What's your carbon footprint?

Published December 7 2005

The Daily Targum

If you're the type to read The Economist on mundane train and bus rides while your neighbors shove their elbows in your face turning the pages of their large, clumsy New York Times newspapers, then you'd notice the unusual frequency of environmental ads within this British weekly current affairs magazine.

One advertisement asks you, "What's your carbon footprint?" Which translates to: how much do you contribute to the carbon emissions that cause damage to the environment?

The same organization takes out another full-page color advertisement in a different magazine, saying, "Do you think solar energy will ever be a real alternative?" and continues below that, "it's a start."

A different concerned entity boasts in the Economist, "After investing heavily in a better technology to measure greenhouse gases, what do we do? Give it away."

Who are these environmental saints – creating 'carbon calculators' and giving us and their competitors other free technologies to measure our impact on the earth and how we can reduce it? They're oil companies.

And if you don't believe me – I know The Economist isn't exactly snatched off the stands by college students – perhaps you've seen the television commercials of a tanned, hippy-ish forty-something-year-old scrambling over red rocks looking for little sea shells, and talking about how she has a PhD. in environmental protection. And how she now works for Shell (the oil company, not the sea creature's disposable house).

British Petroleum launched a $200 million re-branding campaign five years ago, to take consumers beyond the fact that the company has had an unfortunate history with environmental unfriendliness (as I imagine most oil companies do) and convince them that British Petroleum is now thinking "Beyond Petroleum."

According to the company's website, "BP was the first major energy company to publicly acknowledge the need to take steps against climate change," and is now investing $350 million over five years to reduce internal CO2 emissions by up to one million tonnes each year.

They also claim to be one of the world's biggest investors in lower carbon fuels and technologies. Today, natural gas makes-up about 40% of BP's portfolio. Because of the higher hydrogen to carbon ratio in natural gas, the CO2 produced by natural gas combustion is 25-30% lower than with petroleum products and 40-50% lower than with coal, for the same energy output.

BP is one of the world's leading solar companies, and partners with more than 200 stores in America to bring solar-powered facilities to homeowners, making it easier to reduce their "carbon footprint" a few sizes. And the company is now the largest partner in the UK's Department of Energy's hydrogen program, working with car manufacturers to test hydro-powered vehicles.

Chevron-Texaco, the company that smugly announced in a two-page color ad in the Economist that it gave away its Energy and Emissions Estimating System to its competitors after investing heavily in its research, has also launched an aggressive campaign on its environmental friendliness, accusing its consumers of using 25 barrels of oil a year, and then asking, "So are you ready to do something about it?"

The ad states that since 1973 alone, "improvements in energy efficiency have resulted in a 50% reduction of our daily energy use, which is the same as discovering 25 extra million barrels of oil equivalent every single day.

It continues, "Clearly, saving energy is like finding it."

All this talk of energy conservation by oil companies, whose primary mission continues to be that of drilling the earth and extracting every last drop of black gold from her loins, sounds a little fishy, doesn't it? Could there be a greater oxymoron than an environmental oil company?

After all, Exxonmobil announced the largest quarterly corporate profits in global history at $7.04bn (£4.4bn) last year, on the back of increasing oil sales. The Texas firm's annual profit is higher than the gross domestic product of Syria. But even Exxonmobil has its own corporate citizenship site that addresses energy conservation, investment in new technologies, and Exxonmobil's contributions to science education and fighting malaria.

It seems the new drive for corporate citizenship and social responsibility, a phenomenon that has grown increasingly popular in the corporate world over the past decade, has infected the oil industry.

According to BP's Chief Executive of Exploration & Production, Tony Hayward, "if a company is going to be sustainable it must do two things. First it must run a successful business that makes a profit and invests for continued growth – this is fundamental and distinguishes business from other parts of society. Second it must be trusted and supported by those it does business with – customers, suppliers, governments, communities, informed observers and experts such as NGOs."

Businesses are increasingly finding that it makes more sense to put a little effort into helping the human population than to steamroll over the masses who can't afford your product to get it to the few who can. Better idea – contribute to lifting more people out of abject poverty and sickness, and you get a larger consumer base to buy your stuff.

In the oil industry, the corporate citizenship idea takes the form of encouraging conservation because, realistically, oil companies know that encouraging American consumers to reduce their carbon footprints may decrease oil sales here, but they have the mushrooming industrial nations in the East – India, China and Central Europe –consuming oil at phenomenal rates over the next few years. Oil sales won't suffer from American and European conservation, so why not go a little green in these countries and polish the industry's image a bit?

It may be a superficial publicity stunt, and it may pain me a great deal to say this, but as BP puts it, "It's a start." In the meanwhile, I say whip out that carbon calculator [available at www.bp.com] and keep a watchful eye on the push beyond petroleum.

Fleshing out our diets

Published October 26 2005
The Daily Targum

Animal activists have got to face the sad reality that most humans like a little meat in their diet, be it cow, chicken or the other white meat.

But, given the mad cow fiasco of a few years ago in Europe, the Foot and Mouth epidemic in Southeast Asia more recently, and now the Avian Flu, perhaps it’s time the meat eaters of this world paid attention to some of what these activists are saying.

Mad Cow Disease, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), is “a slowly progressive, degenerative, fatal disease affecting the central nervous system of adult cattle,” according to the US Food and Drug Administration. It broke out in an epidemic in Britain in the early 1990s, with cases of BSE peaking at over 36,000 in 1992.

What was the cause of the epidemic in cows? Farmers had been feeding cattle food prepared from bovine tissues, such as brain and spinal cord matter, which were contaminated by the BSE agent. Their feed also included sheep brain matter, infected with scrapie, the form of the disease manifested in sheep.

But humans have been eating various sentient beings and their brain matter, their intestines and their hooves in McDonald’s hamburger patties for decades, you might say! What’s the big deal?

The odd crop of crazy cows dropping dead wouldn’t have mattered much to us, but alas humans began contracting the disease from BSE-infected beef in the form of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), a human neurodegenerative disease. While there have only been around 73 cases of vCJD globally so far, scientists have predicted epidemics of up to 250,000 cases of the lethal disease.

As a result, governments across the world have cracked down on cattle and other meat industries, requiring them to eliminate animal parts from feed. The livestock industry in the U.S voluntarily banned sheep and certain other animal parts from their feed, and then the FDA formally banned “any proteins from cows, sheep, goats, deer or elk -- animals that get similar brain-wasting diseases -- from feed for cows, sheep or goats.” Poultry and pigs could still, however, eat these proteins, but their feed would have to be labeled "do not feed to cows or other ruminants" and companies had to have systems to prevent accidentally mixing up the feeds.

