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***Uniqueness***
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No Conflict
After months of political turbulence, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has regained
relative stability and swept aside the immediate risk of chaos or even a coup, observers say. Next
year’s presidential elections, with all their attendant problems and numerous stakes, are now the next greatest challenge facing
Africa’s premier oil exporter, they said. “I would rule out the possibility of a coup now... the
country is now a bit stable,”
said Bayo Okunade, political scientist at Nigeria’s premier University of Ibadan. “We cannot compare where
we are now with where we were three months ago. That was a very dark period,” he said. Analysts
said that Nigeria, with a history of successive military coups d’etat up till 1999, was spared another one after President Umaru
After two
Yar’Adua, suffering from an acute heart ailment, was hospitalised late last year for more than 90 days in Saudi Arabia.
and a half months of political vacuum, the parliament on February 9 voted Yar’Adua’s deputy, Goodluck
Jonathan, into office as acting president, a post that was confirmed when Yar’Adua returned to Nigeria on February
24. Yar’Adua has neither been seen in public since November nor is his state of health known. Jonathan, who has assumed power
since February, has now appointed his own advisers and ministers and was this week guest of US President Barack Obama in
Washington, in his maiden foreign visit. The probability of a coup “has increased lately,” according to an expert on Nigeria at the
French Research Institute for Development, Marc-Antoine Perouse de Montclos. And even though the risk has “diminished” in recent
weeks, “it can not be ruled out” he said. Ishola Williams, a retired army major general, disagreed. “The
army is one of the
most ethnically balanced institutions. Every single ethnic group is in the military. So, to have a
consensus to make a coup d’etat, the situation would need to be very bad. “We haven’t got to
such a situation now,” he told AFP. “The military wouldn’t attempt anything right now,” said
Williams, former head of Transparency International in Nigeria. “There is some political stability
now... The test will come as we move towards the elections,” he added. Jonathan should demonstrate his capacity to put in place
the long-awaited electoral reforms ahead of the 2011 presidential poll and tackle Nigeria’s national cankerworm, corruption, Williams
said. Jonathan’s ability to consolidate a fragile peace in the oil-rich southern Niger Delta, where Yar’Adua had offered an amnesty to
militants, would also be critical. Violence resurged recently in the key region just as the country was wracked by sectarian clashes
which claimed hundreds of lives in the central part of the west African nation. Under an unwritten rule adopted by the Nigeria’s main
political party on power rotation between the mainly Muslim north and Christian-dominated south, the next elected president in 2011
should be a northerner.
CSM 4. (A continent at peace: five African hot spots cool down”, January 2, http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0102/p07s01-woaf.html)
As the new year begins, Africa - so often besieged by wars - is seeing a period of growing peace. For the first time
in five years, no major wars are roiling the continent, even if low-level conflicts still smolder. A deal to end Sudan's
civil war - Africa's longest - could be struck this month. And peace processes are pushing ahead in Liberia,
Burundi, Ivory Coast, and Congo. Perhaps it's just a lull between storms. Yet observers see fundamental
shifts that may create an era of relative calm for Africa's 800 million people. The biggest
new force is Africans themselves. Led by South Africa, there's growing desire to arm-twist warriors into laying down their weapons.
Also, outside powers, including the United States, are more engaged. They may be motivated by antiterror fears, need for oil, or guilt
for inaction during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, but they're increasingly supporting Africa's peaceful impulses. "The
continent as a
whole has asserted a good bit more activism about putting conflicts to rest - and has turned
down the flames of its active wars," says Ross Herbert, Africa Research Fellow at the South
African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg.
Africa’s conflicts are being solved and the economy is on the upswing
Xinhua 5. (“Yearender”, People’s Daily Online, December 22, http://english.people.com.cn/200512/22/eng20051222_230080.html)
Long-time hotspots in Africa's war- torn regions cooled down considerably in 2005, and political
stability in volatile places as Liberia has helped to bring the impoverished continent back to
economic growth, restoring hope in its people. Optimists might praise Africans for their own efforts to resolve their own
problems, as witnessed in the crisis of Togo, while insecurity in Somalia and stalemate in Sudan's Darfur nevertheless evidence the
Albeit uncertainties in Africa's security map, the continent has
lurking phantom of conflicts and feuds.
started to reflect on ways to achieve swifter economic turnaround, and evidences are that a
better year in 2006 is already around the corner. FEWER CONFLICTS The first positive sign emerged in January, as
the Sudanese government and southern rebel leader signed a comprehensive peace agreement,
concluding an eight-year process to stop a civil war in the south, which has cost more than 2 million lives since 1983. After establishing
a transitional federal government in Nairobi in last October, the lawless Horn of Africa nation, Somalia, in June relocated the
administration to temporary base of Jowhar. Although factions inside the government still feud with each other and pirates
terrorize the seas off its coast, the relocation is still a significant step towards the end of a 14-year civil war
between various factions and clans. Most Burundians have the reason to believe their country is on the
path to peace after a series of polls culminated in Pierre Nkurunziza's election and inauguration in August, under a UN- backed
plan to end ethnic civil war that has killed 300,000 people since 1993. The only remaining rebels, the roughly 3,000-strong
Forces for National Liberation, have also expressed the willingness to talk peace with the new government of the tiny
central African nation. The west African nation Liberia also followed the steps of peace as Ellen Johnson-
Sirleaf was elected the first postwar president in November's elections, 14 years after the civil wars, which killed 200,000
people and left a once prosperous country in shatters.
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Yes Conflict
Africa’s goin to shit—fragility of Nigeria’s democracy and its leader’s absence, combined
with political tensions, are decreasing African stability
Punch 4/6 (4/6/10, " Nigeria's democracy still fragile, US insists ", http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art201004074355090)
The United States has again expressed concern over the political developments in Nigeria, saying
that democracy in the biggest black nation in the world is still “fragile or tenuous.” The US said
through its Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Ambassador Johnnie Carson, on Monday night that President Umaru
Yar’Adua’s illness and the controversy generated by his long absence from office had led to
tension in Nigeria. Carson, at the second annual Africa Focus at Harvard University, Boston, also named the Democratic
Republic of Congo and Sudan as other countries in Africa with fragile democracies. Reaffirming that “the US welcomes President
Yar’Adua’s recent return to Nigeria,” he said, “Nigeria continues to experience political tensions caused by the
prolonged illness of the President (Yar’Adua).” He added that the US remained concerned that “there may be some people
in Nigeria who are putting their personal ambitions above the health of the President and more
importantly ahead of the political stability of the country.” A US-based Nigerian news agency, Empowered
Newswire, quoted the Assistant Secretary of State as also saying that Washington was concerned with Nigeria’s political health
because of its (Nigeria) importance to the world. He said, “Nigeria is
simply too important to Africa and too
important to the U.S. and the international community for us not to be concerned and engaged.
“Widespread instability in Nigeria could have a tsunami-like ripple effect across West Africa and the
global community.” Carson disclosed that during his recent visit to Nigeria, he “was encouraged by the steps Nigeria’s elected officials
at the national and state level took to elevate Dr. Goodluck Jonathan to the position of Acting President.” He warned that even though
political progress had been made, “Nigeria stillfaces significant political challenges and uncertainty in the run-
up to the presidential and National Assembly elections in 2011.” The US, according to Carson believes “it is important that
Nigeria improve its electoral system; reinvigorate its economy; resolve the conflicts in the Niger
Delta and end communal violence and impunity in Plateau State.” He advised Nigeria’s leaders to “act
responsibly and reaffirm their commitment to good governance, stability and democracy by choosing constitutional rule.” Nigeria and
other African countries, Carson pointed out ”need civilian governments that deliver services to their people; independent judiciaries
that respect and enforce the rule of law; professional security forces that respect human rights; strong and effective legislative
institutions; a free and responsible press; and a dynamic civil society.” Carson also announced that the US would start new
programmes and initiatives, ”which work to implement our policies to move our partnership with Africa forward. “We are establishing
in-depth, high level dialogues with South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, and with the African Union,” he said. A US-Nigeria bi-national
commission agreement was signed on Tuesday afternoon by the Secretary of State, Mrs Hillary Clinton, and Secretary to the
Government of the Federation Alhaji Yayale Ahmed. The agreement is expected to open up to the Federal Government, “the wide
resources and reach of the American government and society.” Carson stated before the signing of the agreement that the US
through the commission ”can help provide some answers and solution to some of Nigeria‘s power generation deficiencies.” Another
top US official said Nigeria was the first African country to earn such an agreement with the Barack Obama presidency. The source
claimed that the Obama administration was trying to pep-up the Jonathan presidency partly, in the hope of promoting democracy in
Nigeria. Commenting on the US-Nigeria bi-national commission, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, Mr. Phillip
Crowley, said “it is a strategic dialogue designed to expand mutual cooperation across a range of shared interests, including good
governance, transparency, integrity, energy, investment, food security, agriculture, the Niger Delta, and regional security
cooperation.”
Underlying causes of war still fester in SSA – conflict could break out at any time
Xinhua 05. (“Yearender”, People’s Daily Online, December 22, http://english.people.com.cn/200512/22/eng20051222_230080.html)
But one grave worry remains. Even
in countries in peace, if the underlying causes of conflict are not
properly addressed, the specter of war is never too far away. Studies show that civil wars are more likely to
occur in countries with bad governance, stagnant economies and lots of valuable minerals, and
some argued, several wars that seem to have been extinguished are in fact only waiting to re-ignited.
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"There will be no sustainable peace in Africa as long as poverty, bad political leadership and the
many unviable states continue to exist," said Katumanga Musambayi, a political scientist based in Kenya.
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======Conflict/Instability Good======
Since the end of the Cold War, Africa has been embroiled in a plethora of intra- and interstate conflicts.
Most of these conflicts have a transnational character and generate consequences that have implications for regions beyond those in
which they occur. Among
the major causes of these conflicts are: the weak democratization process; deep-
seated environmental problems; competition for resources; breakdown in the rule of law; and
proliferation of private armies, militias, and the attendant problem of illicit trade in, and use of, illegal arms.
In addition, the nature and dynamics of conflicts are shaped by the interplay of features peculiar to each sub-region.
