Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File
Ext #2 – Food Price Increase Innevitable
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Ext #2 – Food Price Increase InnevitableFamine is Inevitable in the Status Quo, the Dollar Decline Plummits Food Prices Scott Thrill 6/6/08 (staff writer “Is Famine Inevitable” pg. online @ http://www.alternet.org/environment/87071//) These inconvenient truths generate a logical but nevertheless callous question: Who will starve, and who will survive? Even that has a profit motive, as it should, considering that the oil sector's economic shenanigans -- occupations, ethanol, record-setting paydays -- under the Bush administration have brought us to this disturbing tightrope. The cold pursuit of profit promises to kick-start further genetic experimentation to make up for what nature cannot provide, thanks to hyperproduction and global warming's incoming floods, droughts and fires. And the fact that we grow food now to put not into our bodies but into our cars only draws that dystopian future closer. Shifting the auto market to another fuel source would go a long way to staving it off, if political and popular will could only be galvanized from its comfy couch to start saving and not wasting money and food."The best way to avert future famines on the supply and price side," concludes Woodall, "is to ensure that there are enough food reserves that can feed the hungry in countries in crisis, (and) offer reasonable prices to consumers in the developed world and fair prices for farmers. Under the current agriculture policies, the supply and price of food staples has been very volatile, and there is no safety valve to ensure that the supply of commodities can match the need of consumers. Farmer-owned reserves and the re-establishment of some government supply management policies could greatly ease the year-to-year price shocks faced by development agencies, grocery store consumers and farmers."But that would be a solution for those interested in finding one. Considering that billions are already on the edge of starvation, interest in earnings rather than solutions seems to be the main problem. Until that changes, the poor as always will remain the petri dish for such economic speculations and resource shortages. They are already at ground zero in the war against an inevitable famine."Skyrocketing prices are hitting them the hardest," Luescher continues, "those who already spend 60 percent, sometimes even 80 percent, of their budget on food. These groups include the rural landless, pastoralists and the majority of small-scale farmers. But the impact is greatest on the urban poor. And the rises are producing what we're calling the "new face of hunger" -- people who suddenly can no longer afford the food they see on store shelves because prices have soared beyond their reach." AT: Free Trade Impacts(__) Increased trade has no effect on decreasing risk of conflict between nations 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) 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. (__) Trade inevitable – globalization. BRAINARD 08 Vice President and Director for Global Economy and Development [Lael, Senate Committee on Finance, “America’s Trade Agenda: Examining the Trade Enforcment Act of 2007,” Senate testimony, 5/22/2008, brookings.edu/testimony/2008/0522_trade_brainard.aspx] We are experiencing a period of breathtaking global integration that dwarfs previous episodes. Global trade has more than doubled in the last 7 years alone. The entry of India and China amounts to a 70 percent expansion of the global labor force—with wages less than a tenth of the level in wealthy economies. This expansion is more than three times bigger than the globalization challenge of the 1970s and 80s associated with the sequential advances of Japan, South Korea, and the other Asian tigers. It is also far larger than the more recent integration of the North American market. If, as is now widely expected, these trends in population and productivity growth continue, the time will soon approach where the balance of global economic heft flips. According to my colleague, Homi Kharas, the so-called emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies will account for over half of world income by 2050, up from 13 percent today, while the share of the G7 wealthiest economies will slip from 57 percent today to one quarter of world income in 2050. And by 2030, 83 percent of the world’s middle class consumers will reside in what are today considered emerging markets. (__) Single blows against trade don’t spread—no impact Ikenson 2009 – director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies (Daniel, Center for Trade Policy Studies, Free Trade Bulletin 37, “A protectionism fling”, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10651, WEA) Still even more importantly, the trade rules are not so restrictive that governments obsess over finding ways around them. It is not the existence of the rules that compels countries to liberalize trade. Governments typically are not looking for excuses to raise trade barriers. If compliance were the primary motivation for countries to liberalize trade, we would not observe applied tariff rates that are so much lower than the maximum allowable rates. And we would likely observe much greater use of the various trade remedies across industries and more invocation of restrictions in the name of health and other technical barriers to trade. Trade liberalization is motivated by self-interest, and the disparities between bound and applied rates are explained by the fact that most members have a preference for openness. There are real benefits, beyond the reciprocal openings of others' markets, to keeping one's own trade barriers low. Nevertheless, governments have been invoking protectionist