stick.’’ Civil society actors play a vital role in the
construction of civil interests and social differentiation even though ultimately the state is the implementor, enforcer, and guarantor of political freedoms,
individual rights, institutional safeguards, and efficacious participatory structures and processes.
Political violence will prevent any upsurge in democratization
Diamond and Plattner 1999- Diamond is a senior at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Plattner is vice-president for research and studies at
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), codirector of the International Forum for Democratic studies- 1999 (Larry and Marc, “Democratization in Africa” p. 4)
Of the many factors impeding constitutional democracy in Africa, none appears more significant than the upsurge of political
violence. Reflecting his skepticism about the recomposition of power in Africa behind the facade of democratization, Achille Mbembe proposed closer
scrutiny of “regimes which long relied on modes of authoritarian governance [and] are making an about-turn and verbally espousing
democratic ideals.”5 More attention, in his view, should be directed to the crime, gangsterism, and warfare prevalent in both functioning and
collapsed states in Africa. Instead of political transitions, Mbembe speaks of revising formulas and structures of domination, which
rely upon the coexistence of warfare and civil politics.
Following Mbembe, we can distinguish cases in which warfare leads to the collapse of civil politics from those in which warfare and civil
politics coexist. Often there is no clear demarcation between organized groups that pursue political objectives and those responsible
for the criminalization of state and society through drug trafficking, mineral smuggling, embezzlement of public funds, money laundering, and other
fraudulent practices.6 In rethinking the course of political renewal in Africa, analysts should pay more attention to the role of political violence.
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African Democracy – Poverty

Poverty and corruption are the greatest threat to the survival of democracy in Africa
Ambrose 1995- consultant and has worked in Africa with CUSO, a nongovernmental organization that works on development and human rights issues in the
Third World – 1995 (Brendalyn P., “Democratization and Protection of Human Rights in Africa: Problems and Prospects” p. 145-146 Questia)
Poverty remains the greatest threat to the survival of democracy in Africa. The majority in Africa are victims of material and
intellectual poverty. If democracy is to take hold in any meaningful way in Africa, there must be economic democratization. The
economic structure must be altered to allow for a mixed economy with built-in mechanisms for equity, empowerment, and capacity
building along with free, equal, and open access to the system. This means access for the majority, not just access for a few masters while the majority share
the crumbs of the nation's pie. Such demands will be best articulated by enlightened masses.
Corruption and instability pose serious challenges to the establishment and sustenance of democracy on the continent and must be addressed with as much urgency as
the poverty question.
The Poverty crisis in Africa inhibits it’s democratic growth.

Udombana 2003 – Department of Jurisprudence and international Law, University of Lagos, Nigeria; LL.M. University of Lagos, Member of Nigerian Bar –
2003 (Nsongurua J., Michigan Journal of International Law, “Articulating the Right to Democratic Governance in Africa,” Summer 2003, Lexis)
Africa is plagued by poverty "on a scale never known in earlier times, or even dreamed of."n395 There are serious deprivations in many aspects
of life, as hundreds of millions of people live in absolute poverty. n396 Bad weather, coupled with bad leaders, n397 has left many
Africans [*1277] hungry. A 2002 report "estimates that the proportion of the population living on less than US $ 1 a day in the least
developed countries of Africa has increased continuously since 1965-1969, rising from an average of 55.8 percent in those years to
64.9 percent in 1995-1999."n398 NEAPD corroborates this gloomy picture, pointing out that 340 million Africans, or half the population, live on
less than one dollar per day. The mortality rate of children under five years of age is 140 per 1000, and life expectancy at birth is only 54 years. Only 58
percent of the population [has] access to safe water[, while] the rate of illiteracy for people over 15 is 41 percent. There are only 18
mainline telephones per 1000 people in Africa, compared with 146 for the world ... and 567 for high-income countries.n399 It is
submitted that poverty is a great hindrance to democracy and the enjoyment of human rights. Poverty leaves many people susceptible to
manipulations by several forces and interests. Democracy will not thrive in instability or under conditions of excruciating and
humiliating poverty. As Christopher Weeramantry rightly observes, "the human rights dialogue breaks down completely if the listener
suffers from an empty stomach or the preacher has had any hand in producing it."n400 It is true that elections are evidence of popular sovereignty
and the basis for international endorsement of the elected government; but free elections are only one side of the coin. A hungry person - who usually is also an
angry person - cannot appreciate the aesthetics of a ballot box or, for that matter, the significance of his ballot. n401 Such a person thinks about food, not
freedom. [*1278] Therefore, the first challenge to democratic governance in Africa is to address the problem of hunger and illiteracy,
bearing in mind, that "literacy, especially functional literacy and adequate education, represents an indispensable element for the
development and harnessing of science, technology, and human resources for economic and social progress outside of."n402 The irony is
that most constitutions in Africa require the possession of a primary or secondary certificate as a basic condition for standing for elected positions. n403 Yet, most
African constitutions make economic, social, and cultural rights, including the right to education, nonjusticiable. n404 There are a few exceptions, such as South
Africa n405 and Algeria, n406 but the general rule in many African countries is that citizens have the right to vote, but not to be voted for, by reason of
illiteracy and such other inhibiting factors. This, undoubtedly, is a violation of democratic rights.
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African Democracy – Corruption

Democratization is marred by fraud, corruption and does nothing to overturn fraudulent
neopatrimonialist regimes
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), codirector of the International Forum for Democratic studies- 1999 (Larry and Marc, “Democratization in Africa”
p.45)
The career of African democratization in the 1990s is a checkered one. Elections have frequently been marred by fraud, and occasionally by force;
the commitment of elected rulers to democratic governance has been weak; and the new constitutions, parliaments, civil societies, and
other key institutions of democratic politics remain fragile. More important, successful multiparty elections have not been enough to overturn
prevailing patterns of personal rule and neopatrimonial politics. In fact, neopatrimonialism has not only shown itself able to coexist comfortably with
multiparty rule, but may even have derived a new intensity from it. Corruption, excessive patronage, and expensive perks for the political class—to
say nothing of unjustifiably large cabinets, ministerial retinues, and costly presidential establishments— are common phenomena in
Africa’s young democracies. Material and professional limitations, the persistence of perniciously harsh laws, and hostile courts continue to hamper the
effectiveness of the press. Governments continue to enjoy near-monopolies over radio and television broadcasting, while restrictions on
private stations (usually applied through regulatory machinations) impose additional limits on the media’s ability to foster accountability and
transparency. The task of the watchdog, whether undertaken by the press or other agencies, remains particularly difficult to discharge in the prevailing political
culture of Africa, where high-level government operations are shrouded in excessive secrecy and a generalized “blackout” is imposed on official information
Corruption destroys democracy in Africa

Udombana 2003– Department of Jurisprudence and international Law, University of Lagos, Nigeria; LL.M. University of Lagos, Member of Nigerian Bar –
2003 (Nsongurua J., Michigan Journal of International Law, “Articulating the Right to Democratic Governance in Africa,” Summer 2003, Lexis)
Corruption is endemic in Africa and is the defining feature of its governance. It has made so many headlines in African cities such that the citizens are growing weary of
bad news, and feel powerless in relation to the monster. Government institutions in Africa have become breeding grounds of paralysis and
patronage, turning a blind eye to corrupt practices. Corruption, especially political corruption, is antithetical to democracy, as it denies the
state of resources needed to strengthen the institutions of democracy - like the judiciary. It denies the state of resources needed to bring
about democratic dividends, like good roads, communication, health facilities, and water. It denies the state of [*1282] resources
needed to empower the citizens - especially women - through education and other means necessary to play useful roles in the
democratic project. Corruption brings about moral decay in society and weakens that vital moral fiber that society needs for survival.
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African Democracy – Education