Westerners eager to promote democracy must be wary of African politicians who promise democratic reform without sincere
commitment to the process. Offering money to corrupt leaders in exchange for their taking small steps away from autocracy may in
fact be a way of pushing countries into anocracy. As such, world financial lenders and interventionists who wield leverage and
influence must take responsibility in considering the ramifications of African nations who adopt democracy in order to maintain elite
political privileges. The obvious reason for this, aside from the potential costs in human life should conflict arise from hastily
constructed democratic reforms, is the fact that Western donors, in the face of intrastate war would then be faced with channeling
funds and resources away from democratization efforts and toward conflict intervention based on issues of human security. This is a
problem, as Western nations may be increasingly wary of intervening in Africa hotspots after experiencing firsthand the unpredictable
and unforgiving nature of societal warfare in both Somalia and Rwanda. On a costbenefit basis, the West continues to be
somewhat reluctant to get to get involved in Africa’s dirty wars , evidenced by its political hesitation when
discussing ongoing sanguinary grassroots conflicts in Africa. Even as the world apologizes for bearing witness to the Rwandan genocide
without having intervened, the
United States, recently using the label ‘genocide’ in the context of the
Sudanese conflict (in September of 2004), has only proclaimed sanctions against Sudan, while dismissing any
suggestions at actual intervention (Giry, 2005). Part of the problem is that traditional military and
diplomatic approaches at separating combatants and enforcing ceasefires have yielded little in Africa. No
powerful nations want to get embroiled in conflicts they cannot win – especially those conflicts in which
the intervening nation has very little interest.
Nowhere was the scope and intensity of violence during the 1990s as great as in Africa. While the
general trend of armed conflict in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East fell during the 1989-99 period, the
1990s witnessed an increase in the number of conflicts on the African continent. During this period, 16
UN peacekeeping missions were sent to Africa. (Three countries-Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Angola-were visited by multiple missions
during this time.) Furthermore, this period saw internal and interstate violence in a total of 30 sub-Saharan states. In 1999 alone,
the continent was plagued by 16 armed conflicts, seven of which were wars with more than 1,000 battle-related
deaths (Journal of Peace Research, 37:5, 2000, p. 638). In 2000, the situation continued to deteriorate: renewed heavy fighting
between Eritrea and Ethiopia claimed tens of thousands of lives in the lead-up to a June ceasefire and ultimately the signing of a peace
accord in December; continued violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone, Burundi, Angola, Sudan, Uganda,
and Nigeria as well as the outbreak of new violence between Guinea and Liberia, in Zimbabwe, and in the Ivory Coast have brought
new hardship and bloodshed to the continent.
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Economic conditions are the root cause of African conflict—the aff doesn’t solve
Collier, 2 Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Director, Centre for the Study of African Economies at St Antony’s College and Anke
Hoeffler, research officer at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, February 2002, Journal of Conflict Resolution, p. 25.
In this study, we
have applied an econometric model of civil war to analyze the inci- dence of
conflict in Africa, the only region in which, according to SIPRI, conflict has been on a rising trend. We find that Africa largely
conforms to the pattern of conflict predicted by the global model. On average, over the period from 1965 to 1999, Africa had an
incidence of conflict similar to that in other developing regions. However, its structure of risk was very dif- ferent. Africa’s economic
characteristics generated an atypically high risk of conflict, but this was offset by its social characteristics, which generated an
atypically low risk. The model predicts correctly that non-African developing countries would have expe- rienced a declining trend of
conflict. The model accounts for this by their improved economic conditions. By contrast, the
model correctly predicts
the rising trend of Afri- can conflict observed by SIPRI. Again, this is fully accounted for by the
deterioration in Africa’s economic performance. The analysis suggests that the rising trend of Afri- can
conflict is not due to deep problems in its social structure, as suggested by Kaplan (2000), but rather is the
contingent effect of economic circumstances.
Since the violent conflicts in Africa reflect the chal- lenges of weak and failed states, the search for
security and development should be accompanied by attempts to enable the states to resuscitate and
revitalise their governance structures and operational machinery such as the legislature, executive,
judiciary and security forces. It is apparent that weak states are in themselves unable to create
conditions for stability, security, development and ultimately durable peace. Successful democratisa- tion and development
depends to a large extent on state capability and strength. In Africa, the problem of weak and failed states is a
reality, with Somalia and Sudan topping the list on the weak states scale. Weak states are not only unstable, they also struggle to
address the issues of poverty, unemployment, HIV/AIDS and environ- mental degradation, the major factors in development.
Subsequently, this process leads to a “legitimation crisis”, wherein citizens become discontented with the state. Discontented citizens
usually choose from an array of options, ways of expressing their disgruntlement. In most cases, the frustration has been manifested
through rebellion, riots, crime and coups.
The media repeatedly makes us keenly aware of the ongoing and lurking conflicts on the African
continent. Reality, unfortunately, also tells us that they are not about to go away any time soon. Most of
these African conflicts are very complex and internal in nature. In fact, some are actually so protracted
that official state structures have totally collapsed. These realities indeed create daunting challenges for potential
interveners. To obscure matters even further, most African conflicts encompass deliberate targeting of local civilians and, where
present, international peacekeepers and aid personnel – a tactic which unfortunately has become a significant, and often preferred,
weapon in the toolkit of many combatants. Darfur is a sad, but true, current case in point.
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A long–term strategy needs to be developed to address the root causes of conflict which involve
economic injustice, poor governance, and lack of accountability. This strategy should focus on strengthening
civil society activists who have contributed tremendously to peacemaking and democratisation efforts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, DRC,
Mali and Zambia. In short, there
is need for more policy coherence, more equitable allocation of
resources, and a more effective regional approach to conflict resolution efforts in Africa.
The affirmative does not solve the root causes of African conflict
Elbadawi and Sambanis, 2k Ibrahim Elbadawi and Nicholas Sambanis, World Bank economists, October 2000, Journal of
African Economies, p. 253
Four factors drive Africa’s propensity toward violent conflict. First, Africa is highly dependent on
natural resources exports, which may be looted by rebels to sustain their rebellion. Other regions are
also dependent on natural resources. However, since the relationship between natural resources and civil war-proneness is quadratic,
what is important is the dispersion rather than the mean of this variable (isxp). We find that the standard deviation of African
countries’ resource-dependence is 46% smaller than the standard deviation of non-African countries. Thus, more African countries are
closer to the peak of natural resource dependence, which maximizes the threat of war. More importantly, levels of per capita
income in Africa are much lower than in the other three developing regions. Median per capita GDP in
Africa accounts for less than one-half of that of Asia and less than one-eighth of the income level of Europe and North America. The
fact that young men in Africa are very poor and not educated substantially increases the risk of civil conflict. Globally, young males are
the best recruits for rebellion, and if they have little to lose they are more likely to enlist (on this finding see Collier and Hoeffler 2000).
Thirdly Africa’s pronounced failure to develop strong democratic institutions has compounded
other problems and significantly increased the risk of political violence in the continent (see the results for the P1p variable in
the appendix).
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Since the tragedy in Somalia, the trend has been for Western nations to refuse to send troops into
Africa's hot spots. Jordan recently underscored this point when it expressed frustration with the West's failure to commit
soldiers to the UNAMSIL mission as a reason for the withdrawal of its troops from Sierra Leone. America's aversion to peacekeeping in
Africa also reflects broader U.S. foreign policy on the continent. Africa occupies a marginal role in American
foreign policy in general (a point highlighted by conference participants).
The international community has of late shown lack of interest in intervening in conflicts within
sub-Saharan Africa in general and West Africa in particular as the Liberian, Sierra Leone and Burundi and Rwandan civil wars proved.
For instance the United Nation’s peacekeeping force in Africa which stood at about 40,000 in 1993 was just about 1600 as of June
19992. And during the Liberian conflicts, the then United Nation (UN) Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar
categorically stated that the UN would not intervene. The United States (U.S) which had about 2000 Marines
off the Liberian coast also refused to intervene and separate the warring factions.
Western powers consider African conflicts a second tier concern-- UN peacekeeping proves
de Coning, 6 Cedric de Coning, Research Fellow at ACCORD and an advisor to the Training for Peace (TfP) in Africa and the African Civil-
Military Coordination (CIMIC) programme, 2006, Conflict Trends, http://www.accord.org.za/ct/2006-3.htm,
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While Western foreign policy, security and media attention has been focused on Iraq, Afghanistan and
the Balkans over the last decade, Africa emerged as the major arena for United Nations (UN)
peacekeeping operations.1 Of the 18 peace operations currently managed by the UN, eight are in Africa, and six of these are
large complex peace operations. This explains why 75% of the approximately 88 000 military, police and civilian UN peacekeepers
currently deployed can be found in Africa. The emphasis on Africa is also reflected in the UN peacekeeping budget. Of the
approximately US$5 billion budgeted for 2005/2006, around 77% is budgeted for operations in Africa.2 Peacekeeping is also a
dominant theme for the African Union (AU). Over the last half decade, the AU has undertaken two major peacekeeping operations of
its own in Burundi and Sudan. These operations have involved 10 000 peacekeepers at a total cost of approxi- mately US$600
million.3 Africa is, of course, also a significant troop contributor to UN peace operations, with 34 African countries contributing 28%
of the UN’s uniformed peacekeepers. In comparison with the peacekeeping missions in Africa of the mid- to late 1990s, the new
trend towards large complex peace operations represents a significant shift in the political will of the
international community to invest in peace operations in Africa. This trend should not, however, be interpreted as
signifying a new interest in the UN or in Africa. Rather, the willingness to invest more than US$5
billion in UN peace operations was generated in, and will be sustained by, the post-9/11 belief that
failed states are ideal training, staging and breeding grounds for international terrorists.4 In this context, a
kind of informal peacekeeping apartheid has come about, whereby most European and
American peacekeeping and offensive forces are deployed in NATO or European Union (EU) operations in
Europe and the Middle-East, whilst most UN peace- keeping troops are contributed by the developing
world and deployed in Africa. Whilst this division of roles reflects the macro-pattern, it masks an interesting sub- trend
that has emerged over the last three years. Almost a decade after the debacles in Somalia and Rwanda resulted in the West
withholding its peacekeepers from Africa, there is now a new willingness to consider deploying European peacekeepers to Africa.