Yet, according to the Associate Press, FDA inspections in 2001 found that around 20 percent of U.S feed mills, companies that turn slaughtered animals’ parts in to meat and bone meal, feed considered ‘risky,’ lacked these warning labels and had no system to prevent feed mix-ups.

The next edible animal epidemic to hit the scene was Foot-and-Mouth disease, which affects all cloven-hoofed animals, and is the most contagious of animal diseases, according to the British Journal of Medicine.

The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease two years ago in Scotland cost the Scottish economy up to £29million. More than half a million sheep and 80,000 cattle were slaughtered in the area after 177 farms were infected.

In 2002, The South Korean authorities, trying to contain an outbreak of swine foot and mouth disease, slaughtered more than 55,000 pigs and cattle.

While foot-and-mouth disease (so named because it causes painful blisters in the mouths and on the feet of infected animals) does not pose a health threat to humans (yet), the financial losses from it have been significant in the affected industries.

Avian influenza, the latest of these diseases doesn’t usually infect species other than birds and pigs, according to researchers, but humans came down with the bird flu in 1997 in Hong Kong, and out of 18 people who were infected, six died.

The strain of the flu that infected and killed these people then went on to kill 60 others across Asia, in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, who are thought to have been infected after coming into contact with infected bird feces.

Hong Kong’s entire poultry population, around 1.5 million birds, was slaughtered within three days.

Since its appearance in Hong Kong, the Avian Flu has moved on through Asia and has now been detected in Russia and Turkey, following the paths of migratory birds. According to The Food and Agriculture Organization, 140 million birds have been killed or have died from the disease, resulting in financial costs of up to $10 billion.

The World Health Organization has said the H5N1 strain of bird flu is endemic in poultry in China and across much of Asia, and it may only be a matter of time before it develops the ability to pass easily from human to human.

Fears that the disease could easily spread across the European and North American continents through migratory bird transmission, and become a pandemic with not only significant economic costs but also threat to humans, have propelled the European Union into considerations of implementing a ban on not just poultry imports, but imports of pet birds!

The host of such diseases, sickening and killing off the animals we would otherwise have slaughtered anyway, begs the question – are we responsible for these epidemics?

A report released recently by Worldwatch Institute, an independent environmental think-tank, explains: “Factory farms were designed to bring animals to market as quickly and cheaply as possible. Yet they invite a host of environmental, animal welfare, and public health problems.

“Crowded, inhumane, and unhygienic conditions on factory farms can sicken animals and create the perfect environment for the spread of diseases including avian flu, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or mad cow disease), and foot-and-mouth disease, according to the author, Danielle Nierenberg.

Nierenberg continues that many factory farmers have turned to irradiation and genetic engineering, as well as the use of antibiotics in animal feed to ensure their products are safe, but, while these “end-of-the-pipe remedies are certainly innovative, they don't address the real problem: factory farming is an inefficient, ecologically disruptive, dangerous, and inhumane way of making meat.Did you hear what the Rutgers Dining Hall Services do with student leftovers and excess catered food? According to Charles P. Sams, the director of Dining Services, who was interviewed earlier this month by the Targum, it goes to the pigs

What's left after the food is pulverized and its liquid extracted, “is a barrel of unused edible food waste resembling the consistency of oatmeal and is suitable for only the most indiscriminate of livestock,” the article said.

It may just be that this lack of discrimination lies with humans in their treatment of livestock, and not the pigs.

On Hurricanes and Bicycles

Published October 12 2005
The Daily Targum

While yet another hurricane sweeps across the American Gulf Coast, killing at least 300 people in Central America, the Arctic Council of Indigenous Peoples are mounting pressure on nations such as the United States over the shrinking arctic icecap.

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk for the fourth consecutive year, according to a study released by US scientists, and September 2005 will set a new record minimum amount of Arctic sea ice cover.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center, which produced the new data, concluded that human-induced global warming is at least partly responsible for the arctic meltdown.

The Arctic Indigenous leaders are therefore calling for the United States, the world's biggest polluter, to cap emissions of heat-trapping gases from cars, factories and power plants, the sources most scientists blame for global warming.

This phenomenon of global warming could also, according to many leading scientists studying global weather patterns, be the cause of the recent rash of unusually strong hurricanes across the US gulf coast.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, have analysed global tropical cyclone statistics since satellite records began and found that between 1975 and 1989, there were 171 severe hurricanes but the number rose to 269 between 1990 and 2004.

The author of the study, Dr Peter Webster, told the BBC News website: “The increase in intensity is probably accounted for by the increase in sea surface temperature and I think probably the sea surface temperature increase is a manifestation of global warming."

The United States pulled out of the Kyoto Agreement of 2001 amongst major industrial countries to cap emissions, because President George Bush declared the agreement would be too costly and would unfairly disadvantage developing nations.

Leading British Scientist and chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Sir John Lawton, has gone so far as to say, “if this makes the climate loonies in the States realize we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation.”

And indeed, through a strange series of events, the United States seems to be curbing its emissions, not because of the government’s guilty conscience over global warming, but because of the price of oil.

The two rising economic behemoths in Asia have long known the secret to low public fuel consumption – bicycles. The crouching Tigers of China and India rode to work for years, if they could afford a bicycle, on the cleanest and greenest mode of transportation besides walking before economic liberalization and development allowed them the luxury of buying cars.

Today, the biggest consumer of oil, the greatest polluter and producer of waste in the world, the United States, is following in the footsteps, or rather the tire tracks, of India and China.

According to the United States Chamber of Commerce, more bicycles have been sold than cars in the last 12 months. The reason – astronomical gas prices in the U.S that are forcing those who have cars out of their vehicles and onto the saddle. Americans considering buying cars have also turned to bicycles as a cheaper and more cost-effective alternative.

Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong, an industry association, told the AFP, “Bicycle sales are near an all-time high with 19 million sold last year -- close to the 20 million sold during the oil embargo in the early 1970s.”

Following the two hurricanes that have ripped apart the oil refining industry in the American Gulf Coast, the President of the United States, a professed Texas oil man at heart, has even started to encourage US citizens to take their pedals off the metal and try to conserve as much energy as possible.

Bush said last month, after a briefing at the energy department in Washington, that it was up to all Americans to "pitch in" by being better conservers of energy: "I mean, people just need to recognise that these storms have caused disruption and that if they're able to maybe not drive ... on a trip that's not essential, that would be helpful.”

If it makes sense for the American citizen to curtail non-essential travel, he added “We can encourage employees to car pool or use mass transit, and we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation," he said.

The US President is even reported to have been pottering around the White House, reminding staff to turn off lights.

Has Mr. Bush had a change of heart? Is he going green? Not likely. The president of the United States is encouraging his citizens to consume less oil because the cost to US treasuries of subsidizing oil following Hurricane Katrina is probably keeping him up at nights.