Education is on the decline in Africa --- this will be a huge barrier to a sustainable democracy
Ambrose-1995 consultant and has worked in Africa with CUSO, a nongovernmental organization that works on development and human rights issues in the
Education has been on the decline in Africa, both in terms of enrollment as well as physical infrastructure, material, and equipment. There has been little
advancement in technology. For that matter, the information age has bypassed Africa. Democracy grows from the confidence and faith of a people in their
own abilities to attend to their own needs. It is therefore totally dependent upon an educated and informed electorate who have access to
ideas and opportunity to express and experiment with those ideas.
In order for democracy to be effective, civil society must be in a condition that enables it to follow the basic principles of democracy.
At present, illiteracy and ignorance are impediments. The adult literacy rate is under 50 percent in Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Guinea,
Liberia, Mali, Mauritius, Namibia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Sudan, and under 20 percent in Somalia. Nigeria, the most populous African country, has a male literacy
rate of a mere 54 percent, while the female literacy rate is 31 percent. 7 Only twelve of the fifty-one countries in Africa have a male literacy rate over 70 percent, and in
all countries female literacy rates are significantly lower than males. Africa Recovery reported that "women predominate among 60 per cent of Africa's population that
is illiterate." 8 It added that African children would have greater chances of survival if more African women were literate.
Illiteracy affects the sustenance of democracy because uneducated people cannot make informed political decisions. At the same time,
poverty negates the citizens' human right guaranteed in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration, which states:
Everyone has the right to Education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental states. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical
professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. The impact of poverty on
democracy is profound. Lack of education impedes participation in government. In order to participate in government, a person must
understand the principles of government and the nature of political operations. If the majority remain uneducated and unaware of the
principles of majority rule, democratization in Africa will not be sustained.Education is vital for human resource development, and that in turn builds
a foundation for the establishment of a stable democracy. If adults are equipped with basic education as far as level 8 (the equivalent of two years of secondary school),
the result would have tremendous impact on economic improvement. The benefits include: 1. increase in productivity;
2. improved opportunity to escape poverty;
3. improved ability to handle innovative tools and use fertilizers, thus increasing farming yields; and
4. improvement in health and nutrition in women and their families since literate women care better for their children, place greater emphasis on educating their own
children, and usually have fewer pregnancies.
Education is an effective weapon against poverty and authoritarianism. But since the exploitative rulers in Africa have no intention of changing the
social inequity, it is no oversight that education is given little priority.
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African Democracy – Healthcare

Lack of health care impedes democratic development in Africa
Ambrose 1995- consultant and has worked in Africa with CUSO, a nongovernmental organization that works on development and human rights issues in the
Africa's statistics on health care are grim. Statistics in 1990 showed that life expectancy in many African countries ranged between 41 and 69. Infant
mortality ranged between 23 and 169 per 1,000 live births. Up to 1988 less than 40 percent of the population in eighteen African
countries had access to safe water. 9 By the beginning of the 1990s Africa had regressed to the extent that some diseases that previously were eradicated had
reemerged. Most of the diseases are caused by poor sanitation, lack of access to medical care, insufficiency of hospital beds, and all the other problems related to
poverty. While malaria afflicts about 90 million Africans annually, 10 another more serious threat to the African population is AIDS. By the end of 1991, an estimated
six million 11 African adults were HIV positive. Africans make up about 78 percent of the three million 12 people in the world afflicted with AIDS and tuberculosis.
(The validity of these data on AIDS in Africa might be disputed in some medical circles.) Added to these more alarming diseases are frequent outbreaks of cholera and
meningitis. Other ailments that plague the people on the continent include elephantiasis, which is estimated to afflict 28 million 13 Africans; river
blindness, which afflicts another 17 million; 14 and guinea worm, leprosy, and sleeping sickness.
Lack of proper health care impedes democratic development because a sickly
and malnourished population will not be productive. Undernourished children do not learn well in school, and that is a disturbing
omen for the Africa of tomorrow. The quality of human resources necessary for nation building and economic advancement in Africa
is seriously threatened with such disappointing health statistics.Health, like education, simply cannot compete with military priority in Africa, and that
has contributed to the woeful specter of the continent today. While African leaders argue that there is no money to pay teachers' salaries or purchase health care supplies,
there is never any such problem when it comes to buying guns.
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African Democracy– Military

Politicized armies will threaten to hijack democracy --- insurrections will ensue
the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), codirector of the International Forum for Democratic studies- 1999 (Larry and Marc, “Democratization in Africa” p.
57-8 )
7) Privatizedviolence and politicized armies. Nearly everywhere in sub-saharan Africa the armed forces remain a threat to hijack or halt
democratization. To make matters worse, what passes for the national armed services in many countries are actually tribal armies that have
been assembled by political leaders not to defend the nation, but to maintain themselves in power and put down internal insurrections. With rare
exceptions, these armies are idle corps with almost nothing to do when there is no repression to carry out. Similarly, in some countries
the army functions as a kind of armed jobs program, a place where young men from the president’s home region can draw a paycheck.
The military will undermine democracy in Africa
El-Khawas and Ndumbe 2005– El-khawas is a professor of history and political science at the University of the District of Columbia, Ndumbe is a
assistant editor of Mediterranean Quarterly and associate professor of public administration/policy at the University of the District of Columbia- 2005 – (Mohamed and
J Anyu, “Democracy, Diamonds, and Oil: Politics in Today’s Africa” p. 6)
While Kenya was making progress to complete its transition to democracy, other countries have been unable to keep the military out of
politics. Events in different countries illustrate the toll that military coups, mutinies, and armed conflicts have had on democratic
institutions. In several African countries, military leaders have not hesitated to overthrow a democratically elected government and
replace it with a military regime. Typically, they have then suspended the constitution, closed the legislative assembly, banned political
parties, and detained opposition leaders. They put themselves in charge without being accountable to th people.’3 As Abiodun Onapide put it, “The
move toward democracy in Africa is currently suffering numerous setbacks with military force being used to supplant the expressed
wishes of the electorate in most cases, while, in others, people’s wishes are just ignored.”4 This pattern occurred in Algeria, Gambia, Burundi,
Niger, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone in the 1990s. In some countries, the military tried to give the illusion of democracy by holding national
referendums to legitimize their illegal seizure of power. In Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore, who originally came to power in 1987 through a coup, later
eliminated his partners and repressed the opposition. Five years later, he held an election that was boycotted by the opposition. After his election, he resorted to the use’
of plebiscites and to give an illusion of democracy, he ran against weak candidates.’5
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African Democracy Bad – Power relations