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Over the past half decade, the AU and regional economic communities (RECs) like the Economic Community of
West African States (ECOWAS), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and Southern African Development Community
have significantly increased their capacity to undertake and manage peace operations.
(SADC)
The AU, in particular, has played a leading role by deploying its first two peace operations , AMIB in
Burundi and AMIS in Darfur. One of the most significant developments in the African context is the informal division of roles that has
emerged around the sequencing of peace operations. The pattern that is taking shape is that the AU, or one of the
RECs, first deploys a stabilisation operation, followed by a UN complex peacekeeping operation
within approximately 90 to 120 days.
One of the most significant developments in the African peacekeeping context is the initiative to develop
an African Standby Force (ASF). It is significant because, for the first time, Africa now has a common
position and action plan for the development of its peacekeeping capacity. This means that the various
disparate donor initiatives to enhance Africa’s peacekeeping capacity can be positively channelled
to support one coherent effort.
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The responsibility to protect is limited in what it can accomplish. First and foremost is the inescapable fact that the
principle will not be applied uniformly. Inevitably, the decision to take action—political,
diplomatic, or otherwise—will reflect the realities of power and circumstance. This is especially true
where, having run out of options short of force, some form of military action appears warranted. Rather than lament the inevitable
unevenness of application,
the report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)
embeds it in a series of “precautionary criteria” for action, including, in the case of a military
response, the “reasonable prospect” that it will succeed. As the report says, “It will be the case
that some human beings simply cannot be rescued except at unacceptable cost—perhaps of a
larger regional conflagration, involving major military powers. In such cases, however painful
the reality, coercive military action is no longer justified.”19
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3. The impact is containable -- a relatively small army could easily stop a genocide
Feil 98 (Scott- graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1973 and received an MA in political science from Stanford University.
Preventing Genocide: How the Early Use of Force Might Have Succeeded in Rwanda. Published by Carnegie Corporation
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/rwanda/rwanda.htm)
Based on the presentations by the panel and other research, the author believes that a modern force of 5,000 troops,
drawn primarily from one country and sent to Rwanda sometime between April 7 and 21, 1994,
could have significantly altered the outcome of the conflict. Although the organized combatant factions in
Rwanda were fairly capable light infantry and such an operation would have entailed significant risk, the introduction of a
combat force large enough to seize, at one time, key objectives all over the country would have,
in the words of one senior officer, "thrown a wet blanket over an emerging fire." More specifically, forces
appropriately trained, equipped, and commanded, and introduced in a timely manner, could have
stemmed the violence in and around the capital, prevented its spread to the countryside, and
created conditions conducive to the cessation of the civil war between the RPF and RGF.7
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1. The warrant in their cards is that genocide is bad because lots of people die. That’s it.
They don’t have a single piece of evidence that compares genocide with extinction. Their
evidence that says we should act regardless of consequences doesn’t assume that those
consequences result in more people being killed.
2. Their moral tunnel vision is complicit with the evil they criticize
Issac 2 (Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life,
PhD from Yale (Jeffery C., Dissent Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
As a result, the most important political questions are simply not asked. It
is assumed that U.S. military intervention
is an act of "aggression," but no consideration is given to the aggression to which intervention is
a response. The status quo ante in Afghanistan is not, as peace activists would have it, peace,
but rather terrorist violence abetted by a regime--the Taliban--that rose to power through
brutality and repression. This requires us to ask a question that most "peace" activists would prefer not to ask: What
should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban
regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy and international
law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized ethic of global order.
But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied by any account of how
diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the problem at hand campus left
offers no such account. To do so would require it to contemplate tragic choices in which moral
goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not
a dirty word or an unfortunate feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish
anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it
about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say that power is
beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality . As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli,
Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding concern with moral goodness
undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it
suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the
achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with
morally compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence,
then it is hard to view them as serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their
supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not
simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the
standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In
categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices
with any effect; and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as
it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most
significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is
the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally
important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and to judge these effects in
pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It
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alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political
effectiveness.
3. Exclusion is a reason to vote neg – They advocate that the group they save is more
important than the rest of humanity – Since all lives are equal, you should treat them that
way by protecting the greatest number
Dworkin 77 (Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University (Ronald 1977, “Taking Rights Seriously” pg 274-5)
The liberal conception of equality sharply limits the extent to which ideal arguments of policy may be used to justify any constraint on
liberty. Such arguments cannot be used if the idea in question is itself controversial within the community. Constraints cannot be
defended, for example, directly on the ground that they contribute to a culturally sophisticated community, whether the community
wants the sophistication or not, because that argument would violate the canon of the liberal conception of equality that prohibits a
Utilitarian argument
government from relying on the claim that certain forms of life are inherently more valuable than others.
of policy, however, would seem secure from that objection. They do not suppose that any form
of life is inherently more valuable than any other, but instead base· their claim, that constraints on liberty are
necessary to advance some collective goal of the community, just on the fact that that goal happens to be
desired more widely or more deeply than any other. Utilitarian arguments of policy, therefore, seem not to oppose
but on the contrary to embody the fundamental right of equal concern and respect, because they
treat the wishes of each member of the community on a par with the wishes of any other, with
no bonus or discount reflecting the view that that member is more or less worthy of concern, or his
views more or less worthy of respect, than any other. This appearance of egalitarianism has, I think, been the principal source of the
great appeal that utilitarianism has had, as a general political philosophy, over the last century. In Chapter 9, however, I pointed out
that the egalitarian character of a utilitarian argument is often an illusion. I will not repeat, but only summarize, my argument here.
Utilitarian arguments fix on the fact that a particular constraint on liberty will make more people happier, or satisfy more of their
preferences, depending upon whether psychological or preference utilitarianism is in play. But people's overall preference for one
policy rather than another may be seen to include, on further analysis, both preference that are personal, because they state a
preference for the assignment of one set of goods or opportunities to him and preferences that are external, because they state a
preference for one assignment of goods or opportunities to others. But a utilitarian argument that assigns critical weight to the
external preferences of members of the community will not be egalitarian in the sense under consideration. It will not respect the right
of everyone to be treated with equal concern and respect.
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By 1990 the United States and other governments had created emergency stockpiles of oil as a buffer
against disruption. The invasion of Kuwait showed that the United States and other governments were willing to use their
stockpiles. A noncommercial measure, “Days of Net Petroleum Imports in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve,” is published in the Annual
Energy Review. It shows that the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) peaked at 115 days of supply in 1985 and has now declined to
63 days. Assuming that the SPR does not expand or contract, coverage will decline to 35 days in 2020 as consumption grows.
Combining noncommercial and commercial stocks provides a somewhat broader measure of
the ability of inventories to respond to supply disruptions. Since 1985, available commercial stocks in the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries have fluctuated between 25 and 30 days of supply.
Assuming that commercial pressures keep stockpiles from expanding, while consumption continues to grow, the supply would slip to
20 days in 2020.8 Besides stockpiles, surge capacity
or excess world production capacity is another source
of supply. Historically, excess capacity has responded primarily to prices, building up during
periods of high prices and declining during periods of low prices. A buildup occurs during a high-
price period such as the early 1980s, as consumers conserve and producers rush to find more oil
and cash in on high prices. If oil prices remain at their current moderate levels through 2020, excess capacity can be
expected to decline from 3.4 to 2.4 million barrels per day in 2013, before rising to 3.2 million barrels per day in 20209 (Figure 4).
be. As a share of the U.S. economy, oil accounts for only 3% of GDP, down from almost 9% in the late 1970s. More
wealth is being generated by industries that don't use much oil, like IT. For each dollar of GDP America
generates, it uses half as much oil as a generation ago. (For more, see The Web Page.) Even manufacturing appears untroubled.
Many companies hedge their energy risks through futures contracts. Few plants use oil for
power generation anymore, and those that do often have the ability to switch to another
source (typically gas) if prices soar. "Given that we got through the Asian crisis hardly breaking stride, I think $ 30 oil isn't really
a problem," says Joe Kennedy, economist at the Manufacturers' Alliance.
4. US-China cooperation over new fuels and strategic reserves will offset shocks
Washington File, 5 (April 4, http://usinfo.state.gov/eap/Archive/2005/Apr/04-622583.html)
Working together, China and the United States can more effectively meet their own energy challenges
and make the world energy situation more stable in the process, U.S. officials say. The two countries should cooperate
because “our goals are similar and our interests converge with theirs,” said an official, who asked not to be identified, in a March 8
interview. Both countries want to reduce their reliance on oil and natural gas imports by embracing new fuels
and technologies for enhancing energy efficiency, the official said. Both also want to limit environmental problems related to the use
of fossil fuels by moving toward cleaner technologies, the official said (See related article, “U.S. Encourages China to Become
Responsible Energy Consumer.”) The United States is a leader in many fields of energy research and technology and China has
achievements of its own, for example, in high-energy physics, coal sequestration and next-generation nuclear reactors. So both sides
have something to gain from cooperation, U.S. Energy Department officials have said. However, Jane Nakano, China desk officer from
that department, says that the more the United States and China understand each other’s objectives and policies, the greater benefits
the two countries would be able to draw from bilateral cooperation. That is one of the main goals of the U.S.-China Energy Policy
Dialogue, she said. Agreed to in 2004, the dialogue aims to build upon 25 years of bilateral energy science and technology
cooperation, she said in a March 1 interview. The dialogue will encourage both sides to view demand and other energy problems as
common challenges rather than as sources of a competition in which one side's interests are advanced at the other's expense, Nakano
said. “It is a framework that will help us diminish potential for misunderstanding,” she said. The specific topics of the U.S.-China
dialogue have not been publicized, but discussions are to include energy security and regulatory issues, according to a 2004 Energy
Department news release. As for energy security, Robert Ebel said in a March 11 interview that one of the most important things the
Bush administration could do to make world energy markets more predictable would be to encourage China to
enhance its plan for strategic oil stockpiling. Ebel directs energy research at the Washington-based Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS), a private, nonpartisan policy group. Government-controlled petroleum reserves have been
established by developed countries and some other major countries for emergencies such as supply disruptions. China has started
building such reserves at one of four locations designated for that purpose. Its strategic stockpiles are expected to reach full capacity
by 2008 or 2009. The unidentified U.S. official said that, indeed,
it is important for China and other Asia-Pacific countries to
establish or boost their strategic petroleum reserves. What the Bush administration also would like to see is a
clear message regarding how and under what circumstances China would use those reserves, the official said. Jeffrey Logan, a
researcher at the International Energy Agency, says that the use of strategic petroleum reserves must be coordinated internationally
to make the biggest impact on the energy markets. Hence, the need for continued international dialogue with China on the issue, he
said at a March CSIS symposium. According to U.S. officials, because
the United States and China consume so
much of the world's oil, the degree of cooperation between them could have a big effect on the
global energy market. The U.S. economy, the most dynamic in the industrialized world, and the Chinese economy, the world's
fastest growing, together account for one-third of global energy consumption. The two countries will need more energy to fuel their
economic growth in the future. However, the United States is projected to increase its share of world energy consumption only
marginally to 22 percent in 2025 while China’s portion is forecast to almost double to 15 percent in the same period, according to the
United States' Energy Information Administration (EIA). A large upsurge in the demand for oil worldwide, particularly in China and
other developing countries, is seen as the main force behind the sharp petroleum price increases in the past three years.
