The Demise of Doha?

It was just reported about an hour ago that the Group of 4 meetings in Germany, which were tasked with trying to save the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, have just collapsed. While this is not surprising, it is nonetheless disappointing. After the suspension of talks a year ago, this was seen as a last-ditch effort to revive this round of WTO negotiations, which was touted as the round intended to bring the benefits of liberalized trade to the developing world. As has been the case all along, agricultural protectionism was the hurdle that the participating nations – US, EU, Brazil and India – were not able to overcome. Now one can only expect the blame game to ensue, in which each nation points its finger at the others’ perceived lack of willingness to cut agricultural subsidies.

So all of you who were holding on to the hope that Doha talks would finally get back on track, it’s not looking too good.

In a very well-timed piece in the Washington Post, it was reported yesterday that US farm subsidies, unsurprisingly, tend to only benefit large, white-owned farms, while small farms (many of which are black-owned) receive none of the largess. The idea behind farm subsides is to help farmers who need assistance in coping with detrimental shifts in the agricultural economy, such as changes in weather and world food prices, but in reality they are going to large commercial farms that can probably deal with such factors on their own and those who are most vulnerable receive no support.

Although I don’t know this first-hand, I suspect that small farmers in Mississippi don’t have well-paid lobbyists in Washington, but I’m sure that the large commercial farmers do.

Violence in America

“Since her boys were teenagers, she [a mother who had just lost her son to gun violence] had been haunted by the fear that guns might take them. There is a connection, she believes, between the violence that blights America and the country's actions elsewhere. ‘When people see what we're doing in the rest of the world, they think, why not in my neighborhood? The government sets an example of violence and then it gets played out on the streets.’ "

The above quote is from the Guardian Newspaper’s recent article on gun violence in America. The article tells the story of nine young people who found themselves on the wrong end of a hand gun in different cities in America over a 24-hour period. The sentiments of the woman in the above quote, Martine Parraga, greatly mirror my own (see previous entry).America can’t possibly hope to quell violence at home when we export our violent tendencies abroad. While there has been a strong current of violence throughout the history of mankind, the United States has managed to institutionalize that violent sentiment over the last 60 or 70 years, since the end of World War II and the emergence of the US as the sole global superpower. In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned us against the threat of the “military-industrial complex” (see previous entry), which has not only championed the loss of US life through military operations around the globe, but has successfully spread our bellicose tendencies to other governments and regimes. How many US and British soldiers have been killed by al Qaeda using weapons that we sold them in the first place? How are we expected to teach our youth to respect life when countless innocent Iraqi citizens have died at the hands of US and British soldiers? Perhaps Ms. Parrega is right: the violence in our neighborhoods is simply a microcosm for US actions in the global community.

If our government and society began showing some respect for human life abroad, maybe we as Americans could learn to respect each other at home.

Nuclear Fusion

I just attended a lecture on the potential of fusion to meet our global energy needs in the somewhat-distant future. According to applied physicists, at temperatures that exceed 100 million degrees, it may be possible to fuse together sub-atomic particles to produce vast amounts on energy. I don’t quite understand the science behind all of it, but theoretically, fusion technology promises nearly unlimited carbon-free energy. Furthermore, scientists are optimistic that they can produce “green” nuclear energy that produces no radioactive waste and is so safe that there is no need for emergency evacuation plans for areas surrounding the nuclear facilities. As an added bonus, with the type of nuclear fusion they are studying, there is no danger of proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The only problem is that they haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet.

The EU, US, China, Korea, Japan, Russia, and maybe others, have pledged $11 billion to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, an experimental plant which will be located in France to make the theory of nuclear fusion a reality. If I remember correctly, they hope to prove that nuclear fusion is viable within the next 10 years and then make it commercially available by 2050.

2050 is still a ways off, but if this thing works the way scientists hope it will and big polluters like the US, China, and the EU take concrete steps to curb global warming in the meantime, maybe mankind isn’t doomed after all.