Democratization will disrupt current power relations and fuel resistance
Ottaway 1997- professor at African Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies- 1997 (Marina “Democracy in Africa: The
Hard Road Ahead” p. 5-6 Questia)
The problem of democratization, particularly in a purely political transition, is the problem of power. At one level, this means redistribution. The
incumbent leaders or parties must accept that power will not be concentrated and monopolized as before, but that it will be shared,
according to certain agreed-upon mechanisms, among political parties, interest groups, and formal governmental institutions. They
also have to accept institutionalized uncertainty. Power will be limited by the activities of a loyal opposition. Winners will have to
further weaken their grip by allowing a tension to develop even within their own ranks between the executive and the legislative—a dialectical relation at best,
leading to compromise and stability, but possibly a deeply conflictual relation leading to stalemate. The winners must also allow some of the
institutions to remain autonomous—not only the judiciary but also the military, which should obey orders from the government but not become the militia of a
particular party. The complex problems entailed in the transformation of the military are discussed in Chapter 3 by Eboe Hutchful.
It is this aspect of power—its redistribution—that worries incumbent leaders facing the challenge of democratic transformation. In most cases,
they do their best to limit redistribution by putting obstacles in the path of
opposition parties so that they will perform poorly in the elections and by trying to maintain their grip on institutions not subject to voting results, particularly the
military and the judiciary. Resistance to democracy is first and foremost resistance to power redistribution.
Democratization in Africa has empirically proven to only increase monopolies by the elite class
Bangura 1991- Research Coordinator at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development – 1991 “Authoritarian Rule and Democracy in Africa:
A Theroetical Discourse” Discussion paper for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development March
http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/httpNetITFramePDF?ReadForm&parentunid=A81C86EE203A8B1780256B67005B6139&parentdoctype=paper&netitpat
h=80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/A81C86EE203A8B1780256B67005B6139/$file/dp18.pdf) -
But democratization also strengthened the alliance between the emerging élites and the colonial authorities. This facilitated the growth of a
nascent local bourgeoisie. It gave the anticolonial alliance a decidedly class character and blunted the popular orientation of the democratic project. Rather than
democratize the colonial economy, the nationalist élites ruled through the state monopolies and the colonial patronage networks to
consolidate and expand their economic and political power. In Nigeria, for instance, the regionalization of the marketing boards in the run
up to independence led to the transfer of accumulated peasant surpluses into the hands of competing politicians and business groups.
Public probes showed how these resources were plundered by the emerging dominant power élite (Osoba, 1978). Decolonization did not
fully establish democratic rule, even though the period stands out as a major landmark in democratic experiments in Africa.
Representative governments were introduced in controlled stages (Collier, 1982); the right to free expression and association was coloured with proscriptions, the
banning of radical literature and the arrest of activists considered to be too militant for the transition process.
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African Democracy Bad – Conflict 1/4
The transition to democracy in Africa will only increase levels of conflict --- would not generate sufficient
political powers
Hard Road Ahead” p. 6-7, Questia)
Beyond the problem of power redistribution, thus, democratic transformation entails a sea change in the nature of power and in the institutions
needed to generate it. And this is the most difficult aspect of the transformation. As Jennifer Widner points out in her chapter, in the process
of transformation many new groups emerge, but they are not necessarily integrated into the orchestration of interests that provides the
support for political parties. Organizations of civil society, usually considered to be the key to democratic transformation, may remain
surprisingly isolated from the process through which political power is generated.
The problem of generating sufficient power through democratic means remains largely unsolved in African countries at present, and it
is not going to be solved easily. Paradoxically, the very change that triggered the present wave of democratic openings, the collapse of socialist systems,
may prove to be a major obstacle to the consolidation of democracy, depriving politicians of the ideology that played a crucial role historically in the
formation of powerful political parties capable of challenging incumbent regimes. Socialist parties destroyed democracy when they were able to seize
power, but they promoted democracy when they remained in the opposition. In the absence of an ideology with broad appeal, African
political parties form along ethnic and religious lines. Rather than promoting democracy, this increases the level of conflict.
Even the most successful cases of democratic reform prove that the process will be counterproductive ---
fear of violence will lead donor governments to want to revert back to regime instabilities and violence
Hard Road Ahead” p. 8, Questia)
Democratic transformations have historically been complex and prolonged processes, often beset by violence in the initial stages, when
the regime resisted change and a redistribution of power. They have also entailed long periods of political instability as the new
regimes tackled the problem of generating sufficient power to govern the country. Democratization in France entailed a revolution and then long
decades of political turmoil and deep socioeconomic change before political stability was reestablished. Democracy in the United States emerged from a war of
independence, a civil war, and a slow process of evolution—and for much of its history the country would not have rated very high on the scale by which democracy is
measured today. In Germany and Japan, it took a major military defeat before democratic transformation occurred. The list could continue.
There are, to be sure, more benign examples of democratic transformations. The cases of the southern European and Latin American countries studied
by Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter ( Transitions from Authoritarian Rule:Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies, 1986) show that it is
possible for democracy to come about through less dramatic and violent processes—indeed they conclude that violence does not augur well for the success of a
democratic transition. But even these cases demonstrate the difficulty of the transformation and underline the fact that change does not take
place all at once. No democracy is perfect, but new democracies are particularly imperfect as well as extremely unstable.
The process may be particularly difficult in those countries where external pressure was an important factor in forcing a political
opening. Policymakers in countries like the United States inevitably envisage their role as that of engineering reform, not of promoting violent upheavals with
uncertain outcomes. Yet attempts at engineering democracy through an orderly process of reform may not only prove impossible but also
become counterproductive when fear of violence and instability leads donor governments to tacitly accept lack of democracy as the
best alternative. Such a policy conundrum is not easy to solve.
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Democracy is marred with chaos and violence--- Nigerian elections prove

New York Times 2007 (“Africa’s Crisis of Democracy” Lydia Polgreen, 4/22, L/N)
Nigeria's troubled presidential election, which came under fire on Sunday from local and international observers and was rejected by two leading
opposition candidates, represents a significant setback for democracy in sub-Saharan Africa at a time when voters in countries across
the continent are becoming more disillusioned with the way democracy is practiced. Analysts said the Nigerian vote was the starkest example of a
worrying trend -- even as African countries hold more elections, many of their citizens are steadily losing confidence in their democracies.
''The picture in Africa is really mixed,'' said Peter Lewis, director of the African Studies program at Johns Hopkins University, who was
among the researchers who conducted the Afrobarometer survey of African public opinion. ''Some countries have vibrant political scenes, while other countries go
through the routine of elections but governance doesn't seem to improve.'' African voters are losing patience with faulty elections that often exclude
popular candidates and are marred by serious irregularities, according to the Afrobarometer survey, published last year, which sampled voters in 18
countries, based on interviews with 1,200 to 2,400 people per country. While 6 in 10 Africans said democracy was preferable to any other form of government,
according to the survey, satisfaction with democracy dipped to 45 percent from 58 percent in 2001. The threat to Nigeria's fragile democracy was
underscored on Sunday by government officials, who dropped dark hints warning of a possible coup attempt, and said election critics
were welcoming a military putsch by inciting violence. Twenty-five candidates vied to replace the departing president in the Saturday vote, the first time
in Nigeria's history that power will be transferred between two civilian administrations. But the election was marred by chaos, violence and fraud. Results
are not expected until Monday at the earliest.
Democratic elections foster increased violence between African politicians and civilians
Diamond and Plattner-1999 Diamond is a senior at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Plattner is vice-president for research and studies at the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), codirector of the International Forum for Democratic studies- 1999 (Larry and Marc, “Democratization in Africa” p. 57) 6)
The Absence of Civility. The