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--Shocks N/UQ
Link should have been triggered last August and the August before that
AP, 11 (Associated Press, 8/8/11, “Oil prices plunge to the lowest point of the year,” JPL)
Oil plunged to its lowest price of the year Monday on concerns about the slowing global
economy and future demand for oil and gas. Benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude fell $5.57, or
6.4 percent to settle at $81.31 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That is the lowest
settlement price of the year for crude, but it's still higher than the $71.63 per barrel low of
the past 12 months. Oil hit that on Aug. 24 of last year, when a combination of disappointing economic news and
abundant supplies drove down prices. Brent crude, used to price many international varieties of crude, on Monday fell $5.63, or
5.2 percent, to settle at $103.74 per barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London. Anxious traders pulled
money out of oil and stocks and bought assets considered to be safer during times of economic uncertainty, such as
Treasurys and gold. Gold topped $1,700 an ounce for the first time, while stocks were down more than 5 percent. Standard & Poor's
on Friday cut the Triple-A credit rating for long-term U.S. government debt. Monday's trading session was the first chance traders and
investors had to react, and many of them sold off.In the past two weeks, oil prices have dropped nearly $16
per barrel. Analysts think oil remain volatile this week as traders look for some clarity about the direction of the world economy
and demand for oil. The Department of Energy is scheduled to release its Short-term Energy Outlook on Tuesday, and OPEC is
Traders also are concerned about debt
expected to issue an updated forecast for global oil consumption as well.
problems in Europe, where the European Central Bank said it will intervene to prop up the
sagging economies of Spain and Italy.
Oil prices hit year-long low in October; should have triggered the link
Khan, 10/3 (Chris, 10/3/12, “Oil drops to lowest price since 2010,” USA Today / Associated Press, JPL)
The benchmark price dropped below $78 per barrel to its lowest level in more than a year,
as fears of another recession grew. Oil fell along with broad declines on Wall Street. If the price oil stays low, gasoline
prices could fall further. Gasoline has fallen from a peak of $3.985 per gallon May 5 to $3.417 Monday ,
according to AAA. It began the year at $3.073. Investors are concerned about a pair of recent
announcements that point to weaker demand and even lower energy prices this year. Greece, at the
center of the European debt crisis, said over the weekend that it will miss its lower spending targets despite severe cost-cutting. And
China's manufacturing sector appeared to cool off in September. "We're also at a lull in the
market" after the summer driving season, independent analyst Stephen Schork said. "This is when you tend to see
weakness" in oil prices. Benchmark crude on Monday fell $1.59, or 2%, to finish the day at $77.61 per barrel in New York.
Prices tumbled as low as $76.85 earlier in the day. Oil hasn't been that low since
September 2010. In London, Brent crude dropped $1.05 to end at $101.71 a barrel. The decline in oil markets may give U.S.
drivers a break this winter. Gasoline prices have dropped during the past few months, though at a slower pace than oil. The price of
gas has fallen 14% since peaking in May near $4 per gallon (3.8 liters). Oil
is down by more than twice as much —
32% — in that time. An ongoing worry for investors in recent months has been Greece's debt
problems and their impact on the rest of Europe. Without more financial aid, Greece will start running out of money in two weeks.
A Greek default could spread to neighboring countries and possibly trigger widespread banking problems. That would
hamper world energy demand as lending slows and businesses cut spending.
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Burgeoning economic ties also belie the challenges that have arisen from greater economic integration. Beijing’s
unwillingness to press its state-owned firms on issues of good governance and social responsibility is
producing a backlash in several African countries. Last month, Gabon ordered the Chinese energy firm,
Sinopec, to halt exploration in Loango national park, designated a nature reserve in 2002 with funding from international
donors, after a US conservation group accused it of desecrating the forest and operating without an
approved environmental impact study. In Zambia, mineworkers rioted at a Chinese run-mine over poor working conditions and a
Anecdotal evidence also suggests simmering grass roots resentment of the
failure to pay wages.
growing Chinese presence. Legal and illegal Chinese immigrants are moving to Africa by the tens
and sometimes hundreds of thousands. Chinese laborers are brought in to work in extractive industries, construction and
manufacturing projects fueling charges that Chinese investors are taking rather than creating jobs. In Angola, a Chinese $2 billion dollar
credit line is contingent on Chinese firms getting 70% of the contracts. In South Africa, where an estimated one hundred to two
hundred thousand Chinese dominate the retail and wholesale clothing industry, unions
have pressed Pretoria to put
quotas on Chinese apparel and textiles imports to protect local industry and jobs.
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1. Alt cause – disease spread increases terrorist cell recruitment from the SSA
Whitman 6. (Christine Tood, former administrator of EPA in the Bush admin, “More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach
Toward Africa”, Center for Foreign Relations, January 23, http://www.cfr.org/publication/9695/more_than_humanitarianism.html)
And of course, we
have a growing concern of terrorists emanating from the Sub-Saharan.
Obviously, our focus has been more to the Middle East and North Africa to date, but we also know that
a lot of terrorist cells have started to find a place in Africa—in Nigeria and the Sudan and other
areas. And when you look at the poverty—the issue of the devastation wrought by HIV/AIDS, the kinds of
things that all go to create a feeling of despair, particularly among young people, those are the
very kinds of confluence of influences that can make it easier to recruit people to terrorist
movements.
The argument about terrorist motivation is also important. Terrorists generally have
not killed as many as they
have been capable of killing. This restraint seems to derive from an understanding of mass casualty attacks
as both unnecessary and counterproductive. They are unnecessary because terrorists, by and large, have
succeeded by conventional means. Also, they are counterproductive because they might alienate key
constituencies, whether among the public, state sponsors, or the terrorist leadership group. In Brian Jenkins' famous words,
terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. Others have argued that the lack of mass casualty terrorism
and effective exploitation of BW has been more a matter of accident and good fortune than capability or intent. Adherents of
this view, including former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, argue that "it's not a matter of if but when." The attacks of
September 11 would seem to settle the debate about whether terrorists have both the motivation and sophistication to
exploit weapons of mass destruction for their full lethal effect. After all, those were terrorist attacks of unprecedented
sophistication that seemed clearly aimed at achieving mass casualties--had the World Trade Center towers collapsed as the
1993 bombers had intended, perhaps as many as 150,000 would have died. Moreover, Osama bin Laden's constituency
would appear to be not the "Arab street" or some other political entity but his god. And terrorists answerable only to their
deity have proven historically to be among the most lethal. But this debate cannot be considered settled. Bin Laden and his
followers could have killed many more on September 11 if killing as many as possible had been their primary objective. They
now face the core dilemma of asymmetric warfare: how to escalate without creating new interests for the stronger power and
thus the incentive to exploit its power potential more fully. Asymmetric adversaries want their stronger enemies
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fearful, not fully engaged--militarily or otherwise. They seek to win by preventing the stronger partner from exploiting
its full potential. To kill millions in America with biological or other weapons would only commit the United States--and
much of the rest of the international community--to the annihilation of the perpetrators.
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--Ext. – No Impact
Furthermore, a group’s interest in ABC weaponry is not the same as obtaining such capabilities. Before any decision to deploy either
conventional or non-conventional weapons, a terrorist group will have to judge its competence to use the weapon effectively. This will
involve practical assessments of the level of training, skills, and technical and logistical capabilities requires. Terrorists
are
dependent on success, as failure could threaten the cohesiveness or the very existence of the
group. This creates an environment of risk aversion where known and proven tactics will be
preferred. Surely, if the stakes are high, terrorists , as others, can accept further risks. But there have always been
enormous gaps between the potential of a weapon and the abilities and/or will to employ it by
terrorists. Most terrorist groups, even those pursuing suicidal ends, protect their resources.
Wasting personnel and money will inevitably harm the group and its long-term goals. Consequently,
new means and methods of violence with unknown outcomes would be less appealing.
Groups in this category are even less discriminatory in their suicide bombings than those of the preceding category. But despite the
religious justifications that allow them to dehumanize civilians more effectively, the CBRN involvement of thes e groups remains on
the level of declared interest. And even though many open-source reports and court testimonies document Al
Qaida’s attempts to acquire CBRN agents, no hard evidence of Al Qaida’s CBRN capabilities exists.91 Further,
the fact that Al Qaida’s attempted acquisition of CBRN is public knowledge suggests that not much effort was invested
into concealing this information; quite the contrary. Under Lesson 9 subsection d) of the Al Qaida training manual,
the group’s members are instructed exactly on what to say when captured and interrogated. 92 It is
quite possible that the existing claims of CBRN activities by the group’s members are part of a
deliberate misinformation campaign designed to spread fear and to divert the U.S. government’s attention from other
forms of attack. In terms of agent selection, it is interesting to note that these groups tend to claim possession of all types of CBRN
weapons.
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2. There’s no internal link to nuclear war – no countries with WMD would care about
African water shortages. It’s their burden to prove they would be drawn in.
