Final Post
As a wrap up to this course, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of the issues that I haven’t been able to address so far in this course, but are nonetheless incredibly important in today’s world. I have chosen to talk about three key issues that are some of the hottest and most controversial issues facing our world in the 21st century.
Health for Sale
The video below is focused on BigPharma, also known as the ten largest pharmaceutical companies in the world (AstraZeneca, Novartis, Johnson&Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol Myers Squibb Co., Sanofi Aventis, Roche, Merck, Wyeth and Pfizer). Their combined profit exceeds that of the rest of the 490 companies on the fortune 500 combined. In 2004, they made a pre-tax profit 0f $205 billion after we the consumers spent $500 billion on their drugs. The top five killers every year are pulmonary problems, diarrhea, AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which total 15 million deaths per year. 85% of these deaths occur in the southern hemisphere, yet only 11% of world spending on pharmaceuticals goes there. There are three main problems facing medicine dispersal in the southern hemisphere. The first is that the medicines and technologies that are so desperately needed in the southern hemisphere are not being developed since the companies can make more money selling Viagra in Europe than they can selling cures to tropical diseases in South America. They invest in creating drugs that will make them the most profit and those happen to be tailored to diseases prevalent in the northern hemisphere. The following statistic says it all: Since 1975, 1500 new drugs have been invented, 13 were for tropical diseases and 4 were for Malaria, which claims 1.6 million lives each year. The second reason is that the drugs are available, but they are priced too high. For instance, AIDS drugs are available in some parts of Africa, but people that survive on less than $1 per day can not afford the expensive cocktail required to treat HIV. The third problem is, in my opinion, the most disturbing of all. There are many cases where the drugs to cure these diseases already exist, but companies have stopped manufacturing them. One point in the video sums it up perfectly: “the people who needed the medicines were there, but as consumers, as a market, they did not exist”. We have been talking all semester about people being viewed as consumers rather than human beings. Nothing proves this point more than BigPharma telling the non-consumers of the southern hemisphere that they are too inconsequential to bother saving.
Cry for AIDS Drugs
When we thing about AIDS drugs not being distributed to the poor in Africa, we tend to blame the Pharmaceutical companies (with good reason), but here is looking at the situation from a different angle. The government in South Africa that was in power up until the elections a few weeks ago would not allow generic HIV drugs to be brought in. Thabo Mbeki, the former president would not make AIDS treatment a priority and people took to the streets in protest. It takes a miracle to bring the drugs even close to the continent and then to have your own government-the people who are supposed to protect you tell you that you can not have the medicine you need even though it is available for the first time. The questions being raised reach far beyond the prohibition of HIV/AIDS drugs. The government has in place laws that prohibit even short courses of retroviral drugs to prevent the passage of HIV from mother to child during labor, despite the fact that each course is only about $5. A few provinces are defying government policy and are giving retroviral treatment to expecting mothers to try and save their children’s lives. It is bad enough that their children will be orphaned-they do not need a death sentence as well. Shelters such as the Nkosi shelter provide safe havens for women who are HIV+ and their children, but can only remain open through donations and international support. This video highlights the current struggle with AIDS in Africa, and looks at the struggle to get access to medicine from a different point of view. While BigPharma is not without fault, if the drugs are being stopped at the border, there is nothing the pharmaceutical companies can do about it.
The video cannot be embedded on other pages so there is a link to the Youtube page HERE
Future of Food
One topic that has been at the center of heated debates for much of the last decade is that of genetically modified foods. This is one topic where I can safely say that I see both sides of the issue and believe that there is no 100% right answer. The heart of the issue is the promise of GM foods versus the unknown health effects of heating tomatoes with genes for flounder in them. Before I get into the debate between whether GM foods are a cure-all or Russian roulette with our biology, I want to address an issue that clouds up this one-the issue of agribusiness and seed patenting. Companies like Monsanto have a monopoly on agriculture and no one saw it coming. They started out manufacturing herbicides and decided to join the biotech phenomenon by entering into the genetic modification of seeds. These large agribusiness companies bought up all of the smaller seed companies and put only a few kinds of seeds out on the market. They created genetically modified seeds that were resistant to one herbicide-Round Up-which happens to be the herbicide that they sell. They flood the market with their genetically modified seeds which they have patented and farmers have no choice but to buy their seeds. To complicate matters further, these companies have patents on not only the seeds they sell but subsequent generations of seeds produced from them. Therefore, it is now illegal (violating intellectual property rights) to save seeds from one harvest and dry and save them for the next, thereby ensuring a never-ending demand for seeds. Even more bizarre is that farmers can be sued for use of the seeds even if they did not plant them. As a canola farmer in Canada found out, if the seeds replicate and come to rest in your fields, either brought by wind or birds, etc., you can be sued for illegal use of the seeds. So in order, they patent the seeds, sell them for inflated prices, make you pay a technology fee, and guarantee their intellectual property rights. All of this makes you thing that GM foods and seeds are unnecessary and inflate costs for already struggling farmers. However, for the sake of evaluating only the issue of the GM foods themselves, I think we should put aside the disastrous way the seeds are distributed and focus on the technology itself. In any case, here is the introductory video which I think will be quite informative.
Genetically Modified Foods: Global Savior or Global Catastrophe
As for the issue of GM foods, there are two sides to the issue. The first side believes that GM foods are evil. They represent an ecological risk as well as a health risk and by costing more money, they further harm farmers that are barely surviving. By cutting down the variety of seeds available, they leave farmers open to agricultural catastrophes like the potato blight in Ireland in the 1800s. Yes, there were no GM potatoes back then, but Ireland was only growing a few kinds of potatoes so when the blight hit, it devastated the potato crop. The same blight hit Peru some time later and the results weren’t nearly as devastating because the variety of potatoes meant some were immune to the blight. The agricultural diversity that we enjoyed at the beginning of the 20th century is gone. 97% of the species of fruits and vegetables we had at the beginning of the century are extinct and we are working with 3%. This leaves the entire world open to insect and disease-driven catastrophes. The major health concern is that we do not know what these foods are doing to our bodies. There have been no negative reports yet, but effects could take generations to see. The following video takes the anti-GM position.
For those in favor of GM foods, I give you the following quote: “Those people who are opposed [to genetically modified foods] are not farmers. They are people who can afford food”. It may be simplistic but it gets to the heart of the issue. Genetic modifications to foods are able to make crops that are heat and cold tolerant, drought tolerant, and are resistant to infestations. Not only that, but by increasing the yield per acre, they will reduce the amount of supplies and land needed to farm and deforestation to create farmland will slow. For many poor countries, crops that are drought tolerant could be the difference between life and death for their families. Cost aside, making crops less susceptible to the elements means less crops will die in the fields each year before they can get onto the table. While the effects are still somewhat unknown, proponents of GM-foods are quick to point out that there are no negative health reports despite using GM-foods for close to twenty years now, and perhaps there never will be. Some people also think that these foods are not tested well enough before they are put in our grocery stores and sold as seeds to farmers, but the truth is that these biotech foods are tested more rigorously than conventional crops are just to make sure that they are safe for consumption. Lastly, targeting genetic changes in crops is a finer technique of the same principles that farmers have been using for centuries. The old way was to cross-pollinate two plants and hope for the best, or irradiate plants and look for a mutation. The new way is to take the guesswork and dumb luck out of the equation and make plants do what we need them to do. At one point in the video, it mentions that while it is true that not everything is known about these GM foods, it is not okay to watch while millions die and food rots in storage facilities. As Simpleton says “it is easy to be hypersensitive about new technology when you always have enough food to eat”.