politics of fear pervades the rhetoric and governing styles of politicians. Cameroon’s President Biya refuses to
use his adversaries’ names, referring to them only as “thugs,” “vandals,” and “outlaws.” Gabon’s President Bongo is subtler: “The opposition
doesn’t make me lose any sleep. Those folks run the streets, I run the country.”2 Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko spoke contemptuously of his opponents as “Kinshasa loud-
mouths out of touch with the Zairian heartland.”3 His recent downfall seems to show that more than a few “Kinshasa loud-mouths” chafed at his kleptocratic rule.
During campaigns and elections, the already low level of civility in the public debate reaches its nadir. For example, when asked about
challenger Paul Ssemogerere’s chances of winning the 1996 presidential election, Uganda’s President Yoweri Musevêni declared: “How can that idiot win?. . . I cannot
surrender my army to an idiot who is campaigning in churches trying to convince Catholics to vote for a fellow Catholic.”4 On radio and television, Ghana’s Jerry
Rawlings characterized his 1992 opponents as “punks,”“disgruntled politicians,” and “thieves.”5 Following the 1995 legislative elections in Benin, an opposition figure
referred to the wife of then-President Nicdphore Soglo as “a piece of horse manure.”6 This violence in speech reflects the violence of the political
game itself, which leaders view as a “winner-takes-all” fight to the finish where defeat means a loss not only of the emoluments and
status that office brings, but sometimes of life itself. The game is for keeps. One must win—by any means necessary. The modern
state, as Max Weber said, holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of force; the transition, in the eyes of many African politicians, is a battle for
control over the state’s coercive apparatus. In this frenetic Darwinian struggle, soldiers have a comparative advantage that the more ambitious among them
have often exploited in countries where the new political class lacks the skill to curb the power of the military.
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Democracy creates too much chaos – African people will revert to military rule
Albin-Lackey and Rawlence 2007 – Nigerian researcher AND consultant for Human Rights Watch – 5-08-2007 (Chris and Ben, “What’s next for
Nigeria? The whole concept of African democracy is at risk,” Guardian Unlimited, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/05/09/nigeri15887.htm)
Nigeria's foreign partners must now decide how to link themselves to an administration that lacks the legitimacy the elections were meant to confer. They will console
themselves that the new president, Umaru Yar'Adua, seems like a decent man. Even though Yar'Adua was the sitting governor of a state, Katsina, which saw electoral
violence and vote-rigging, he was one of the few state governors to have avoided an indictment by Nigeria's anti-corruption watchdog. Some governments will be
tempted to support the new Nigerian president based on the default position that a civilian president with no mandate is better than the
alternatives: chaos or military rule.
But western and African governments alike should speak up about the government's blatant contempt for the rights of Nigerian
citizens. They should demand immediate, serious and sustained reforms to regain some measure of the public trust that has been
squandered not only by the gross irregularities that characterised last month's polls, but also by the Obasanjo administration's failure to do more to
fight endemic corruption. G8 leaders meeting in Germany next month must recognise how Nigerian authorities have manifestly failed to deliver on the Millennium
Development Goals, designed to improve the basic rights of people to health and education, and instead have shared the proceeds of record oil revenues among cronies
and supporters.
The struggle for democracy will promote violent uprising of anti-democratic communities
Wiseman 1996- Dept of Politics @ University of Newcastle- 1996 (John, “The New Struggle for Democracy in Africa” p. 6-7)
To discuss events in terms of a struggle also highlights the extremely contested and conflictual character of the process. In a literal sense we are describing the
oppositions of a struggle both for and against democracy. The struggle for democracy has in many cases met with strong resistance from
those who benefit from the absence of democracy. Although few would now argue, at least openly, that authoritarian rule provides the best way of
providing for the progressive development of Africa (or perhaps just the staving off of disaster) there is no doubt that non-democratic systems have often worked with
reasonable efficiency in serving the short-term’6 interests of those who exercise state power. This is not at all surprising because, if stripped of a series of largely
spurious ideological justifications, this is exactly what such systems were designed by their architects to do. Elites in control of these systems have interests
in resisting change if at all possible because public accountability often appears very threatening. The struggle against democracy has
taken many forms which have met with varying degrees of success. These range from the use of high levels of physical coercion to other more
subtle methods of undermining the struggle and avoiding its consequences. The tactics and strategies adopted by those struggling
against democracy have been at least as varied as those adopted by the would-be democratisers. The fact that the notion of struggle inevitably
implies a conflict perspective makes it especially relevant in these circumstances because it forces the observer to focus on the full range of the
multitude of participants, both individuals and groups, involved in the process and on the extreme antagonisms which exist.
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Multiparty elections divide Africans – increases ethnic violence and armed conflict
El-Khawas and Ndumbe 2005 – El-khawas is a professor of history and political science at the University of the District of Columbia, Ndumbe is a
assistant editor of Mediterranean Quarterly and associate professor of public administration/policy at the University of the District of Columbia- 2005 – (Mohamed and
J Anyu, “Democracy, Diamonds, and Oil: Politics in Today’s Africa” p. 108)
In some countries, multiparty elections have led to the rise of ethnic politics, which has divided rather united Africans. Often, it has led to
increased ethnic violence and armed conflict, which sometimes has become a prelude to civil war. This sequence occurred in countries like Cote
d’Iviore, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. In others, the losing side of the conflict refused to accept electoral defeat, accusing incumbent regimes of
rigging the elections. Angola demonstrates the difficulty in introducing democracy as a conflict- resolution device to end a civil war. Its
1992 multiparty elections turned out to be an exercise in futility because rebel leader Savimbi refused to accept his electoral defeat in free and fair elections, as judged
by the UN and foreign observers. Instead, he took the country back to war. As John Wiseman put it, “Savimbi’s rejection of the election result was
extremely damaging to the possibility of establishing democracy in Angola.”388 The problem lies in an electoral system, which produces a single-
party government through multiparty elections. This winner-take-all voting system has presented a serious problem not only in Angola but also in other states across
Africa. This voting model is divisive because it awards the big winner and does not leave room for power sharing based on the number
of votes each party receives. Unless a solution is found, it can undermine the work of democratic institutions.
Establishing democracy in Africa doesn’t address the root cause of conflict--- backlash will only intensify
Bradley 2005- Professor of Political science @ Indiana University – 2005 (“‘The Other:’ Precursory African Conceptions of Democracy” International Studies
Review http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2486.2005.00507.x)
Obviously, Uganda’s ‘‘movement system’’ is not perfect, but what democracy in the world is without its limitations. Multipartyism is often only a ‘‘band-aid’’
or superficial attempt at appeasing the majority of the population in a democracy. Indeed, the root causes of discontent will have to be
investigated more judiciously and honestly throughout Africa. Nefarious designs by rogue groups and marginalized populations will probably
intensify without some fuller understanding of the various cleavages that plague Africa. And cleavages in Africa go beyond the usual
suspects of ethnic, religious, and class differences; they include economic disparities and weak pluralist institutional practices. Moreover,
economic ‘‘underdevelopment’’ arguments can only go so far as Ake (1996) and Bratton and van de Walle (1997) have convincingly demonstrated
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African Democracy Bad – Economy

Democratization will collapse African economies and result in violence and loss of legitimacy
Hard Road Ahead” p. 16, Questia)
The economy that the new democratic elites inherit in most African countries has typically suffered from two decades of
mismanagement, exogenous shocks, and inappropriate policies, resulting in a growing debt crisis and a semipermanent process of negotiations
and debt rescheduling with international creditors. In addition, the democratic transition itself has occasioned large economic costs, either because
of extensive civil unrest and sometimes violence, or because of the fiscal recklessness of authoritarian leaders trying to hold onto
power. Thus, the governments that emerge from the process of democratization face the daunting tasks of consolidating pluralist institutions and undertaking urgent
economic reform simultaneously.
For the fledgling democratic states, speedy stabilization of the economy is almost certainly a sine qua non of both sociopolitical stability and longer-term economic
success. In its absence, the economy will continue to drift, and policy will continue to be dictated by crisis management and the immediate requirements of' quarterly
International Monetary Fund ( IMF) missions and Paris Club negotiations every twelve to eighteen months. Public infrastructure and services will not improve, and the
government will not be able to create the conditions that attract private investment and pave the way for long-term growth. It must be emphasized that there are no
alternatives to stabilization for the new democracies. Little foreign direct investment or African capital repatriation can be expected as
long as the economic climate is so uncertain. For one thing, the high and variable inflation present in many of these countries scares away
all but short-term speculatory investments. Thus, short of simply printing money, governments have to generate their own revenues or convince the West to
grant public finance. 4
The dilemma for the new democratic governments is that they risk losing legitimacy if they do not quickly restore economic stability,
but the policies required to bring about stabilization may well be extremely unpopular, at least until they bring about results. 5 New governments typically enjoy a
honeymoon period during which the population will blame their predecessors for their hardships. But in the absence of progress, sooner or later the
government will be held accountable and begin to lose its popularity; the very stability of democratic rule will eventually be
threatened, with a return to popular unrest and a greater likelihood of military intervention. That was indeed the pattern for countries like Ghana,
Nigeria, or Sudan in their previous brief democratic experiments.
Liberalization of politics has empirically worsened African economies and political sphere
Ihonvbere 2003- professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin- 2003- (Julius, “The Transition to Democratic Governence in Africa” p.51)
Finally, the liberalization of politics has not improved African economies. Rather corruption, waste, the creation of extralarge
cabinets, sinecure political appointments, and perks for parliamentarians have further put pressure on already scarce
resources. As well, liberalization has not meant more freedom for individuals, the media, scholars, and students. Schools have been
closed, unions proscribed, social critics jailed, discredited politicians rehabilitated without apologies, and media houses raided by security agents just as it had been
under the dictators. In fact, the political situation in Africa has hardly improved in fundamental or structural terms. The politicians have simply
become more careful and sophisticated in practicing the usual politics of manipulation, nepotism, corruption, and repression. Africa’s new
politicians have been whitewashed in the color of democracy. They have mastered the art of propaganda and the strategy for
convincing and confusing donors about their commitments to democracy and democratization. In reality, they are still despots with
little tolerance for pluralism, accountability, human rights, good governance, and democracy. One can therefore appreciate Adebayo Adedeji’s
frustrations when he declared that “the idea of a second liberalization in Africa has gone away with the wind, at least temporarily. Even the most timid attempts
at democratization have often failed due to self-centeredness of African leaders and their lack of vision.”2 As a leading pro-democracy
activist noted a while back, “True, we are doing our best. It will be foolish however to assume that we are making progress. We are
attacking the surface issues. The core issues will require a revolution and more selfless leadership.”3
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African Democracy Bad – Human Rights