A super beetle could be the answer to water shortages in the desert. The beetle has a special
kind of shell on its back that attracts tiny water droplets from the air. When enough of the tiny droplets
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4. ALT CAUSE –
a) poor water management
USA Today 3. (“Water shortages will leave world in dire straits”, January 26, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-01-26-
water-usat_x.htm)
More than half of humanity will be living with water shortages, depleted fisheries and polluted coastlines
within 50 years because of a worldwide water crisis, warns a United Nations report out Monday. Waste and
inadequate management of water are the main culprits behind growing problems, particularly
in poverty-ridden regions, says the study, the most comprehensive of its kind. The United Nations Environment Programme,
working with more than 200 water resource experts worldwide, produced the report.
b) increased consumption
Info for Health.Org 98. (“Facing Water Shortages”, Population Reports, Vol. XXVI, Number 1, September,
http://www.infoforhealth.org/pr/m14/m14chap3.shtml)
Years of rapid population growth and increasing water consumption for agriculture, industry,
and municipalities have strained the world's freshwater resources. In some areas the demand for water
already exceeds nature's supply, and a growing number of countries are expected to face water shortages in the near future.
Predictions of ‘water wars’ have generally been incorrect, despite increasing water shortages.
This is not due to cooperation among the countries involved, as many low-intensity conflicts
demonstrate. Instead, the stronger countries in a region manage water for their own benefit,
often at the expense of weaker countries. The authors use the concept of ‘hydro-hegemony’ to analyze how
countries exploit power inequalities to stake their claims to water resources. This concept is best
described as somewhere between positive regional leadership that emphasizes cooperation, and regional dominance.
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***Hotspots Frontlines***
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There is an impression that conflict is endemic in Africa and that any improvement in the political climate can
only be temporary. Indeed, conflicts and political unrest linger in Uganda, Ethiopia, the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)
and in Côte d’Ivoire. Does this mean that no progress is being made towards political stability and democracy? Are things getting
worse or better? The focus on war and anecdotal evidence hide real progress towards more stable and
open political systems in Africa. A detailed monitoring of the daily events and decisions that make up the reality of
political life and government attitudes in 30 African countries shows the breadth of this change. The annual African
Economic Outlook 2005-2006 provides such a systematic screening of political events, using three
categories to see what is going on: domestic political trouble, government repression and government softening. According to the
African Economic Outlook ’s indicators, political repression has lessened over the last decade, as more
governments have adhered to the rule of law and respect for human rights. The upholding of civil
rights and liberties has improved in countries which were very fragile at the beginning of the decade, including Algeria, Nigeria
and South Africa. In parallel, political instability has been declining, though important exceptions remain in Chad, DRC
and Côte d’Ivoire, where the authorities have countered raising political instability by hardening their political stance. A number of
presidential and/or legislative elections took place in 2005 and 2006 as did important referendums. Tanzania and Benin joined
Mozambique in the still limited, but growing, number of countries enjoying a peaceful passage of presidential powers. Egypt held its
first-ever multi-party elections, in which the opposition made substantial gains. In Uganda, 92.5 per cent of voters approved the re-
establishment of the multiparty system. More positive developments are hoped for as Chad, the DRC, Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia either
conclude or engage in delicate political transition programmes in 2006. Political troubles tend to increase around election time. In
2005, public demonstrations and riots, clashes with the security forces were recorded in Egypt, Ethiopia and Gabon. Political tensions
have also increased in Chad, as well as in Kenya following the rejection of a governmentbacked new constitution, which prompted the
President to suspend Parliament. In a way, the surge of tensions can be seen as a sign of growing maturity, where people dare to
express themselves and become more vocal. Of course, one must be careful interpreting this data: tensions may decrease as a result of
continuous hardening of repression – as in the case of Zimbabwe. The African Economic Outlook’s close monitoring
of
political activity did not produce any evidence of contagious effects of political instability in
Western and Southern Africa. Despite mounting tensions in Côte d’Ivoire and the deterioration of the political stance in
Zimbabwe, neighbouring countries have resisted well and continued as in Mali, their progress towards stability and democracy.
Are Democracies Less Likely to Fight Each Other? The replication and extension of Oneal and Russett (1997), which is one of the most
important studies on the DPP, showed that democracies are not significantly less likely to fight each other.
The results demonstrate that Oneal and Russett’s (1997) findings in support of the DPP are not robust and that joint democracy
does not reduce the probability of international conflict for pairs of states during the postwar
era. Simple and straightforward modifications of Oneal and Russett’s (1997) research design generated these dramatically
contradictory results. Specifically, by teasing out the separate impact of democracy and political distance
(or political dissimilarity) and by not coding cases of ongoing disputes as new cases of conflict, it
became clear that there is no significant relationship between joint democracy and the
likelihood of international war or militarized interstate dispute (MID) for states during the postwar era. These findings
suggest that the post—Cold War strategy of “democratic enlargement,” which is aimed at ensuring peace by enlarging the community
of democratic states, is quite a thin reed on which to rest a state’s foreign policy—much less the hope for international peace.
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3. Turn – Refugees
a. African democratization undermines refugee protection
Crisp, 2k Jeff Crisp, head of evaluation and policy analysis in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2000,
Journal of Contemporary African Studies, p. 164
The hostile reception received by refugees in some African states is also related to political developments at the national level. Indeed,
there is growing evidence of a linkage between the process of democratization on one hand and the
decline in refugee protection standards on the other. Prior to the 1990s, authoritarian governments
and one-party states in Africa were relatively free to offer asylum to large refugee populations when
they considered such a policy to be consistent with their own interests. But with the end of the cold
war and the introduction of pluralistic systems of government in many parts of the continent, the refugee
question has assumed a new degree of political importance. As in the industrialized states, both
governments and opposition parties are prone to encourage nationalistic and xenophobic
sentiments, and to blame their country’s ills on the presence of refugees and other foreigners. In countries where large
numbers of people are living below the poverty line and where income differentials are wide (South Africa
provides a good example) such messages can have a potent appeal, irrespective of their veracity.
Certain regions of the world experience more conflict than others. Previous analyses have shown that a civil
war in one country significantly increases the likelihood that neighboring states will experience conflict. This finding, however, still
remains largely unexplained. We argue that population movements are an impor tant mechanism by which
conflict spreads across regions. Refugee flows are not only the consequence of political turmoil—the presence of
refugees and displaced populations can also increase the risk of subsequent conflict in host and origin countries. Refugees
expand rebel social networks and constitute a negative externality of civil war. Although the vast majority of refugees
never directly engage in violence, refugee flows may facilitate the transnational spread of arms, combatants, and
ideologies conducive to conflict; they alter the ethnic composition of the state; and they can exacerbate
economic competition. We conduct an empirical analysis of the link between refugees and civil conflict since the mid-
twentieth century, and we find that the presence of refugees from neighboring countries leads to an
increased probability of violence, suggesting that refugees are one impor tant source of conflict
diffusion.
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African democracy up
WPO 4. (“Perceptions of Democracy in Africa”, World Public Opinion.Org, http://www.americans-
world.org/digest/regional_issues/africa/africa4a.cfm)
Most Americans are not aware that democracy in Africa has grown over the least 10 years. A
majority supports aid to help promote democracy in Africa. Among observers of Africa, there has been a general
consensus that democracy in Africa has shown clear growth and improvement since the end of
the Cold War. However, most Americans are not aware of this. A January 2003 PIPA poll asked, "Do you think the number of
democratic countries in Africa over the last ten years has increased, decreased, or stayed about the same?" Less than one in five--18%-
-knew that the number of African democracies has increased. Seventy percent believed that the number of democracies had either
stayed the same (48%) or decreased (22%). [1]
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As the situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo improves, increasing security for civilians is the
most pressing humanitarian priority, says a new report by Refugees International. Seizing This Moment of Hope: Towards
a Secure Future in the Democratic Republic of the Congo calls on the international community and the Congolese government to end
the violence by rehabilitating the Congolese armed forces, expanding the UN peacekeeping force in the country and enforcing an
existing embargo on arms and natural resources. The report also provides recommendations on how the country can continue to
maintain progress after the presidential runoff election on October 29 by offering concrete steps for improving humanitarian
assistance, funding and coordination.“There is a
real sense of hope that things are getting better in the
Democratic Republic of the Congo. The elections are moving forward, fighting has slowed down
in the east, and refugees are starting to return home,” said Rick Neal, Advocate for Refugees International and
author of Seizing This Moment of Hope. “But this is a long process, and now is not the time to turn our backs and walk away. Doubling
our efforts at this crucial moment will have a tremendous impact towards ensuring that the Congolese people have the food, shelter
and security they need to get home and restart their lives.”Fighting
in many parts of the D.R. Congo has
dramatically decreased, largely due to the expansion of the UN peacekeeping force (MONUC), withdrawal of
foreign troops and the formation of a transitional government in July 2003. On July 30, seventy percent of the electorate voted in the
first democratic election for president in four decades. However, pockets of extreme insecurity and acute need persist. To address this,
the report recommends strengthening the new Congolese national army (the FARDC) by giving troops a living wage, improving
training, and holding soldiers and their superiors accountable as necessary for human rights abuses, particularly rape.
Now, nudged by other governments, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has a chance -- a slender chance --
to undo the devastation wrought by generations of conflict and despotic rulers and begin to live
up to its name. The transitional government in Kinshasa -- a tense coalition led by President Joseph Kabila, 33, last month
shepherded through a new constitution that supports democratic ideals. Most important, the government is beginning to
register voters in Kinshasa, the first steps toward holding nationwide elections, some time in the next
year. And, after two years of the transitional government and an official ceasefire, several regions of the Congo have
stabilized, including the area around central Kindu -- a town of roughly 50,000 people about 600 miles east of Kinshasa, the capital.
The fighting is largely limited to the still-dangerous Ituri region in the northeast.These are intimations of progress -- but
only intimations. It is hard to imagine a more challenging place to build a working government or hold an election.