The price of oil per barrel broke records, rising to around $70 a barrel on August 30^th this year, just after Hurricane Katrina. While that number has gone down to around $62 a barrel, the US energy department said that refineries were operating at just 69.8% capacity in the last week of September and a dozen refineries in the US Gulf of Mexico region are still shut after being damaged by the two storms.

The International Energy Association has offered to release 2 million barrels of petrol a day (the amount Kuwait puts out) to the US, but the American government is already using its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks to counter the sharp rise in gas prices.

It is here we come to the tail end of the cycle that put Americans on their cycles. Meteorological experts around the world have been warning for over a decade that at the rate we release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, global warming is becoming a significant and imminent threat.

And the United States, world leader of industry and development, has ignored these warnings until now, when two hurricanes, very probably enhanced in their strength and ferocity by global warming caused by US fuel emissions, have ravaged the very industry that caused them.

If this isn’t Mother Nature’s revenge, it certainly makes for an extraordinary coincidence.

The Dalai Lama's Dilemma

Published September 28 2005
The Daily Targum

"It seems to me, peace is not just the absence of violence but much more," the Dalai Lama said this past Sunday in his talk, "Peace, War and Reconciliation."

Peace, according to Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th dalai lama of Tibet, means creating and coming into being. It has to do with attitude, motivation and compassion.

The peace of the Cold War, for example, was not peace at all, because it was a time where the terror of nuclear annihilation kept the nations of the two blocs in a relative military standoff. But fear and suspicion ruled for decades.

"Any action which is motivated by hatred, anger or jealousy, is essentially violent," he said. The Dalai Lama's speech was disarmingly simple, yet full of a wisdom that is so uncomplicated it will take most of us a lifetime to even begin to implement in our lives.

"We are all living things, including those trees, flowers, this grass. ... Is this real grass? It looks like real grass!" the Dalai Lama said.

He was referring to the Astroturf on which a hundred or so people were sitting, in front of the stage.

It is, unfortunately, the most straightforward and uncomplicated things that are hardest for those of us entangled in the chaos and overstimulation of modern urban life to grapple with.

For example, the monks of the Drepung Loseling Monastery of Tibet have been working on a sand mandala - a circular patterned drawing made out of different colored sands - since Wednesday last week and finished off their beautiful mandala at the Zimmerli Art Museum on Saturday.

Sand mandalas are symbols of the universe and its energy and are also used by Tibetan monks in meditation and the initiation of new monks. Tibetan monks have been traveling around the United States over the past decade or so, publicizing their struggle for a Tibet free and independent from China. They have shared sand mandalas and prayer chants with audiences throughout the United States to raise awareness of their culture and what is being stifled by communist China's occupation of Tibet and the forced exile of its monks.

These sand mandalas represent the cycle of life and death; the mandala is created laboriously over a few days by several monks and then destroyed. The sand is emptied into a nearby body of water - in this case, the Raritan River.

This process symbolizes the transience of life and the ideal of avoiding attachment to the material world.

It surprised me, then, to see that once the mandala was destroyed, bags of the sand were to be distributed to museum visitors - of which there were hundreds - as a souvenir of the event.

It surprised me even more that people were scrambling into place to get their bags of sand first, in case the stuff ran out, and they couldn't take home their own little piece of the art.

Intentions were, I have no doubt, good-hearted. Those who were interested enough in the culture of another nation to turn up at the Zimmerli wanted to show their respect to the monks in taking a piece of their hard work home with them. They also wanted to support the monks by buying books, incense, Tibetan and Nepali cloth work and, of course, T-shirts. There was also a "donations" box, which, while it had some dollar bills in it, went largely ignored by the majority.

We were all awed by the mesmeric chants of the Drepung Loseling yellow-hat monks and their intricate sand drawing. Everyone who attended either the Zimmerli exhibition or the Dalai Lama's talk - I'm sure the population of both events overlapped a great deal - came away with a greater awareness of an ancient and inspiring tradition and its political perils with China.

What escaped many of us, however, was the essential spirit in which these monks, including the Dalai Lama, approach the world, which gives them such quiet sophistication that most of us can only imitate at best.

The point of destroying the sand mandala was that beauty and art, like life, must be enjoyed for what they are but then let go. The sand, the monks explained, is usually released into the water so it can carry the monks' blessings into the ocean and then into the rain, which spreads the blessings and prayers over the earth. Taking home bags of colored sand, whose pattern and beauty has already been destroyed, defeats an essential point of Buddhist philosophy - and of most spiritual philosophies, for that matter.

What is even more unfortunate than our lack of understanding of what it means to enjoy life without wanting to take it home in a bag, is this understanding does not come with being Buddhist or any other religion.

Most of us in the world are born into one religious background but have managed to carry the most hollow remnants of spirituality with us into our urban adulthood while leaving behind the essentially similar tenets most religions are founded on: compassion, tolerance and contentment.

Osama bin Laden, in terrorizing the globe with random and ignorant acts of violence, acts in the hope of bringing everyone to Islam, which, according to him, "is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights and defending the oppressed and persecuted."

While he has the tenets of his religion down pat in this statement, his actions and those he has orchestrated couldn't be further from the teachings of Islam.

Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, who theoretically share the Dalai Lama's philosophy of peace and nonviolence, have been heavily involved in the politics of the civil war between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government and the mainly Hindu Tamil separatists. The monks are fully supportive of the government's war against and extermination of the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam, more commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.

Speaking to a reporter from The Associated Press, one politically prominent Buddhist monk said, "Nowadays, monks cannot go and sleep in the forest. The monks of Sri Lanka have always been involved in national issues."

According to the article, "Rathana, an official with a powerful Buddhist group, dismisses Sri Lanka's peace process and urges renewed military action against Tamil Tiger separatists."

"We should fight against unjust activities," Rathana said, according to the AP. "Yes, we should fight."

It seems, therefore, that while we are blessed with the immensely wise canons and values of ancient, but still relevant, religions today, most of the world's leaders, political actors and even everyday citizens - including those of us fortunate enough to witness Tibetan Buddhism at the Zimmerli and Rutgers Stadium - are somehow missing the point. Hopefully, listening to and understanding the Dalai Lama's call to tolerance, compassion and contentment will clear our minds of the complicated inanities of life and give us a glimpse of the simple profundities.

Hooked on Oil

Published September 13 2005
The Daily Targum

I have little doubt that everybody who drives a car is woefully aware that gas prices in the United States, a meager $1.86 a gallon just a year ago, have jumped over a dollar since then to around $3 a gallon today. I don’t drive a car, fortunately for the environment and not so fortunately for me in the middle of highway-clad New Jersey suburbia. But I’ve been assaulted left and right, nevertheless, by cries and sighs of indignation over the phenomenal price of oil these days.

Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the US Gulf Coast explains the recent hike in prices – more than 83 percent of gas production and 95 percent of oil production in that region has been shut down over the past week because of the damage to oil rigs and refineries, according to the BBC.

The BBC reports that about 30 percent of the country's entire crude oil output - is out of commission.

The price of oil per barrel broke records, rising to around $70 a barrel on August 30^th this year, just after the hurricane. This is the highest price of oil ever recorded, but still falls short of the oil crisis of the late 1970’s, where, adjusted for inflation, the black gold was selling for about $90 a barrel. So cheer up, things have been worse.

Oil prices are already slowing falling, partially because various oil producing countries have offered to provide the US with oil to buffer the shortage caused by the hurricane’s impact.

The International Energy Association, for example, has offered to release 2 million barrels of petrol a day (the amount Kuwait puts out) to the US. Consisting of 26 countries including France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the IEA holds a combined stockpile of 4 billion barrels of oil, 1.4 billion of which are available to these governments for emergency use.

While this buffer supply is yet to arrive in the US, the American government is already using its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks to counter a sharp rise in gas prices, according to the BBC.

Prices fluctuate, however, not only with actual rises and falls in oil availability, but with speculation on disaster and how much damage will arise. This explains why the price of oil leapt from about $66.86 (set on August 12 on the New York Mercantile Exchange) to $70 before demand for oil outstripped the interrupted supply from the Gulf Coast.

The price of crude oil has been steadily rising for other reasons, since far before Hurricane Katrina struck refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Upsets in oil supply from major oil-producing nations such as Niger (undergoing internal political strife), Iraq (undergoing an externally induced chaotic cataclysm and recently a rebellious sabotage of the power grid) and Venezuela (where strikes interrupted oil export) also contributed to the edging up of oil prices.

If that’s not enough of a complication of the usual media-pulverized, mushy public-feed that oil prices are up plainly because Katrina struck, here’s another one: an overall rise in demand for oil has driven up prices in recent years because the supply of oil is restricted (both by what the poor earth has left in her tired loins as well as by oil producing cartels like OPEC).

China, the new oversized kid on the block, consumed about 6.7 million barrels of oil per day last year, 3.2 million of which came from imports. Its consumption is speculated by the various bespectacled cogitating oil gurus to increase as its economy expands.

The US and Europe have also increased demand over the last few years, putting more of a strain on oil supply.

While North America contributes about 4.8 percent to global oil production at just over 14 million barrels a day, oil greedy America boasts the highest consumption in the world and has to import an addition 11 million barrels a day to support its needs.

The fact of the matter is that this precious commodity that keeps the United States on its knees before Saudi Arabia and Kuwait while it kicks Iraq and Iran in the pants for Islamic fundamentalism (bred largely in Saudi-funded madrasas) is a slippery fish that will never leave us with our bellies (or rather, our gas tanks) full. So why do we so desperately cling to it? What on earth do we use all this oil for?

Perhaps the national obsession with Sports Utility Vehicles (SUV’s), Hummers and other generally colossal, compulsively oil-guzzling American-made cars has something to do with it.

One online news source (yes, the BBC again, sorry) tries to convince us that sales of the SUV, “the nation’s top selling car,” are “sluggish with a disappointing 4.1% increase for the year.” That’s a sluggish increase, by the way. Hummer sales, however, declined by 21 percent, and the Hybrid, a more environmentally-friendly car that combines petrol and electric power, is basking in the sun of celebrity endorsements by the likes of Cameron Diaz and Leo Di Caprio. American registrations for Hybrids rose over 25 percent last year, apparently, to nearly 44,000. That number may seem impressive on its own (even then, not really), but when compared to just one car company’s - Toyota’s - 675,809 American light-truck sales (SUVs, vans and pickups) last year, the number of Hybrids on the road in the U.S today is, in fact, insignificant.

Decades of environmental activism, warnings from international conservation groups, and even oil companies like Shell and Chevron, that the current levels of fuel consumption are ruining the environment and exhausting a non-renewable natural resource, haven’t curbed our consumption of oil. Maybe the only thing that will is astronomical gas prices. If this is the case, I say hitch up the price a few more dollars, OPEC!

There are viable alternatives to driving huge cars back and forth across the vast smoggy expanses of America. Bicycles (two-wheeled, non-fuel-consuming and human-powered machines) are one great way to traverse short distances and jettison those two pounds you’ve been trying to lose since the 90’s. Walking is another.

If exercise isn’t your thing, other alternatives such as trains (NJTransit is offering FREE trips to and from New York all this week), busses and car-pooling in regular or hybrid cars do exist.

Gas prices may descend eventually, but in the meanwhile, I suggest taking this opportunity to leave the car in the garage and explore the world of the bipedal!

TRIPping over patent laws

Published March 22, 2005

The Daily Targum

I was racking my brain for something to write about for this week’s column the other day – believe it or not, scrambling your way up to earning a soapbox isn’t half the struggle, it’s finding something significant to say when you’re on it – when a friend of mine suggested I read an article on BBC’s online front-page.

This may be giving away far too much of my research method and robbing me of my seemingly thorough info gathering skills, but I get most of my international news from the British Broadcasting Corporation, as well as most of the seeds of interest from whence I launch into a foray of the web for more, more, more. And this was one story that unfolded from Africa to India and then across the rest of the world.

The article was about hundreds of people living with HIV or Aids in Kenya who had gathered to demonstrate at the Indian High Commission in Nairobi. The reason for the protests, also planned in Uganda and Tanzania according to the BBC, was that India’s parliament will be reviewing the Indian Patent Act of 1970 over the next few weeks and could, quite probably, begin enforcing patent laws that will end the production of generic Aids medications used to treat millions across India, Africa and other developing countries that cannot afford the branded drugs produced by large pharmaceutical companies.

The difference between generic anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs and brand-named drugs is nothing to sneeze at. While the article mentions that one African patient pays $20 a month for treatment with generic forms of drugs that would otherwise cost $395.

In Nigeria, the government has resorted to subsidizing the generic drugs themselves, which, despite being more than ten times cheaper than brand-named drugs, are still not affordable to many of the four million Nigerians estimated to be HIV-positive today. Under the program, the Indian-produced generic ARVs are given to around 14,000 Nigerians for $7 per patient per month, and that number was supposed to rise to 100,000 this year.

This is unlikely if India changes its patent laws to prohibit the generic production of patented drugs. Under current law, Indian drug companies have been able to replicate products patented in other countries as long as the process of production is not entirely the same. In other words, India recognizes patents on the process of drug-making, but not on the final product.

Working with loopholes is a forte with Indian businesses, which have learnt to thrive despite continuous entanglement in the one thing the country is never short of- red tape.