Democratization encourages increased human rights abuses
Melber 2002 Research director at Nordic African Institute – 2002 (Henning, “Measuring Democracy and Human Rights in Southern Africa” p. 31, Questia)
Over the past decade, Southern Africans have witnessed extraordinary political change in their region, with Namibia being granted independence,
apartheid rule in South Africa being abolished, a sustainable peace in Mozambique being secured, and Banda's tyrannical rule in Malawi being replaced by participatory
democracy. In short there has been a transition from a condition of armed conflict and repression to a condition of democracy and relative peace.
Subsequently, many governments in the region have sought to consolidate these gains, but as indicated by the drawn-out civil war in Angola, as well as
the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, the prevailing environment of peace and democracy in the region is extremely fragile.
Even in countries that are not encountering severe internal crises, the process of democratic consolidation and the maintenance of
good governance is being undermined, largely due to the actions of the security forces. That is, despite the toppling of most of the repressive regimes in
Southern Africa over the past decade, security forces in many of these countries continue to commit human rights abuses. The reasons for the
undermining of this democratic process are two-fold. First, the Bill of Rights in the constitutions of many Southern African states are the cornerstone of democratic
governance as they prescribe certain fundamental human rights, and affirm democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom, and if these fundamental
rights are threatened then democracy itself is threatened. Second, it is the responsibility of security forces to maintain the degree of order that makes
democratic governance possible, however, the legitimacy of this role is undermined if the security forces are responsible for human rights abuses.
This paper seeks to explain why state security forces, namely police, military and paramilitary in young democracies in Southern Africa commit significant
levels of human rights abuses, and hence undermine the state's attempts at democratic consolidation. In order to address this question, this paper
analyses and compares the current situation in Namibia and South Africa, which are two of the more stable democracies in the region. In both these countries, despite
the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, levels of human rights abuses committed by security force members remain relatively
high.
Democracy will fail in Africa – leaders will just coopt the elections and continue to abuse human rights
Albin-Lackey and Rawlence 2007 – Nigerian researcher AND consultant for Human Rights Watch – 5-08-2007 (Chris and Ben, “What’s next for
Nigeria? The whole concept of African democracy is at risk,” Guardian Unlimited, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2007/05/09/nigeri15887.htm)
Sadly the recent election, which was meant to be a step forward towards consolidating Nigeria's tenuous democracy after decades of
abusive military rule, was not only brazenly rigged but also exceptionally violent, resulting in at least 300 election-related deaths. As
Nigerians and the international community grapple with the scale of the government's contempt for their basic democratic rights, the question they should now be
asking themselves with some urgency is: "What now?"
When we suggested to a senior western diplomat that Nigeria's recent elections were rigged, violent and seen as illegitimate by much
of the Nigerian public, his response was brusque: 'So what?'
The polls have been roundly condemned by election-monitoring bodies. Observers from the European Union said that the whole process was "not credible"
and the report they issued on the exercise was the most damning it had ever issued anywhere in the world. The US-based National
Democratic Institute said that the process had "failed the Nigerian people".
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African – Poverty
Alt Causalities to Poverty—Poor Leadership, Inexperienced Rulers, and Regime Stability
Adomako—2007 (Appiah Kusi Adomako is an international freelance writer and the President of Ghana Chapter of Leaders of Tomorrow Foundation,
5/26/07, “Africa; Why continent still poor?”)
The causes of poverty in Africa are numerous. We can talk of biophysical and socio-economic problems. However, there are those,
which are created by man. The whole root can be summarized up in one phrase managerial problems.
From 1950's many African nations broke free from the chains of colonialism. Most nations began on a good note. Ghana, for example,
began independence in much better economic shape than most African countries. It had a relatively well-developed infrastructure,
large amounts of foreign exchange, and a civil service generally recognised as one of the best in Africa. It is startling to note that in
1957, Ghana had the same per capita income as South Korea. However, in the 28 years after independence, successive governments in
Ghana adopted policies that caused the average person to be significantly poorer in 1982 than he or she had been in 1957. During the
same period, the South Koreans quintupled their per capita income. (Economist, 23 September 1999). Poor leadership has caused
Africa dearly, more so than it has done any other continent. Ironically, Africa's poverty is poignant because it is occurring at a time
when other developing world countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea are experiencing economic
expansion thus putting poverty on the cross and prosperity and dignity on the throne.
Recently BBC world affairs correspondent Mark Doyle came to Ghana and Malaysia to compare the development experiences of
nations that were roughly on an economic par 50 years ago. At the end of his visit this was conclusion: it would take Ghana fifty years
to get where Malaysia is.
I can say without any apology that upon all the Heads of States who have ruled Africa since independence until now, less than half of
them were/are incompetent to rule his country. African leaders like Mobutu Seseiko of Zaire, Samuel Doe of Liberia, Colonel
Mengistu Haile Minam of Ethiopia, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, Emperor Bokaisa of Central African Republic and Colonel I.K
Acheampong of Ghana left the seat of presidency with things worse of than before they came to rule. In other words, they came to
mismanage their country therefore the only dividend was poverty and squalor with deteriorating social conditions, less food, greater
energy shortages and more unemployment (World Bank, World Development Report 1991).
Most leaders who come to rule their nations are inexperienced. They have no idea how to move their countries forward in prosperous
times. All they do is secure power, siphon State funds and leave things to rot.
Secondly, the reason why Africa is poor is that the continent lacks stability in many ways. The continent Africa has witnessed more
conflict than any continent-from Liberia to Cote d'Ivoire, Angola to Somalia, and Rwanda to Burundi. ILO World of Work Magazine #
33-2000 reports that, "many conflicts are undermining the continent, inflicting unnecessary sufferings on the populations, jeopardizing
economic development and social cohesion".
Government programmes and policies to reduce poverty are mostly from medium to long term. Tragically, however, before these
noble policies are allowed to materialise, the ruling governments are overthrown.
For example, in Ghana Dr. Kwame Nkrumah embarked on a rapid industrialisation and ten-year accelerated development plan to make
Ghana a "developed" nation and break free from the neo-colonial stranglehold. After the overthrow of the Nkrumah's government, the
then National Liberation Council abandoned any serious attempt made by Nkrumah to break the economy of neo-colonial dependence
on the west. The most laudable projects were halted. A good example was in Tema, where Nkrumah was building a series of cocoa
storage silos with a potential capacity of 200,000 tons. These would have enabled Ghana to place up to half her annual cocoa crop in
storage if the world market price was too low. If this project had been allowed to continue, Ghana could have earned much more for
her cocoa export.
Development cannot thrive in an ocean of strife. Nigeria, for instance, with over $300 billion dollars worth of oil exports after
nearly thirty-year of oil export is still crippled with poverty because of political instability and widespread corruption. Nigeria, a
nation of both natural and human resources, should be in a position to fend for itself but due to political instability, its per capita
income is around US $320. However, the countries north of the Sahara (Egypt, Morocco, and Libya) are relatively better off than
those of south of the Sahara. Everything stems from the fact that these nations have relative peace and stability. Ethiopia,
Mozambique, Somalia, Angola and Liberia are poor not because of anything but war and instability which has maimed the
infrastructure. Cote d'Ivoire registered a lot of growth after independence during the reign of the late Felix Houpheat Boigny. His reign
was successful to some extent because of political stability, which exited after independence. What can one see today? Civil war has
disintegrated a nation, which was once prosperous and peaceful.
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Disease – Alt Cause