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2. Alt. Cause
a. Brain drain
Ploch, 9 (Lauren, Congressional Research Service, May 1, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports and Issue Briefs, May 1)
As Africa's largest economy, South Africa has been affected by therecent global economic
downturn, and its retail, mining, and manufacturing sectors have declined. Economists warn
that South Africa's unemployment rate could rise in 2009, with the country losing up to 300,000 jobs. (52) As
discussed above, however, the economy is expected to rebound in 2010. Some analysts have
highlighted the country's executive "brain drain" as one of greatest threats to South Africa's
economic progress. They also suggest that the outcome of the debate over the role of state assistance may have the greatest
effect on the country's capability to meet ASGISA goals.
b. Weak infrastructure
The Star, 11 THE STAR 7-5-2011 (“Africa needs $930bn capex this decade; zz AfDB spells out infrastructure shortages,” lexis)
Africa needs an estimated $93 billion (R621bn) a year, over the next 10 years, to spend on
infrastructure, according to the African Development Bank (AfDB). That amount is needed in addition to the $45bn a
year countries are already spending on capital investment and maintenance. The figures appear in a
report entitled Telling Africa's Development Story, which was launched at a presentation in Johannesburg yesterday. To make matters
worse, inefficiencies in implementing infrastructure projects cost $17bn annually, the report says. It
notes that efforts to upgrade technical and managerial skills should minimise costs, along with the creation of institutional, legal and
regulatory frameworks for public-private partnerships. According to the report, inadequate infrastructure leaves more than 60 percent
of Africa's population without access to electricity, about two-thirds of the rural population with no roads and 95 percent of
agriculture without irrigation. "The
poor state of infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa cuts economic
growth by 2 percentage points a year and reduces productivity by as much as 40 percent," the AfDB
report says.
3. Doomsday predictions about African debt default are misplaced – sanctions and
retaliation threats check back
Conybeare 90. (John A.C., prof of Poli Sci @ U Iowa and author of Trade Wars, “On the repudiation of sovereign debt: sources of
stability and risk”, Columbia Journal of World Business, Vol. 25, No. 1-2, Pg. 46, March 22, lexis)
A SPECTER HAUNTS the world's bankers, the specter of massive debt default and repudiation,
leading to a collapse of the international banking system and possibly world recession. An
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report in 1983 identified sovereign risk as one of the two main
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problems in international banking today (the other being exchange risk),(1) and recent
interruptions of interest
payments by Argentina, Brazil, Peru and several African countries appear to confirm this view.(2) It has
been argued that lenders to developing countries face an unprecedented challenge due to the
unforeseen circumstances of oil prices, recession, terms of trade, etc.; developing country borrowers with
(in the most charitable view) short time horizons, and the historically aberrant folly of bankers unwilling to analyze country risks
carefully. Anyone who follows the financial press has been reading such prophesies of doom for
the past fifteen years; the widespread acceptance of such forecasts is reflected both in bank share prices and in the secondary
market value of developing country debt.(3) Yet, barring renegotiations or reschedulings, the system stands intact. The
innocent observer might wonder if there is not something missing from these pessimistic prognoses. The thesis offered here is a more
sanguine one, and is presented in two parts. First, I believe that the
doomsday forecasts are misplaced. High risk
loans are a rational strategy of portfolio diversification, and historically there is little to distinguish current
sovereign risk lending from that which has occurred in past centuries. The banks versus debtor country bargaining problem is
analogous to a "Prisoners' Dilemma" game in which both sides can achieve joint gains through non-cooperation or joint losses through
non-cooperation. Mutual
agreement is achieved through "tit-for-tat" tactics of retaliation: default by
the debtors, and penalties imposed by the banks. The first conclusion is that sanctions have, as in the past,
been sufficient to prevent a breakdown of the system. The sanctions for modern debtor countries are similar to
those imposed on medieval kings: loss of assets rather than reputation.
Alt. cause - Agriculture and fertilizer access are key to African economic growth and
stability
EILITTÄ 6 (Marjatta, International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development, “Achieving an African Green Revolution: A
Vision for Sustainable Agricultural Growth in Africa” http://www.africafertilizersummit.org/Background_Papers/01%20Eilitta--
Achieving%20an%20African%20Green%20Revolution.pdf)
Africa’s food security situation is quickly worsening, and if not addressed through concerted, large-scale
international ef-forts, the situation will become critical, requiring increasingly greater investments. • Soil nutrient
mining, caused by continuous cropping in the ab-sence of fertilizer inputs, is an important
contributor to food insecurity, poor agricultural productivity, deforestation, and loss of wildlife
habitats, and is making many of Africa’s formerly more productive farmlands nearly uncultivable. • Agriculture needs to
be the number one priority in Africa’s development agenda. Agricul-ture employs at least 65%
of the labor force and its performance has a direct impact on the food security and economic
wellbeing of this large segment of the society, and numerous more indirect impacts on the
performance of national economies. • Productivity-enhancing in-puts, particularly fertilizers, have an
indispensable role in achieving agricultural growth in Africa. African farmers will use fertilizer if
it is available to them at a price they can af-ford and when appropriate fer-tilizer blends and amounts are used, their crops do
respond to it. Worldwide and in countries that benefited from the Green Revolution, fertilizers have fueled the
growth of agricul-tural productivity.
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OSLO - Human activities are wiping out three animal or plant species every hour and the world must do more to slow the worst spate
of extinctions since the dinosaurs by 2010, the United Nations said on Tuesday. Scientists and environmentalists issued reports about
threats to creatures and plants including right whales, Iberian lynxes, wild potatoes and peanuts on May 22, the International Day for
Biological Diversity. "Biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement.
Global warming is adding to threats such as land clearance for farms or cities, pollution and rising human populations. "The global
response to these challenges needs to move much more rapidly, and with more determination at all levels -- global, national and
local," he said. Many experts reckon the world will fail to meet the goal set by world leaders at an Earth Summit in 2002 of a
"significant reduction" by 2010 in the rate of species losses. "We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of
extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs," said Ahmed Djoghlaf, head of the UN Convention on
Biological Diversity. Dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, perhaps after a meteorite struck. "Extinction rates are rising
by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day,
up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct," he
said. "The cause: human activities."
Mass extinctions appear to result from major climatic changes or catastrophes, such as asteroid
impacts. As far as we know, none has resulted from the activities of a species, regardless of predatory voracity, pathogenicity, or any
other interactive attribute. We
are the first species with the potential to manipulate global climates and
to destroy habitats, perhaps even ecosystems -- therefore setting the stage for a sixth mass
extinction. According to Boulter, this event will be an inevitable consequence of a "self-organized Earth-life system." This Gaia-like
proposal might account for many of the processes exhibited by biological evolution before man's technological intervention, but ... the
rules are now dramatically different. ... Many
species may vanish, ... but that doesn't guarantee, unfortunately,
that we will be among the missing. While other species go bang in the night, humanity will
technologically isolate itself further from the natural world and will rationalize the decrease in
biodiversity in the same manner as we have done so far. I fear, that like the fable d cockroaches of
the atomic age, we may be one of the last life-forms to succumb, long after the "vast tracts of
beauty" that Boulter mourns we will no longer behold vanish before our distant descendants' eyes.
4. Extinctions good - Complex Systems Are More Prone To Total Failure—Simple Ones
Are Stable
Heath, 99
(Jim Heath, 1999, Orchids Australia, December, http://www.orchidsaustralia.com/whysave.htm)
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Some people say we can’t afford to lose any species, no matter what species they are. Everything needs
everything else, they say, to make nature balance. If that were right, it might explain why the six orchid
species should be saved. Alas, no. We could pour weedkiller on all the orchids in Australia and
do no ecological damage to the rest of the continent’s biology. But wouldn’t the natural ecological systems
then become less stable, if we start plucking out species - even those orchids? Not necessarily. Natural biological systems
are hardly ever stable and balanced anyway. Everything goes along steadily for a time, then
boom - the system falls apart and simplifies for no visible reason. Diverse systems are usually
more unstable than the less diverse ones. Biologists agree that in some places less diversity is
more stable (in the Arctic, for example). Also, monocultures - farms - can be very stable. Not to mention
the timeless grass of a salt marsh. In other words, there’s no biological law that says we have to save
the orchids because they add diversity, and that added diversity makes the biological world
more stable.
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Extend humans will survive mass extinctions – our technological innovation will allow us to
separate ourselves from the environment – that’s Powers.
We don’t need animals to keep us alive—human evolution guarantees that we will never
wipe ourselves out by destroying the environment
SIMON 96
(Julian, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, The
Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and
Environment, http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/faculty/jsimon/Ultimate_Resource/)
Extend causing species extinctions is key to simplifying global biodiversity, which makes
bioD as a whole more sustainable – that’s Heath.
Mass extinctions are key to life on earth—they allow evolution and prevent everything
from dying
Scully, 2
(Malcolm, Editor at Large of the Chronicle, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 5)
2. No scenario for escalation – ethnic conflicts remain within Africa and are exaggerated by
the West
FPA 5. (“Recently in Focus”, Foreign Policy Association,
http://www.fpa.org/newsletter_info2482/newsletter_info_sub_list.htm?section=Ethnicity)
In Great Decisions 2001, I. William Zartman poses the following question about conflict resolution in Africa: "can it succeed?" In a
continuing series of reflections on this piece, In Focus looks at ethnicity in Africa and its role in fomenting conflict. Zartman notes that
"Africa's conflicts are mainly internal" and ethnic conflict is a substantial component in many of
these conflicts. However, even when the ethnic dimension is not culpable or is a minor constituent
in a struggle, ethnicity is often blamed. Such reductionism has been a core value of western
attempts to label and to describe Africa since the dawn of the European encounter. By placing
conflicts and disagreements in a simple framework, external viewers are spared the tedium and the
concentration of having to make sense of situations that may have no clear good guys or bad
guys, and which also may show no signs of imminent resolution. This is not say that conflict along ethnic lines is not serious, rather
that observers with ulterior motives have skewed its importance.
