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.