Lack of clean water causes fecal-oral diseases
Global and Mail 2006 (Andre Picard, “Unsafe water imperils lives of almost half of humanity;About 4,500 children die daily because of poor sanitation
and wells, WHO says,” November 16, lexis)
Lack of sewage services kills more people than war and natural disasters. According to the World Health Organization, 4,500 children
die daily from the consequences of unsafe water and inadequate hygiene - about 3.4 million children and adults annually.
Where there are no toilets, people defecate in ditches, or in plastic bags tossed into ditches or dump sites. Raw sewage is everywhere
and, when it rains, noxious black liquid flows in the streets, through people's homes and into the local water supply.
When people fall ill, as they invariably do in these conditions, the vicious cycle begins anew, in an accelerated fashion. Sickness
begets human waste, which begets more sickness.
And lest we be too self-righteous, let's not forget that this problem is not limited to the developing world. So-called honey bags are
still the archaic waste management method used in a number of remote communities in Canada, principally native reserves. Clean
water is not a given in our vast, watery land, either.
Lack of sanitation is responsible for a broad range of fecal-oral diseases such as diarrhea (one of the world's biggest killers of
children), cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A, dysentery and dracunculiasis (Guinea worm disease).
Poverty creates a breeding ground for infectious diseases- they can't solve.
Shah- master of science in enivironmental engineering-2006 (Anup Shah, Conflicts in Africa, "AIDS in Africa," 03 December
2006, http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/Africa/AIDS.asp#ImpactofPovertyonAIDSinAfrica)
The relationship between poverty and ill-health is well established. The economic austerity policies attached to World Bank and IMF
loans led to intensified poverty in many African countries in the 1980s and 1990s. This increased the vulnerability of African
populations to the spread of diseases and to other health problems....
The deepening poverty across the continent has created fertile ground for the spread of infectious diseases. Declining living conditions
and reduced access to basic services have led to decreased health status. In Africa today, almost half of the population lacks access to
safe water and adequate sanitation services. As immune systems have become weakened, the susceptibility of Africa’s people to
infectious diseases has greatly increased....
Disease spread caused by food aid.

News 24- 2005 (News 24, "Disease 'caused by food aid," 10 March 2005, http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/Zimbabwe/0,,2-
11-1662_1810643,00.html)
Harare - Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said food aid "dumped" by developed nations had undermined food safety on the
African continent, state radio reported on Monday.
In remarks made at the start of a UN-sponsored food safety and security conference, Mugabe blamed weak food security controls and
unpredictable droughts for threatening regional food security and triggering the spread of diseases, the report said.
These challenges were compounded by the HIV/Aids pandemic, a rise in unregulated food vending practices, the influx of new food
from new food technologies and the dumping of food from the developed world under programmes of food aid, he was reported as
saying.
Mugabe's government has refused to appeal for international food aid this year, despite warnings from aid agencies that more than a
quarter of the country's 11.6 million people could face hunger by next March.
In May, the state-controlled Sunday Mail claimed that 4 000 tonnes of corn soya blend brought into the country under the UN World
Food Programme (WFP) last year was contaminated.
Mugabe told 170 delegates from 47 African countries attending Monday's conference his country was willing to work with others on a
food safety framework, according to the report.
The conference, due to end on Thursday, has been organised by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World
Health Organisation (WHO).
In a joint statement, the two agencies said food- and waterborne diseases accounted for some 700 000 deaths in Africa each year - one
third of the global death toll from food-related illnesses.
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Famine – Africa
Civil wars in Africa will increase food shortages and famine in Africa
McClelland 06- 2006– (Cary McClelland, received his bachelor's degree in English literature and creative writing from Harvard University, where he won the
Louis Sudler Prize for outstanding artistic achievement, Journal of International Affairs, “POLITICAL CAPITAL DEFICITS IN ZIMBABWEAN FAMINE:
NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR PREVENTION FAILURE” Vol. 59, Iss. 2; pg. 315, 19pgs) (ProQuest)
In examining Zimbabwe's extreme disruptions of food production, one can draw a causal line from the land reform and the political
instability that ensued, to the famine that arose shortly thereafter. Since then, the rains have returned but the violence and famine have
continued in tandem. However, using famine as an instrument of war is not unique to Zimbabwe. As Frank Cuny notes, "In recent years,
disturbing instances have occurred when some governments have tried to deny food to populations as a deliberate weapon to control
rebel areas."63 This practice is evident in Zimbabwe, where MDC-dominated regions and supporters bear the brunt of food
shortages.64 The degree to which the famine has been wielded as a tool to secure political power by those who fear public reprisal provides strong evidence of the
central role of political inequalities in Zimbabwe's famine
Soil degradation is one of many environmental factors that keep Africa from developing successful
agriculture
Drechsel, Kunze and Penning de Vries 2001 (Pay Drechsel, Senior Scientist (Environmental and Soil Science) and IWMI's Subregional
Director for West Africa , Dagmar Kunze, FAO Regional Office for Africa (RAF), Frits Penning de Vries, was Principal Researcher and Douglas Merrey was Director
for Africa, “Soil nutrient depletion and population growth in sub-Saharan Africa: A Malthusian nexus?” Population and Environment. New York: Mar 2001. Vol. 22,
Iss. 4; pg. 411, proquest)
Expanding populations have been exerting tremendous pressure on natural resources, and rural populations are increasingly
encroaching onto marginal lands, fallows and protected areas. Although many factors are at play to explain Africa's current
agricultural problems, soil fertility depletion is considered as the main biophysical factor limiting per capita food production on the
majority of African small farms (Sanchez et al., 1997; World Bank, 2000). This development threatens the resource base of Africa's
current and future food supply. As most economies are dependent on agriculture, soil degradation is also supposed to be a major threat
to overall economic development. There are numerous case studies discussing the relations between population growth and soil or
land degradation at local and regional scales in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). (See Cleaver and Schreiber (1994), Clay et al. (1994), FAO
(1995) and Scherr (1999) for references.) This paper describes, for the first time, such a relationship at the supranational scale in SSA
using data from 36 countries. The focus here is on nutrient depletion or nutrient mining which includes erosion1 and is the most
common soil degradation process (others are, for example, soil pollution, compaction or salinization) and a major component of land
degradation in general (besides deforestation, desertification and, for example, overgrazing).
African soil can’t sustain its population because of lack of nutrients in the soil
Breman and Debrah, 2003 (Henk, director of the African Division of the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development (IFDC) in
Lome, Togo, Dr. Siegfried Kofi. agricultural economist and head of the Policy and Market Program for IFDC's African Division, “Improving African Food Security”,
SAIS Review - Volume 23, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2003, pp. 153-170. Muse)
Nutrient mining of soils aggravates the situation. Harvesting, grazing, and wood cutting remove more nutrients from the [End Page 155]
soil than are returned by natural processes, fertilizer use, and other farm practices such as the use of manure, nitrogen-fixing
leguminous species, and agroforestry. Average use of inorganic fertilizer in Africa is less than 10 kg/ha of nutrients, only one-tenth of the world average. As
well as having the lowest yields, Africa therefore has the highest nutrient-depletion figures, with a negative nutrient balance of about 60
kg/ha. 11 The situation in West Africa may be the worst of all. As in East and Central Africa, average annual rates of nutrient depletion are between 50
and 100 kg/ha of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, but the soil's inherent quality is poorer. For example, the annual sustainable availability of nitrogen
in West Africa is less than 20 kg/ha; only Patagonia and Australia's Northern Territory have levels as low. However, while those areas
are almost unpopulated, with only one to two inhabitants per square kilometer (sq. km.), West Africa is home to almost 100 people per
sq. km. 12
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Poverty – Cant Solve 1/3