Indian pharmaceutical companies such as Cipla, Ranbaxy and Hetero have capitalized on this patent loophole in a way that would make any crafty businessman proud, effectively plagiarizing drugs that have taken years and millions of dollars’ worth of research and development by multinational pharmaceutical companies, and mass producing them for a fraction of the price, therefore cornering a market that had been monopolized by a few huge companies till the recent past.

The difference between this craftiness and any other is that thousands of lives are made better because these drugs are finally being offered at an affordable price for Aids victims and their countries, which have a responsibility to try to curb the epidemic and support those already infected as much as they can.

Such is the usefulness of these generic ARVs that the World Health Organization (WHO) has listed Cipla, amongst other low-cost generic drug producers, as a safe provider of antiretroviral drugs for United Nations purchase. William Haddad, from Cipla, called this a breakthrough, saying it was the first time the World Health Organization, "has
had the nerve to challenge the multinationals by listing generic versions of drugs that are still on patent."

India itself, the second most populous country in the world after China, has one of the highest numbers of HIV/Aids cases – over five million people. There is no doubt the Indian government would prefer home-made generic ARVs to patented imported ones. So why the move to end this industry, which also brings significant amounts of profit into India’s coffers?

India may not be the land of the free or the home of the melting pot of two-garage suburban houses with four-wheel-drive SUVs in the driveway and multi-colored people on the inside, but it has had one pride in common with the United States – its economic isolationism. Alas, both great loners have fallen into the melee of the global market. India now has to answer to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on its patent laws, and its grace period with the WTO came to an end this year.

The Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS), drawn up by the WTO between 1986 and 1994 to ensure intellectual property rights are respected in international trade came into effect in 1995, but different countries have had different periods after which they must comply with the law.

India’s compliance must come at the beginning of this year, or it will face severe economic penalties from the WTO. The drug companies themselves, Cipla, Ranbaxy and Hetero, amongst other generic producers, have their own incentives for withdrawing their generic drugs from the market, the fear of litigation outweighing the hefty profit margins they’ve made from generic medicines – about a sixth of the $48 billion global market for these generic drugs.

What we’re left with now is a situation where Aids victims in Kenya and Nigeria may begin to die at a rate higher than the current 500-700 a day from Aids-related diseases so that pharmaceutical multinationals don’t feel cheated out of profits.

It seems that economics overrides social welfare once again– the precedence of the WTO over the WHO when it comes to condoning or even encouraging the production of low-cost generic drugs to treat Aids patients being just one disturbing example.

The provision of the basic healthcare needed for Aids patients to survive is dependent on privatized pharmaceutical companies that want to make up in profit what they spent on research and development. Governments, trying to provide their citizens with healthcare also have their arms twisted by a supranational organization that is more interested in protecting patent laws than providing reasonable healthcare when possible. This is, of course, the best case scenario where governments do actually take an active interest in the health of their citizens.

Drugs so vital to human survival should not be subject to the laws of the market. If research and development costs are what keep the multinational drug companies from providing their latest drugs at prices that do not require them to be ripped off by the developing world in order for them to be affordable to the developing world, then there must be another solution – perhaps government funding of such research or more lax laws when ARVs and other such vital drugs are involved.

The Ineffables

Published April 05 2005
The Daily Targum


For those of us who are not out of the loop enough to be truly in the know, there's a new revolution in town - the asexual revolution.

Now I know you're going to sigh at the prospect of another overthrowing of the status quo on some minor front that affects a miniscule proportion of the population, but this one is about sex, so that sigh had better be a short one.

The latest sexual genre to come out of the closet, asexuals are people who just aren't interested in sex, or to be more specific, do not experience sexual attraction, be it with men, women or other fauna or flora.

The phenomenon of asexuality has been associated with sexual aversion disorder and hypoactive sexual desire disorder, but to associate it with sexual disorder is to classify it as a handicap or a lacking that must be rectified.

Homosexuality has only recently managed to crawl out of that abyss in the minds of the general public, with gay men and women finally beginning, in modern societies, to be able to live openly homosexual lives without being seen as dysfunctional and wrong in the head (not to mention elsewhere).

Asexuality is similarly viewed in general as a dysfunction and an abnormality by society, when it is acknowledged at all. But because asexuals are not sexually deviant in a positive sense, meaning they aren't having too much of the wrong kind of sex, their situation of having either little or no interest in sex is often ignored or attributed to something else, like prudishness or depression.

Asexuality, according to Canadian researcher Dr. Anthony Bogaert, is not simply a secondary symptom but completes the gamut of sexual possibilities from highly heterosexual to bisexual, homosexual and, finally, not very sexual at all.

It was his research on 18,000 Britons in 1994 that sparked this "outing" of asexuals that has begun across the world from Australia to Belgium to the United States.

Bogaert's research, which was presented in a paper in the Journal of Sexual Research in August last year, showed that at least 1 percent of the population surveyed responded that they had never experienced sexual attraction to anyone.

His research also showed that some factors that influenced asexuality in people were gender, socio-economic status, religion and health. More women, for example, responded they were asexual than did men.

Social factors cannot, however, explain away asexuality as a human disorder that is biologically not viable. According to the New Scientist, several studies were conducted with sheep in the early 1990s to determine if other animals experience differences in sexual orientation. Out of the 10 percent of rams found to be completely uninterested in mating with ewes, between 5 and 7 percent showed homosexual tendencies, and, yes, 2 to 3 percent just weren't interested.

While asexuality, like homosexuality, appears in mammals of various species, neither phenomenon is thought to be particularly biologically useful to the survival of species, but both exist anyway and cannot be ignored.

In my opinion, a little asexuality is just what this world needs. This is a world where one has to scratch one's head to come up with a non-cliché about the overabundance of sexuality. I refer, in this case, to the industrialized West because the industrialized East and the nonindustrialized East are another ball game, pardon the pun. Here, sex sells - see every prime-time TV show on the planet. Now that the ruffled feathers from the gay revolution of the '70s have settled, even homosexual sex sells (see "Queer as Folk," "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," "Queer Eye for the Straight Girl," "The L Word"). We are so surrounded by an activity that really should only take up a minor part of our lives that it begins to stifle and neuroticize even the most accommodating of us. Given this overstimulation, a little dose of asexuality to clear the sinuses actually sounds quite blissful.

Clearly what is to be done is to not do the deed - or rather, to not think about it because asexuals, who can still have sexual lives, tend to be obsessed with sex to a much lesser degree than the average Joe.

Asexual awareness has increased over the last year, since an article on Bogaert's paper appeared in the New Scientist, and a slew of articles have been written on it - finally another new twist to the haggard old "sex story"!