3. African ethnic conflicts are impossible to solve – too many exacerbating factors
Maninger 97. (Stephen, Parliamentary Researcher, “Ethic Confrontation - Security Implications of Policies Towards Ethnic Minorities”,
African Security Review, Vol. 6, No. 4, http://www.iss.co.za/ASR/6No4/Maninger.html)
Both Western and East-bloc military establishments have experienced the durability of nationalist insurgency during their military
involvement in Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively. Former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara conceded that during the
Vietnam war the US overestimated the ideological – Communist – threat while having "totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of
Ho Chi Minh's movement. We were wrong, terribly wrong."26 The old wisdom of guerrilla warfare, namely that the insurgents need to
avoid losing in order to win, while governments need to win in order to avoid losing, also retains its relevance in the ethnic conflict
scenario. Ethnically
motivated insurgents seldom have any desire to take over the entire state, and
it generally remains their objective to gain control of a familiar region or a territory to which
they feel historically attached, wherein they seek to establish a state of their own. The military pressure is merely a
method of reaching a settlement which would make state-formation, with international recognition and formal, as well as normal
relations with the rump state, possible. Heterogeneous military formations and states are almost always at a disadvantage when
engaging in counter-insurgency operations against nationalist sub-groups.27 Cohesion becomes a problem as loyalties and
communication are put to the test. The durable nature of ethnic conflict suggests that almost nothing,
short of genocide, can overcome the will to resist. Sri Lanka's drawn out ethnic war shows that to defeat ethnic
insurgents today is to face their sons tomorrow. In Africa's case, additional factors may also play a role in
such a scenario, namely: the natural proclivity to combat, which follows many years of
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liberation wars and concomitant oversupply of illegal weapons, along with a considerable familiarity with military
weapons and tactics which is quite prevalent among ethnically conscious groups, i.e. Zulus and Boers. Many African ethnic groups or
tribes pride themselves on relatively deep-seated military tradition; the fragility of some countries' infrastructures, which have
difficulty sustaining their populations; and the limited resources of developing countries to combat
insurgencies, as demonstrated in Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi,i etc.
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The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) on Friday welcomed US government contributions in June
totaling $62 million to feed people confronting humanitarian crises across 13 countries in Africa
and one in Asia. US contributions will target refugees and other food-insecure populations in Kenya, the
Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Swaziland, Lesotho, Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi,
Liberia, Djibouti, Cameroon and Nepal. The latest series of major donations, from the Office of Food for Peace at the US Agency for
International Development (USAID), bring total American contributions to WFP operations for the year to $727.6 million. The
United States is WFP’s single largest donor. Lifeline “Once again, the United States government has
thrown a lifeline to people who desperately need assistance in situations of conflict, prolonged
drought and poverty exacerbated by the onslaught of HIV/AIDS,” said Jordan Dey, Director of US Relations for WFP.
2. There is no scenario for escalation – great powers would not be drawn in to fight over
African famine. At best, they can claim a small regional conflict.
3. ALT CAUSE–
a) locusts destroy 80% of crops
Reuters 4. (“Fears of Famine as Locusts Advance Across W. Africa”, Global Policy Forum, August 8,
http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/hunger/2004/0808locusts.htm)
Nearly a
million people in West Africa face famine unless they get international aid to battle swarms of
locusts devouring their crops in the region's worst plague in 15 years, farmers and government experts
warned. The locusts are sweeping into crop-growing areas of the Sahel, on the Sahara's southern fringe, a region whose people are
A fraction of a swarm can eat
mostly subsistence farmers and whose governments lack the means to fight the infestation.
the same amount in a day as 10 elephants, 25 camels or about 2,500 people, experts say, destroying
subsistence crops such as sorghum and millet as well as money earners like water melons and groundnuts. "We
have to expect a deficit in our cereal crop of around 80 percent. What's more, 600,000-800,000
people will be affected by famine," Mohamed Lemine, an official from Mauritania's national
agriculture federation, told reporters late on Saturday. "If steps are not taken we can't hope for any harvest this year,"
another senior federation official said. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation warned as long ago as October that locust swarms
threatened to wreak havoc on the region after exceptional rains and humidity following several years of drought allowed the insects to
flourish. But the response has fallen woefully short. The FAO said two weeks ago that damage from the airborne
invasion could triple to $245 million within a year if no emergency aid is provided soon.
WFP has expressed deep concern over erratic weather patterns in southern Africa which have
devastated harvest prospects for millions of people, and could spell yet another year of
widespread food shortages. Parts of Angola , Madagascar , Mozambique , Namibia , and Zambia ,
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have been struck by devastating floods which have destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of
crops during the most critical growing stage. In stark contrast, Lesotho, Namibia, southern Mozambique,
and much of Swaziland and large swathes of Zimbabwe’s cropland, have all been affected by prolonged dry
spells which have withered and killed crops or reduced their development.
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Africa’s food security situation is quickly worsening, and if not addressed through concerted, large-scale
international ef-forts, the situation will become critical, requiring increasingly greater investments. • Soil nutrient
mining, caused by continuous cropping in the ab-sence of fertilizer inputs, is an important
contributor to food insecurity, poor agricultural productivity, deforestation, and loss of wildlife
habitats, and is making many of Africa’s formerly more productive farmlands nearly uncultivable. • Agriculture needs to
be the number one priority in Africa’s development agenda. Agricul-ture employs at least 65%
of the labor force and its performance has a direct impact on the food security and economic
wellbeing of this large segment of the society, and numerous more indirect impacts on the
performance of national economies. • Productivity-enhancing in-puts, particularly fertilizers, have an
indispensable role in achieving agricultural growth in Africa. African farmers will use fertilizer if
it is available to them at a price they can af-ford and when appropriate fer-tilizer blends and amounts are used, their crops do
respond to it. Worldwide and in countries that benefited from the Green Revolution, fertilizers have fueled the
growth of agricul-tural productivity.
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B. Oil dependence
ICG, 6 (International Crisis Group, 7-19-2006,
http://www.crisisgroup.org/library/documents/africa/west_africa/113_nigeria___want_in_the_midst_of_plenty.pdf
Oil has plunged Nigeria into “Dutch disease” – the phenomenon whereby an increase in revenues
from a natural resource raises the exchange rate, making other export industries uncompetitive
and possibly leading to deindustrialisation. In May 2006, Nigeria’s crude oil output was about 2.1 million barrels per day,
though attacks on pipelines in July have lowered it somewhat.104 In addition to its oil wealth, the country has proven natural gas
reserves estimated at 184 trillion cubic feet, which makes it the seventh largest source in the world.105 The reserve-production ratio,
assuming no additions to proven reserves in the future, is estimated at 240 years for gas, compared with about 40 years for oil,
reflecting the relative under-exploitation of natural gas. The mono-commodity economy has been sustainable, though at a staggering
social cost and great risk to national unity. However, in
the long run it is probably unviable and certainly undesirable:
The economic record since the oil boom is one of lacklustre growth, increasing poverty,
widening inequality and a secular decline in performance. From 1980 to 2002, economic growth averaged just 2 per
cent annually, and real income per capita stands today at about one third the level achieved in 1980….Nigeria’s once-thriving
agricultural and solid mineral exports are moribund; manufacturing today constitutes a smaller proportion of the economy (about 6
per cent) than at independence. The economy drifts on a sea of oil, blown by the capricious winds of international energy markets.106
1. South Africa completely disarmed all nuclear weapons and destroyed all files having to
do with the ability to create more in 1994. It took 3 years to destroy these records and
bombs. It would take decades to put them back together.
Sublette 1 (Carey Sublette is the creator of The Nuclear Weapon Archive, Septermber 2001. “South Africa's Nuclear Weapons Program.”
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Safrica/SADisarming.html)
Along with the destruction of the bombs themselves, and the tooling required to produce them, South
Africa also destroyed all design, production, and other technical documentation generated by
the weapons-related part of the program. This makes it impossible for subsequent (black-led)
governments to recreate the arsenal without duplicating much of the research and
development work. It also makes it difficult or impossible to investigate or verify many claims about the program, and
questions that remain. In particular it appears that much of information about the collaboration with Israel is lost. South Africa
officially entered the NPT with its ratification on 10 July 1991. The NPT safeguards entered into force immediately on 16 September
1991 with the signing of a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (INFCIRC/394). On 30 October 1991 South Africa submitted its initial
inventory of nuclear materials and facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the first verification team from the
Agency arrived on site in November 1991. IAEA inspectors found an inventory of about 400 kg of weapon-grade enriched uranium at
Pelindaba (roughly 100 kg enriched to about 80 percent; the rest enriched to 90-95 percent). Suspicion immediately arose that this
highly enriched material had been previously used in nuclear weapons. But - to encourage full disclosure - the IAEA inspections are
conducted confidentially and are not disclosed the details of the inspections publicly. South Africa insisted on strict secrecy but hints of
their findings soon began leaking out [Baeckmann et al 1995], [Albright 1994a]. By late 1992, as preparations for South Africa's first all-
race elections proceeded, the African National Congress (ANC) was pressing the government for full disclosure of its previous weapons
activity. In a 24 March 1993 speech, President de Klerk revealed that South Africa had produced nuclear weapons. De Klerk claimed -
incorrectly - that the arsenal had been destroyed before 10 July 1991, when South Africa joined the NPT. In fact the destruction
process was not complete at that point, although it was by the time the NPT actually entered force. The
IAEA declared in late
1994, after it had completed its inspection around the end of August, that it had verified that
South Africa's nuclear weapons facilities had been dismantled.
2. South Africa is tightening its anti-proliferation laws and is developing a nuclear energy
program that focuses on peaceful purposes.
Lacey, 6 ( “Country Profile 12: South Africa.” Jennifer Megan Lacey, November 2006. FirstWatch International a research consultancy that
conducts open-source assessments on nuclear fuel cycle programs and nuclear safeguards
technologies.http://www.sipri.org/contents/expcon/cnsc1sa.html)
The South African government has made clear that its nuclear programme will focus on peaceful purposes
and its membership and active role in numerous nonproliferation regimes signals this peaceful intent. South Africa’s upcoming
chairmanship of the NSG also confirms its nonproliferation credentials. SouthAfrica is strengthening the
enforcement of its anti-proliferation laws, and urging more international cooperation in enforcement efforts.(5)
Under President Mbeki, the country has taken an active role in promoting peaceful nuclear energy developments for all nations.(6) In
August 2005, African National Congress (ANC) National Executive Committee member and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Aziz
Pahad emphasized ‘the basic and inalienable right of all NPT states’ to develop research and production capabilities for the peaceful
use of nuclear energy without discrimination.(7) Pahad and the South African Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs have both commented
on occasions that the problems related to Iran’s nuclear programme are primarily due to the unequal implementation of the delicately
balanced rights and obligations contained in the NPT itself.(8) At the end of an October 2006 IAEA Nuclear Safeguards Symposium,
Abdul Minty concluded that ‘What we should strive for is not to place further limitations on the peaceful application of the atom by
those who have already committed themselves not to pursue the nuclear weapons option.’(9)
Juma, 2 Monica Juma, former Associate at the Africa Program of the International Peace Academy, September 2002, The Infrastructure of
Peace in Africa, accessed via cioanet.org, p. 13-14
There is also a naive tendency on the part of many analysts to overstate South Africa’s leverage. In this view,
South Africa is economically more powerful than its weaker neighbors and should be able to translate this power into political clout
and leadership. While South Africa’s dominance has engendered fear, distrust and jealousy among other SADC member
states, it remains a giant with serious limitations. Its govern- ment presides over a deeply divided
society with acute poverty levels, making processes of domestic political and economic transformation difficult.