measures over the past several months. Here are just a few examples:6z * In India, tariffs and other restrictions have been raised on some steel products; * Ecuador raised tariffs on 940 different products by a range of 5 to 20 percentage points; * Indonesia limited the number of points of entry into domestic commerce for imported products and is requiring its civil servants to buy only Indonesianmade products; and * Argentina made licensing requirements more onerous for so-called sensitive products, such as auto parts, textiles, TVs, and shoes. And here is how a top-circulation American daily newspaper described the global flirtation with trade barriers in December: Moving to shield battered domestic manufacturers from foreign imports, Indonesia is slapping restrictions on at least 500 products this month, demanding special licenses and new fees on imports. Russia is hiking tariffs on imported cars, poultry and pork. France is launching a state fund to protect French companies from foreign takeovers. Officials in Argentina and Brazil are seeking to raise tariffs on products from imported wine and textiles to leather goods and peaches.7 There may be nothing necessarily incorrect about the facts reported. But the tone and implications are possibly misleading. It is hard to accept the otherwise marginally significant facts without also accepting the provocative metaphors and sense of impending doom. Those actions have less antagonistic explanations and more benign interpretations. The actions of Indonesia, Argentina, and Brazil are consistent with their rights under the WTO agreements and will have a negligible collective impact on world trade. Russia is not even a member of the WTO and frequently behaves outside of international norms, so its actions have very limited representative value. And France has intervened to block foreign takeovers of French companies on other occasions this decade, so its actions are not particularly noteworthy. The popular media usually lacks nuance in its accounting of trade policy events and often intones that the present will be a replay of the 1930s. (__) Trade only pacifies some constituencies—it can’t solve in the countries with the biggest impacts GOLDSTONE 2007 (P.R., PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and a member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a non-resident research fellow at the Center for Peace and Security Studies, Georgetown University, AlterNet, September 25, http://www.alternet.org/audits/62848/?page=entire) American policymakers should beware claims of globalization's axiomatic pacifying effects. Trade creates vested interests in peace, but these interests affect policy only to the extent they wield political clout. In many of the states whose behavior we most wish to alter, such sectors -- internationalist, export-oriented, reliant on global markets -- lack a privileged place at the political table. Until and unless these groups gain a greater voice within their own political system, attempts to rely on the presumed constraining effects of global trade carry substantially greater risk than commonly thought. A few examples tell much. Quasi-democratic Russia is a state whose principal exposure to global markets lies in oil, a commodity whose considerable strategic coercive power the Putin regime freely invokes. The oil sector has effectively merged with the state, making Russia's deepening ties to the global economy a would-be weapon rather than an avenue of restraint. Russian economic liberalization without political liberalization is unlikely to pay the strong cooperative dividends many expect. China will prove perhaps the ultimate test of the Pax Mercatoria. The increasing international Chinese presence in the oil and raw materials extraction sectors would seem to bode ill, given such sectors' consistent history elsewhere of urging state use of threats and force to secure these interests. Much will come down to the relative political influence of export-oriented sectors heavily reliant on foreign direct investment and easy access to the vast Western market versus the political power of their sectoral opposites: uncompetitive state-owned enterprises, energy and mineral complexes with important holdings in the global periphery, and a Chinese military that increasingly has become a de facto multi-sectoral economic-industrial conglomerate. Actions to bolster the former groups at the expense of the latter would be effort well spent. At home, as even advanced sectors feel the competitive pressures of globalization, public support for internationalism and global engagement will face severe challenges. As more sectors undergo structural transformation, the natural coalitional constituency for committed global activist policy will erode; containing the gathering backlash will require considerable leadership. Trade can indeed be a palliative; too often, however, we seem to think of economic interdependence as a panacea; the danger is that in particular instances it may prove no more than a placebo. Directory: files -> documents documents -> North Mankato Taylor Library documents -> In the Red and Brown Water documents -> - documents -> I. Disaster Summary Sheet II. Tropical Cyclones documents -> Cbp and Trade Automated Interface Requirements Appendix: pga december 22, 2015 documents -> Ace abi catair customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements documents -> Ace abi catair customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements documents -> Mobile audio/video recording systems documents -> Cartographic Concepts for Realizing a Location Based umts service documents -> 1/ Background Statistics Human development index rank Download 2.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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