I stumbled upon the phenomenon not through a clumsy third-hand article on it (like mine) but through the Asexual Visibility and Education Network at www.aven.org. The site, set up by a young American asexual but frequented by people from all over the world, offers a great forum in which they can share their experiences and nonexperiences. The network works to help asexual people become more comfortable and aware with their sexuality, as well as to gain recognition and acceptance of asexuality as a valid form of sexuality from the general public. It also boasts a pithy, witty asexual merchandise page - from which I stole the title of this particular column - not to mention plenty of links to other asexual Web sites and online communities, my favorite link being "Haven for the Human Amoeba."

But alas, from what I've read, true asexuals - people who aren't just going through a disgusted-with-sex phase in their lives because of a nasty experience or because they just can't get any at the moment - are still a very small minority of the population.

This can make it hard to live a completely content life when society as it exists today still demands, to a certain extent, a homogeneity of sexuality - namely, active heterosexuality.

According to some people in today's society, anyone who doesn't fit that model either has something wrong with them and has to be fixed or has to be avoided because it might be contagious.

The Nuclear pissing contest

Published February 15, 2005
The Daily Targum

Condoleezza Rice, the new Secretary Of State, has been busy shuttling around Europe and the Middle East to take some of the sharpness out of relations between the United States and the rest of the world that have bittered considerably since the Bush Administration took over the show.

Despite this renewed attempt at diplomacy, while the United Nations is attempting to pull together some self-respect and exercise a little diplomatic influence over badly-behaved nuclear wannabes like Iran and North Korea, talks seem slow to progress and the United States is getting fidgety.

The US, like a father who forfeits a relationship with his children because he must work and ‘bring home the bacon,’ leaves the mundane nurturing of the brats to his wife, the UN. She does what she can, given the little money he brings in, but he’s been bringing in less and less than he promised, and her hands are usually tied when it comes to disciplining them because he wants the final say, but he’s never home to give it. The munchkins grow up and become petulant, and one day father US comes home to find mother UN yanking her hair out with frustration – threats of sanctions just don’t do the trick. He whips off his leather belt and lets the twerps have it.

Simplistic, perhaps, but the situation is far too reminiscent of the traditional male-dominated family unit to pass up the metaphor.

It all began when, back in the good old days of the Cold War, there were two super-powers – the United States and Russia. It was a happy and balanced time, because the peoples and nations dominated and exploited by one power at least lived with a healthy hatred for another power – a good outlet for the frustration of the oppressed.

What came with this Cold War, which lasted between World War II and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, was the proliferation of nuclear warheads in the U.S. and Russia – an arms race that lasted nearly 50 years. This in turn was accompanied by a paranoia of total annihilation should the little red-faced dictator on the other side decide to press the little red button.

The United States was the first to acquire nuclear capability, following research conducted by several American scientists, including Albert Einstein, between 1939 and 1945 – “the Manhattan Project.” Russia followed, developing capabilities in 1949, then the UK in 1952, France in 1960 and China in 1964.

Fast-forward to the present day, and we now live in a world where Russia is thought to possess 8,500 warheads, with another 11,000 in stockpiles. The U.S is believed to have 7,000 operational warheads with 3,000 in reserve, and China, France and the UK follow with 420, 350 and 200 respectively.

Considering it took only one uranium bomb, “Little Boy,” to kill 66,000 people and injure 69,000 others at Hiroshima in an instant, the thought of thousands of these weapons of mass destruction sitting around in stockpiles around the world is less than comforting.

Matters get even more unnerving when you realize that the above-listed nuclear countries are only those who have declared their capabilities and have signed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) along with 182 other countries. These countries submit their nuclear activities to the inspections of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Security Council, if necessary. Their conformance to the rules becomes increasingly irrelevant, however, when other states do not.

India, Israel and Pakistan are the only three nations known to possess nuclear weapons who have not signed the treaty. While India and Pakistan have declared their possession of nuclear weapons and have conducted very controversial nuclear tests in machismo displays over their border squabbles, Israel has declined to even admit it possesses weapons but is believed to have between 75 and 200.

Iran, which is a signatory of the NPT, hid its nuclear enrichment program for years, violating the stipulations of the treaty. It has agreed to suspend nuclear enrichment activities for the moment, while talks are being conducted with Britain, France and Germany.

But as a senior Iranian cleric and former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said last week in response to the EU talks, ``It is not acceptable that developed countries generate 70 or 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear energy and tell Iran, a great and powerful nation, that it cannot have nuclear electricity.”

France does, in fact, produce close to 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power stations, and other industrial countries produce less, but do use the technology for electricity generation.

This brings up an important point. The U.S and U.N. are not dealing with children. They are dealing with nations and cultures that have extremely strong and proud histories, and a set of rationalities and values that, while they may not sit nicely with Western rationality, cannot be dismissed as irrational, whimsical and fanatic.

What right, after all, do industrialized countries have to their advanced nuclear energy programs and nuclear warheads, if they deny developing countries the same right?

Surely America’s latest rampage for freedom and democracy doesn’t preclude the right to self-protection from developing and politically unstable countries, when it has the second largest stockpile of nuclear warheads itself?

It is this very instability and insecurity that leads a nation to develop nuclear weapons in the first place. This was what led to the nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia, and it is the same thing that is creating nuclear arms races between India and Pakistan, and Israel and its neighbors.

It is also what led the United States, the only country to ever use nuclear weapons against another nation, to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Saying that politically unstable nations should not have access to nuclear weaponry is absolutely correct. To have this ideal implemented, nuclear arms should not be accessible to anybody. No one can possibly use the amount of nuclear warheads available in actual war – the entire world would be annihilated. It is more about display of power than actual security measures.

But I do not believe there is a developed nation today that is willing to give up all of its nuclear capabilities in the name of peace and security.

The United States, seemingly the biggest advocate for eradicating nuclear development in countries like Iran and Korea, must lead the process by eliminating its own stockpile.

The possession of nuclear arms, whether by developing nations or developed, is the surest recipe for disaster.

Environmentally Friendly Starbucks

By Sue Mecklenburg
Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility, Starbucks
Published February 10th 2005, The Daily Targum

Ruha Devanesan's column, "Big Bucks," (The Daily Targum, Feb. 1) misrepresents Starbucks Coffee's corporate social responsibility efforts. Perhaps Devanesan did not realize that Fair Trade Certified, certified organic and conservation (shade-grown) coffees, represent only a fraction of the coffees that Starbucks purchases in a socially responsible manner. We seek to apply the same principles to all purchases - paying premium prices for the highest quality coffee that result in a profit for farmers and workers and care for the social and environmental needs of the area.