Plan does not solve the root causes of poverty – multiple causes exist
VanderSteen—2007 (Jonathan VanderSteen is a Professor at the Queens Population and Public Health institute, 5/9/07, “Get to poverty’s root causes”
LEXIS)
Recently I went to a meeting at City Hall to talk about poverty in Kingston. I was encouraged by the number of interested community members who wanted to help
address this growing concern.
We spoke about many of the causes of poverty in Kingston, including drug abuse and addictions, the low minimum wage, the lack of
accessible public space, poor nutrition, limited opportunities and access to education for those born into poor families, the shortage of
family doctors, inadequate funding of social services and unaffordable housing.
As concerned citizens gave their perspective, stated their case and spoke about the great need, something was becoming clear to me: we were not
talking about the root causes of poverty.
Treating the symptoms is essential, but poverty is not really about a lack of funding. People don't just need decent-paying jobs. They
also need meaningful work.
People don't just need education; they also need to understand their social location. People don't just need social assistance; they need
nourishing relationships.
I don't know how to end poverty in Kingston. I certainly don't know how to reverse the trends in our competitive, materialistic world. But I believe ending poverty
requires some radical thinking and a real investment in community by all of us. After all, love's the only engine of survival.
People need multiple things to escape poverty including capital assets, manufactured capital, human
capital, and natural capital
Ramsey—2003 (Frank Ramsey is a Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St. John’s College. May/June 2003, “World Poverty:
Causes and Pathways” http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/cgsd/documents/dasgupta_worldpoverty.pdf )
An economy’s prospects are shaped by its institutions and by the size and distribution of its capital assets. Taken together they are its
productive base. However, institutions are different from capital assets, in that the former comprise a social infrastructure for guiding the
allocation of resources (e.g., laws and property rights), among which are the capital assets themselves.
We have a name for the overall worth of an economy’s capital assets: wealth. Although economic statisticians have customarily
interpreted wealth narrowly, the measure is in fact an inclusive one. Wealth is based on a comprehensive list of assets, one that
includes not only manufactured capital (roads and buildings; machinery and equipment; cables and ports) and human capital (health, knowledge, and
skills), but also natural capital (oil and minerals, fisheries, forests, grazing land and aquifers, more broadly, ecosystems). Although wealth is an aggregate measure,
it is capable of including distributional concerns if we are prepared to weight the wealths of different people differently before adding them.
To say that an economy’s wealth has increased is to say that in terms of their worth, there has been an overall accumulation of capital
assets. By the same token, to say that wealth has declined is to say that there has been an overall decumulation. Of course, even if some assets have decumulated,
wealth would increase if there were a compensatory accumulation of other assets in the economy. I shall use the term inclusive investment to mean a change in wealth
at constant prices, regardless of whether the change is a decline or an increase.23 Inclusive investment is to be contrasted from recorded investment. Since a wide
range of services obtained from natural capital are missing from standard economic accounts, recorded investment could be positive
even if inclusive investment were negative. This would happen if the economy accumulated manufactured and human capital, but
destroyed or degraded natural capital at a fast rate - a possibility I explore below. On the other hand, current accounting practice does not recognise
that nutrition, health care, and potable water are not merely consumption goods, they are simultaneously investment goods. So, there is a corresponding undercount in
recorded investment.
An asset’s worth is measured in terms of the flow of benefits it is able to generate over time. Being the aggregate worth of all capital
assets, wealth therefore reflects something like an economy’s capacity to sustain human well-being - today and in the future. In fact one
can say more: Subject to certain qualifications, a rise in wealth per person, measured at constant shadow prices, corresponds to an increase in the average well-being of
present and future generations, taken together.24 This is the sense in which wealth is a measure of intergenerational well-being. It is also the
sense in which accumulation of wealth corresponds to sustained development. Inclusive investment is thus a key to economic
progress.
The notion of inclusive investment I am advocating here is not only inclusive of various types of capital assets, but is also sensitive to
individual and locational differences. Earlier, we noted that a pond in one location is a different asset from a pond in another, because their ecological
characteristics are likely to be different, and because the communities making use of them are likely to face different economic circumstances. Therefore, seemingly
identical ponds should have different accounting prices attributed to them. Of course, in practice such refinements may not be
attainable. But it is always salutary to be reminded that macroeconomic reasoning glosses over the heterogeneity of Earth’s resources
and the diverse uses to which they are put - by people residing at the site and by those elsewhere. Shadow prices depend not only
technology and consumer preferences, but also on institutions, and their combined effect on people’s lives.
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Massive lack of food, water and other needed resources make poverty unsolvable
Eradication of micro-nutrient deficiencies would not demand much resources. Rough calculations indicate that less than 0.3 percent of
world income is all that would be required on an annual basis. A problem of far greater magnitude is the availability of dietary energy.
The general consensus among nutritionists is that, barring diets that build on root and tuber crops, those containing adequate energy
are adequate also in their protein content. Among the world’s poor, cereals (viz., wheat, rice, maize, and barley) as food are the main sources of nutrition,
accounting for more than 50 percent of their energy intake. So when people worry about food prospects in, say, the year 2020 or 2050, they typically worry about the
availability of cereals.21 The poor live in unhealthy surroundings, a fact that is both a cause and effect of their poverty. Nearly two million
women and children die annually in poor countries from exposure to indoor pollution. (Cooking can be a lethal activity among the poor.) Over
70 percent of fresh water sources are contaminated or degraded. Moreover, groundwater withdrawal in poor countries exceeds natural recharge rates by
a phenomenal 160 billion cubic metres per year. World Bank (2001) suggests that 5-12 million hectares of land are lost annually to severe degradation, and that soil
degradation affects 65 percent of African croplands and 40 percent of croplands in Asia (in part owing to nitrogen and phosphorus losses). The poorest countries
are in great measure agriculture-based subsistence economies. The agricultural labour force as a proportion of total labour force is on
the order of 60-70 percent. The share of agricultural-value added in GNP is on the order of 25-30 percent. The connection between
rural poverty and the state of the local natural-resource base should be self-evident. When wetlands, inland and coastal fisheries,
woodlands, ponds and lakes, and grazing fields are damaged (say, owing to agricultural encroachment, or urban extensions, or the construction of large
dams, or collective failure at the village level), traditional dwellers suffer. For them - and they are among the poorest in society - there are frequently no
alternative source of livelihood. In contrast, for rich ecotourists or importers of primary products, there is something else, often
somewhere else, which means that there are alternatives. So, whether or not there are substitutes for a particular resource is not entirely a technological
matter, nor a mere matter of consumer taste. Often they cannot move and are thus caught in a trap. But even if they were to migrate, it could be
that they are unable to find employment. The poorest of the poor experience a lack of substitution possibilities in ways the rich do not.
Relatedly, they experience non-convexities in a way the rich do not. Even the range between a need and a luxury is enormous and context-ridden. A pond in one village
is a different asset from a pond in another village, not only because their ecological characteristics are likely to be different, but also because the communities making
use of them are likely to face different economic circumstances. Macroeconomic reasoning glosses over the heterogeneity of Earth’s resources and
the diverse uses to which they are put - by people residing at the site and by those elsewhere. National income accounts reflect that
reasoning by failing to record a wide array of our transactions with Nature.
Status quo Structural Adjustments make poverty rampant and unsolvable