In 2004, Starbucks purchased 12.6 million pounds of certified and conservation coffee, which is one component of Starbucks' larger integrated approach to building mutually beneficial relationships with coffee farmers and their communities. As an important part of this approach, Starbucks purchased 4.8 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee in 2004, more than double the previous year. And our commitment for 2005 is to double our purchases again, to 10 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee. These purchases will benefit tens of thousands of farmers in the Fair Trade system, which we believe will make Starbucks the largest purchaser of Fair Trade coffee in North America. That being said, it is important to note that the Fair Trade system includes only 3 percent of the world's coffee. Because of our size, Starbucks buys coffee from other small, medium and large-scale farmers who are not part of the Fair Trade system.

Starbucks also pays premium prices, provides coffee farmers access to affordable credit, invests in social projects in coffee communities and provides technical assistance and agricultural expertise through the Starbucks Farmer Support Center in Costa Rica.

In addition, Starbucks has developed a set of socially responsible buying practices in collaboration with Conservation International called Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices. These guidelines are designed to protect the environment, help ensure fair prices, wages and workers' rights and promote social development in coffee communities. By 2007, Starbucks expects to purchase majority of our coffee under CAFE Practices.

There's no question that more work needs to be done to bring stability and equity to coffee farmers. But Starbucks takes great pride in being a responsible leader in those efforts.

Those who would like more information on Starbucks efforts in this and related areas can review our 2004 Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report at http://www.starbucks.com/aboutus/csrannualreport.asp.

Sue Mecklenburg is the Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility for Starbucks Coffee Company.

Big Bucks

Published February 01 2005

The Daily Targum

A new year begins and resolutions to try to make the world a better place are, naturally, at the top of everyone’s list.

The question arises – what can I do about the refugees in Sudan, the victims of the Tsunamis or the perennial poverty of Ethiopia? They’re too big, they require a lifetime of dedication on my part to see even a little improvement, and ultimately, I don’t think I have what it takes to do that.

And so the brief moment of altruistic global conscientiousness passes and we pick readily obtainable goals like losing those ten pounds of Christmas dinner that have embraced our thighs with such fervent holiday cheer.

What so many post-New Years’ dieters don't realize is that it doesn't take a lifetime of dedication to make a difference. Fair trade has slipped off the agenda in general since 2002 when aid agencies launched a massive lobby preceding the G8 summit in Canada and the EU's annual summit in Seville that year. But it seems a very viable step we, as consumers, can now take towards changing the unfair economic exploitation we see only glimpses of in the world today through our news media. We are, after all, a key part of the economic exchanges between nations and our advocacy for fairer prices for producers and smaller profit margins for middlemen, like the big juggernaut enterprises of the coffee industry, are bound to make a difference if we scream loud enough - in this case with our consumer choices, not our lungs.

Oxfam International’s “Make Trade Fair” campaign in 2002 aimed to challenge governments, international institutions and companies to change the rules governing international trade, and set free the potential of trade to reduce poverty. But Fair Trade has come to be the guise under which multinationals like Starbucks Coffee continue to exploit the developing world, while now making even more of a profit as they cater to the emerging niche of the population that actually does want to see more organic, environmentally friendly, and economically sustainable coffee for their buck.

Starbucks coffee proclaims proudly on its glossy website: coffee "is an important source of income for an estimated 25 million people living in more than 70 tropical coffee-producing countries" and, "in some cases, accounts for more than 80% of their foreign exchange earnings."

Ah the aroma of a sweet deal! We continue to indulge ourselves in a full-bodied, dark, sexy cup of liquid love, and the Nicaraguans down there in the tropics have rice on the table because of our graceful condescension through Starbucks, the middle-martyr, who “paid the farmers a fair price,” made sure “that the coffee was grown in an ecologically sound manner” and “invested something meaningful in the farming communities where our coffees are produced.”

And it's true - Starbucks has been taking more of a patronal interest in its coffee farmers, be they Nicaraguan, Ethiopian or Javanese. Starbucks, like Nike and the other mega corporate franchises that have found it impossible to continue exploiting every resource possible in order to make the bigger buck - regardless of whether these resources constituted under-aged sweat-shop laborers in Thailand or over-worked Mexican bean pickers sweating over Arabica leaves - has had to clean up its act for the sake of consumer opinion, if not out of the goodness of its heart. Any publicity is good publicity in politics, but in business, negative publicity drives down sales and generally makes bad business. The huge protests of activists and Non-Governmental Organizations such as Greenpeace, Oxfam and Amnesty International over the years have made a dent in corporate sales and forced them to change their images.

“In April 2000,” according to the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), “Starbucks became a leader among major coffee companies when it announced it would begin to offer Fair Trade coffee in thousands of stores nationwide.” It continues to lead the coffee industry as one of the largest purchasers of Fair Trade coffee, but dig a little beneath the surface and it seems that image is all that these companies aim to change.

Going legitimately ‘fair’ means losing very significant amounts of profit, and the temptation to ‘greenwash,’ or jump on the organic and social responsibility bandwagon without giving up much is strong. Out of the more than 100 million pounds of coffee that Starbucks buys each year, only 2.8 million pounds of Certified Organic coffee, 2.1 million pounds of Fair Trade certified coffee, and 1.8 million pounds of Conservation (shade-grown) coffee were bought in 2003, according to Starbucks’ latest figures. That amounts to, at most, 2.1 percent of their coffee being Fair Trade, and 6.7 of their total coffee purchases being socially responsible at some level. For a company that boldly boasts a natural and back-to-the-source image, these numbers are not representative of its image at all.

Starbucks may have been the world leader in fair trade coffee once – the “big four” coffee companies, Sara Lee, Kraft, Nestle and Proctor and Gamble having made even less of an effort to adopt Fair Trade policies with their products – but several major coffee retailers are now making significant headway in the struggle to pay fairer prices to farmers of coffee – $1.26/lb for Fair Trade coffee and $1.41/lb for organic Fair Trade coffee (which must be grown under pesticide-free and environmentally sustainable conditions) – and make enough profit to survive and grow as businesses.

Ahold USA, for example, a subsidiary of the corporation that owns Giant Food and Stop & Shop, is introducing five Fair Trade selections of coffee in 1,200 American supermarkets. Proctor and Gamble has finally joined the Fair Trade market, and 42 out of 100 of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters’ coffees are Fair Trade, while Starbucks has only one out of nearly 50 varieties, according to the Organic Consumers Association. More impressive, Thanksgiving coffee, which earns 1000 times less in revenues than Starbucks, sells only ten times less Fair Trade coffee.

The Fair Trade seed has been sown in coffee retail, and Starbucks has been reaping the benefits of its Fair Trade and Organic image for long enough. It is time it made more of an effort to turn a green façade into tangible results. Whether it be by avoiding Starbucks for more Fair Trade- friendly brands, or demanding that the company introduce weekly Fair Trade coffees of the day instead of just once a month, the effort on your part is a small one. Here, finally, is one thing you can do.

The Lasting Impact of Disasters

Published January 18th 2005
The Daily Targum

Already, news of the tsunamis that hit twelve countries in Asia and Africa on December 26 last year is taking a backseat to more recent and therefore salient reports.

I remember watching a woman in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, as she wept in front of a BBC camera and told of how she held onto her three children with one arm, and floating debris with the other, trying to keep afloat as the water swept through her village. Trying to get a better hold against the force of the water, she let go of her grip on her children for a brief moment and all three, ranging from about 18 months to five years were taken from her. She cried, no mother should have to go through this.

As countless stories of the thousands who have lost their lives or lost those close to them were published in newspapers and aired on our television screens across the world, even the hardest cynic had to concede that the sensationalism of the news media, hardly doing justice in this case to the real tragedy and loss that the victims of the tsunamis, still stirred up an impressive amount of sympathy and desire to help in the surrounding countries of Asia, as well as the Western world.

Josef Stalin, the Russian expert on the issue of meaningless death once said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic,” and I had come to much the same shameful conviction over the past few years as I watched disaster after disaster plague the third world and recede quickly out of the attention of a global attention afflicted with too much information and not enough recourse to alleviate the problems we’re faced with. Hundreds died and millions were displaced in Bangladesh and Haiti from floods last year alone.

This catastrophe, however, has been such a slap in the face to the entire world that it could not go overlooked. The giant ripples caused by the 9.5 Richter earthquake off the West coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, have not only taken what now approximates more than 158 thousand native lives in the countries struck by the Tsunami waves, but the lives of hundreds of tourists from Britain, Sweden and other Western nations. Estimates that around 40 percent of the dead in Sri Lanka were children, and thousands more children were left orphaned have probably elevated sympathy for the almost incomprehensible scope of the tragedy. What leaves Stalin wrong in this case is the way the media turned statistics into stories and images of the death and struggle faced by Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and others struck by the Tsunamis. Although not every story can be told, and those that are told cannot make us feel what people at the scene must feel, they make human something that facts and figures cannot.

As news broke of the disaster in Britain on Boxing Day and the following days, the British government, with its initial pledge of a meager amount of 1 million pounds (if I remember correctly) was put to shame by the amount raised by the public, which came to 33 million pounds by New Year’s Eve. Oxfam bookstores and thrift stores posted large notices in their windows asking for donations, pubs encouraged the donation of the price of one drink to funds for aid, and money poured in to various other non-governmental organizations from the British public. As of today, January 14, the British public has managed to pledge an estimated 200 million pounds, according to the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella charity group. I use Britain as an example because I was there, spending Christmas and New Year’s with my family, but other nations such as China, Japan, Western European countries such as Sweden, and the United States had their own share of unprecedented public mobilization in the face of the calamity.

National governments have also donated considerable amounts of money and aid to the cause, U.S military aircraft helping in the few days after the disaster to shuttle the collecting aid from Medan to Aceh in Indonesia, and Britain sending plane-loads of makeshift tents and tarpaulin as well as emergency food supplies to Sri Lanka’s affected areas. The United Nations has taken charge of the international aid effort, and could finally come into its own as a supranational governmental body capable of organizing efforts of such a large scope and scale.

According to the New York Times, for example, President Bush ordered that American aid to the disaster areas be increased from the initial $35 million to ten times that amount ($350 million). This outpouring of generosity came as a response to a senior United Nations official’s charge that long-term Western aid efforts had been “stingy.”

He also took the opportunity of a weekly radio address from his Texas ranch, where he was spending the week to say “Together, we are leading an international coalition to help with immediate humanitarian relief, rehabilitation and long-term construction efforts… India, Japan and Australia have already pledged to help us coordinate these relief efforts,” continuing that he was confident many more nations will join this core group in short order.

In fact, taking sheer numbers, Japan pledged far more than the United States, promising $500 million to the recovery effort. The initial figures pledged by countries as the scale of the disaster emerged also showed Britain, China and France as the largest donors, pledging $96 million, $60m and $56m respectively behind the World bank, which pledged $250m. The U.S, sixth on the United Nations list of donors, can hardly be said to be ‘leading’ the aid effort. Poorer countries, such as Nepal, Latin American countries, and East Timor, which pledged $50,000 despite being one of the poorest nations in the world, have mounted a truer display of humanity through their donations, said Jan Egeland, the UN's humanitarian relief coordinator.

But enough of that. Whatever national interests might come into the international aid effort, the result takes precedence over the motives behind it. Talk of the political gain America might gain by establishing a friendly foothold in Asia through aid efforts is making its rounds. The anti-American sentiment in Indonesia and India could be somewhat alleviated through the gratitude these nations may feel for the help offered by Big Brother. Japan’s huge aid pledge is no doubt also politically and economically motivated on some level.

What we must ask ourselves and hold our governments to, is how much of this pledged aid will eventually make its way to its destinations once the heat of the moment has died down and a new disaster takes the limelight.

According to Oxfam International, donor governments’ short attention spans are a notorious problem. The Flash Appeal in response to Iran’s earthquake a year ago was only 54 percent funded, and the Flash Appeal during the series of disasters that struck Haiti from March to September in 2004 was only 36 percent funded.

Afghanistan’s 2002 appeal was 67 percent funded, they said, immediately after the Taliban was overthrown. Two years later and the figures were even more disgraceful, with its Drought Appeal for 2004 only 36 percent funded.

So far, $717 million of the $3.4 billion formally pledged by donor countries has been secured as a concrete commitment of aid money over the next six months, according to the Mr. Egeland. That aid is 73 percent of the $977 million that UN General Secretary, Kofi Annan has requested – an impressive response given the previous response figures.

What is more important than the immediate donations flowing in from around the world – from people truly struck by the tragedy who genuinely want to help to governments that have ultimately constituted the bulk of the aid efforts – is that this concern for the people who have lost everything in this natural disaster continue over the months and years it will take to reconstruct their lives.

Money seems the most effective and easiest way to help at this stage, but traveling to Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the African countries affected in the future to volunteer whatever help we can offer should be something at least seriously considered by those of us who are able.

The media cannot, unfortunately, be counted on to keep up the scale of coverage of the Tsunami story. It will be replaced just as Iraq’s position in the news was supplanted by reports of this latest natural disaster, one of the worst in modern history. It is our duty to remember and to continue to search out information on the reconstruction efforts and what can be done long after the situation disappears from front page headlines. This, more than the immediate pouring out of sympathy and pocket change, will be the true test of our humanity and our empathy for the mothers who have watched their children swept away to their death, and the men, women and children who have been stripped of their homes and families by this senseless cataclysm.

To find out how you can continue to help, visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4131881.stm for a list of NGOs involved in the relief effort.