Shah—2007 (Anup Shah has a Master of Science in Environmental Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, 6/20/07 “Structural Adjustment—a Major
Cause of Poverty” http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/SAP.asp )
Many developing nations are in debt and poverty partly due to the policies of international institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Their programs have been heavily criticized for many years for resulting in poverty. In addition, for developing or third world countries, there has
been an increased dependency on the richer nations. This is despite the IMF and World Bank’s claim that they will reduce poverty.
Following an ideology known as neoliberalism, and spearheaded by these and other institutions known as the “Washington
Consensus” (for being based in Washington D.C.), Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) have been imposed to ensure debt repayment and
economic restructuring. But the way it has happened has required poor countries to reduce spending on things like health, education
and development, while debt repayment and other economics policies have been made the priority. In effect, the IMF and World Bank
have demanded that poor nations lower the standard of living of their people.
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Corruption causes poverty, to eradicate poverty you must first solve corruptipon
Shah—2007 (Anup Shah has a Master of Science in Environmental Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, 6/20/07 “Corruption”
http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Poverty/Corruption.asp)
Corruption is both a major cause and result of poverty around the world. It occurs at all levels of society, from governments, civil
society, judiciary functions, military and other services and so on. The impact of corruption in poor countries on the poorer members
of those societies is even more tragic.
The issue of corruption is very much inter-related with other issues. At a global level, the “international” (Washington Consensus-influenced) economic
system that has shaped the current form of globalization in the past decades requires further scrutiny for it has also created conditions whereby corruption can flourish
and exacerbate the conditions of people around the world who already have little say about their own destiny.
Poverty is not a status but rather a trap, those who are born in poverty will die in poverty
Even though there probably are only a few pathways to economic prosperity, the number of routes societies can take to experience
stagnation - even decay - are many. I have been asked to talk at this conference about those countries that have been the "laggards" in the race to contemporary
economic development. I want to do this not only by identifying the various senses in which certain regions of the world have at best remained where they were decades
ago, but also by trying to understand how they have managed to do so. Only a few years back a paper with my intentions would have identified weaknesses in public
policy - including the choice of wrong investment projects - as the cause of economic failure. Today the temptation would be to point to institutional
weaknesses. One can even read such a change in the way the World Bank’s annual World Development Report has evolved since its
inception in 1978. But even when existing institutions are progressive, good policies and sound investment projects cannot be plucked
from air. Institutions, policies, and investments are so dependent on each other, that, if you want to probe one, you simply must keep
an eye on the others. With these dependencies in mind, growth theorists in the late-1980s identified resource allocation mechanisms harbouring the kind of positive
feedback that brings about prosperity. The models encouraged growth experts in the early 1990s to seek evidence of convergence in the
economic performances of nations. The believable results have been negative.1 One aim of growth experts now is to explain why only
a few of the countries that were considered "underdeveloped" in the early 1950s have experienced economic progress. For over twenty
years now I have been studying resource allocation mechanisms harbouring a different kind of positive feedback.2 In contrast to the ones studied by growth theorists,
the mechanisms I have been studying permit hunger and poverty to be a persistent experience for large groups of people in poor regions even while others there and
elsewhere are able to prosper: the mechanisms harbour poverty traps. And they operate at a disaggregated level. One category, involving
metabolic pathways, works at the level of the individual person. They are based on physiological links connecting nutritional status
and work capacity among adults, and those connecting nutritional status and physical and mental development among children.3 A
second category, operating at a spatially localised level, is site specific. It involves a combination of ecological and socio-economic
pathways, sustaining reproductive and environmental externalities. In contrast to the mechanisms underlying modern growth models, these mechanisms
are influenced by the local ecology. The theory based on such mechanisms acknowledges that the economic options open to a poor community in, say, the African
savannahs are different from those available to people in the Gangetic plain of India. To put it simply, policies matter, as do institutions, but the local
ecology matters too. Among the ecological and socio-economic pathways I have been studying are some that reflect synergies between
undernourishment and a person’s vulnerability to infectious diseases.4 But there are other pathways that have a more extensive reach.
They involve positive feedback between poverty, population growth, and degradation of the local natural-resource base. In the latter
mechanisms, however, neither poverty, nor population growth, nor environmental degradation is the prior cause of the others: over
time each influences, and is in turn influenced by, the others. The two broad categories of positive feedback mechanisms are able to co-exist in a society
because, or so it has been found, except under conditions of extreme nutritional stress, nutritional status does not much affect fecundity. In speaking of an economy, I
shall cast a wide net here. The economy could be a household, or it could be a village, a district, a province, a nation, or even the whole
world. Note however that a village could be in the grip of a poverty trap even if the country is not. In such a situation aid from outside
the village would be needed if the villagers are to lift themselves out of the mire. On the other hand, to say that a country is in the grip
of a poverty trap is only to say that without external assistance it would not be possible for all groups in the country to lift themselves
out of poverty, at least not in the foreseeable future; it is not to say that there are no rich people in the country.
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ADI 2008 p2

Competitiveness – Inevitable – Science and Tec................................................................................................32

African Democracy – Healthcare ......................................................................................................................62

Environmental Doomsayers are Wrong! 1/2

Claims of Environmental doomsday are drastically overblown

Environmental Doomsayers are Wrong! 2/2

Environmental threats are grossly exaggerated and ignore evidence of improvement

CAFO Pollution Squo Solvency – Genetically Modified Animals

CAFO Pollution Squo Solvency – A2 GMOs are Dangerous

Clarren, 2008. [Rebecca, “Should biotech piggy go to market?” salon.com, March 4,

Aff CAFO Answers to GMOs Alt Solvency

Clarren, 2008. [Rebecca, “Should biotech piggy go to market?” salon.com, March 4,

Multiple causes for species loss – Alt Cause 1/2

Multiple causes for species loss – Alt Cause 2/2

Rivet theory wrong – not all species worth saving.

No impact to species loss – Puerto Rico proves

A2 over fishing Advantage

FishNet USA 2000, 6-10 http://www.fishingnj.org/netusa13.htm

Alt Cause, Too many boats

VOA.com 2008, 5-8 http://www.voanews.com/english/2008-05-08-voa15.cfm

Alt. Cause, Warming

Oceana 2008 http://www.oceana.org/climate/impacts/depleted-ecosystems/

Alt cause; Sewage dumping causes water pollution

Grinning Planet 05, http://www.grinningplanet.com/2005/09-06/water-pollution-causes-article.htm

Water Pollution - Alt Cause

Alt Cause, plastic

Alt cause, sediment

Alt cause, mining

Resource wars will not happen

Scarcity of resources doesn’t cause conflict – no evidence otherwise

Corruption makes resource scarcity conflicts inevitable

Resource Wars, Alt Cause

Oil dependence decreasing now

Oil demand decreasing – fear of weak economy

Oil dependence decreasing now

Gasoline consumption decreasing – U.S. proves

Oil dependence inevitable, Aff cant solve

Solving dependence takes decades

Water Wars – Will not happen 1/2

Water Wars – Will not happen 2/2

No risk of water wars – conflict will be deflected through cooperation

Water Wars Cooperation Turn 1/3

Turn – water scarcity solves wars by sparking cooperation

WATER WARS won’t happen – cooperation is likely

Water Wars Cooperation Turn 2/3

Water used as a tool for international cooperation

Water Wars Cooperation Turn 3/3

UNESCO will foster cooperation over water and prevent conflict

Econ Resilient - Energy Specific

US economy able to handle higher energy prices

US economy can withstand slowdowns

US economy resilient long-term

Economy Strong – Consistent Job Growth

Econ ↓ Does Not Cause War

US slowdowns don’t impact the global economy

Economic decline won’t cause war

Competitiveness – Inevitable – Education

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Innovation and U.S.

Can’t compete now – lacks of educated workers

Competitiveness – Inevitable – Workers 1/2

Alternative Cause – Industries Need Workers to Boom

Competitiveness – Inevitable – Workers 2/2

Competitiveness – Inevitable – Science and Tec