Although it is an emerging market and undisputed regional power, South Africa is still largely inexperienced in
regional diplomacy and has a relatively weak administrative capacity.
***Conflict Good***
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1NC – War
Today cease-fires and armistices are imposed on lesser powers by multilateral agreement -- not to avoid
great-power competition but for essentially disinterested and indeed frivolous motives, such as television audiences' revulsion at
harrowing scenes of war. Butthis, perversely, can systematically prevent the transformation of war
into peace. The Dayton accords are typical of the genre: they have condemned Bosnia to remain divided into three rival armed
camps, with combat suspended momentarily but a state of hostility prolonged indefinitely. Since no side is threatened by
defeat and loss, none has a sufficient incentive to negotiate a lasting settlement; because no
path to peace is even visible, the dominant priority is to prepare for future war rather than to
reconstruct devastated economies and ravaged societies. Uninterrupted war would certainly
have caused further suffering and led to an unjust outcome from one perspective or another,
but it would also have led to a more stable situation that would have let the postwar era truly
begin. Peace takes hold only when war is truly over. A variety of multilateral organizations now make it their
business to intervene in other peoples' wars. The defining characteristic of these entities is that they insert themselves in war
situations while refusing to engage in combat. In the long run this only adds to the damage. If
the United Nations helped
the strong defeat the weak faster and more decisively, it would actually enhance the
peacemaking potential of war. But the first priority of U.N. peacekeeping contingents is to avoid casualties among their
own personnel. Unit commanders therefore habitually appease the locally stronger force, accepting
its dictates and tolerating its abuses. This appeasement is not strategically purposeful, as siding
with the stronger power overall would be; rather, it merely reflects the determination of each
U.N. unit to avoid confrontation. The final result is to prevent the emergence of a coherent
outcome, which requires an imbalance of strength sufficient to end the fighting.
1. To"work for peace" in her sense causes war, more so when working "energetically," whereas it is the
destructions of war (or the expenses and moral fatigue of war-preparation in cold wars) that brings about peace, by
exhausting the resources and will to persist in war (or war-preparation). To say that Reagan's SDI ended the Cold
War is at least exaggeration, but had Forsberg and those of like minds succeeded in cutting US defense spending when it was still
useful (not for self-defense, admittedly), the USSR--in its later, military aggrandizement phase (prompted by the loss of all hope in
ideological victory)--would have lasted longer, and the peoples of Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States might still be
imprisoned in it. And before then, the arms race that Forsberg & Co. systematically opposed greatly helped to keep the peace, by
venting acute insecurities into harmless "overkill" weapon programs in lieu of far more dangerous attempts to conquer strategic
depth, the standard prenuclear remedy. 2. More generally, war-preparation by those actually willing to fight (not
just ritualistic preparations, as is mostly the case in advanced countries nowadays) may avert war by dissuading others'
hopes of easy victories--even Bosnia might have done it, had it raised a good army before declaring independence--
whereas wishing for peace, marching for peace, etc., is as relevant as wishing and marching for
good weather--except if it interferes with concrete war-preparations, when it may be
counterproductive. 3. "Peacekeeping institutions" commonly perpetuate war, by freezing the
processes that would exhaust it (consider the effect of imposed cease-fires in Arab-Israeli wars). The various UN
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War is peace—allowing conflicts to burn themselves out is key to long-term stability and
these conflicts don’t escalate
LUTTWAK 99 ( Edward N. Luttwak is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. , Foreign Affairs,
July/August, http://isuisse.ifrance.com/emmaf/base/give_war_a_chance.html)
Our argument is moral—lack of intervention is done out of concern for human welfare
LUTTWAK 99 ( Edward N. Luttwak is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. , Foreign Affairs,
July/August, http://isuisse.ifrance.com/emmaf/base/give_war_a_chance.html)
Too many wars nowadays become endemic conflicts that never end because the transformative
effects of both decisive victory and exhaustion are blocked by outside intervention. Unlike the
ancient problem of war, however, the compounding of its evils by disinterested interventions is a new malpractice that could be
curtailed. Policy
elites should actively resist the emotional impulse to intervene in other peoples'
wars -- not because they are indifferent to human suffering but precisely because they care
about it and want to facilitate the advent of peace. The United States should dissuade multilateral interventions
instead of leading them. New rules should be established for U.N. refugee relief activities to ensure that immediate succor is swiftly
followed by repatriation, local absorption, or emigration, ruling out the establishment of permanent refugee camps. And although it
may not be possible to constrain interventionist NGOs, they should at least be neither officially encouraged nor funded.
Underlying these seemingly perverse measures would be a true appreciation of war's
paradoxical logic and a commitment to let it serve its sole useful function: to bring peace.
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--A2: De Mello
--A2: Crocker
Crocker is wrong—civil wars will burn out if they are allowed to escalate
LUTTWAK 2k (Edward, Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Foreign Affairs, March/April)
Chester Crocker's thoughtful critique of my article, "Give War a Chance," warrants broader consideration, but here I can only try to
respond to his main objection ("A Poor Case for Quitting," January/February 2000). While describing the paradoxical logic of the
strategy presented in my article as "compelling," Crocker notes major exceptions to the proposition that wars
themselves establish the preconditions for peace, if uninterrupted by outsiders -- including the cases of Chechnya,
Sudan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Angola. He is, of course, correct. In all those areas, warfare has persisted for
decades, yet there is no peace in sight. But war can become its own remedy only by consuming
and destroying the material and moral resources needed to keep fighting. It follows that the
speed with which war destroys itself depends on its intensity and scale. In civil wars, the intensity of the
fighting is usually low and the scale very limited, except for short (often seasonal) explosions of violence that, in most cases, are very
localized. That leaves unaffected the wider environment, whose undestroyed resources can fuel war endlessly. As Crocker notes,
Chechen resistance to the Russians began in the 1830s. But during the last 170 years there have been only a few months of truly
intense large-scale fighting. Otherwise, the Russians would long ago have achieved an imperial peace through genocide or forced
dispersal. Acting Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to achieve peace through all-out victory. But he is unlikely to do so because
his war is not destroying the essential war-making resource of the Chechens -- their warrior youth. With Russia's democracy
sufficiently established to make genocide or mass deportation impossible, Putin's choices are restricted to an endless war inside
Chechnya or the republic's isolation behind a well-guarded perimeter. In Sudan, the fighting has been limited to some areas of the far
south, and even there it has been mostly seasonal. Neither a war restricted by outside interference nor a war so limited in scope can
create the preconditions for peace. Kashmir exhibits both the Chechen phenomenon of an imperial power unwilling to destroy or
accommodate a rebellious nationality and the interrupted-war syndrome. None of the Indo-Pakistan wars persisted long enough to
bring peace to Kashmir (in 1971, Pakistan was spared total defeat by American intervention). Now a nuclear stalemate has inaugurated
a protracted cold war. In Sri Lanka, ethnic war has continued for decades in the northeast, while foreign tourists continue to frequent
tranquil beaches in the south-west. Had the intensity of the fighting in the Jaffna peninsula been replicated throughout the island, the
war would have ended long ago. Angola has seen periods of intense fighting, mainly when the Luanda government had allies or
mercenaries fighting its battles, but the war with the rebels has been mostly localized and desultory. The
logic of strategy is
no more than a theoretical formulation of an almost physical process. Had World War II been
fought in fits and starts and in secondary theaters far from Germany and Japan, it would still
continue. That the paradoxical logic of strategy cannot exceed its limits is no excuse for the
current practice of systematically sabotaging war's peace-making potential by outside
interventions that are disinterested and therefore both arbitrary and usually inconclusive. Nor is it
an excuse for the U.N. and nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) to provide refugee assistance by permanent encampment, instead
of providing immediate humanitarian relief followed by a natural dispersion when quick repatriation is impossible. Such
an
intervention guarantees the perpetuation of refugee polities, the only possible ideology of
which is revanchist. This, in turn, guarantees perpetual war -- as in Rwanda's recent case. Again, had the U.N.
and today's plague of irresponsible, self-seeking NGOS existed in Europe's past, the continent would contain no stable states but only
vast camps of unreconciled refugees, still battling their ancient enemies.
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1NC – AIDS
The executive director of UNAIDS, Peter Piot, estimated that Africa would annually need between $ 1 billion to $ 3 billion to combat
the disease, but currently receives only $ 160 million a year in official assistance. World Bank President James Wolfensohn lamented
that Africa was losing teachers faster than they could be replaced, and that AIDS was now more effective than war in destabilizing
African countries. Statistics show that AIDS is the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing
people killed in warfare. In 1998, 200,000 people died from armed conflicts compared to 2.2
million from AIDS. Some 33.6 million people have HIV around the world, 70 percent of them in
Africa, thereby robbing countries of their most productive members and decimating entire
villages. About 13 million of the 16 million people who have died of AIDS are in Africa, according to the UN. What barometer is used
to proclaim a holocaust if this number is not a sure measure? There is no doubt that AIDS is the most serious
threat to humankind, more serious than hurricanes, earthquakes, economic crises, capital
crashes or floods. It has no cure yet. We are watching a whole continent degenerate into ghostly
skeletons that finally succumb to a most excruciating, dehumanizing death. Gore said that his new
initiative, if approved by the U.S. Congress, would bring U.S. contributions to fighting AIDS and other infectious diseases to $ 325
million. Does this mean that the UN Security Council and the U.S. in particular have at last decided to remember Africa? Suddenly, AIDS
was seen as threat to world peace, and Gore would ask the congress to set up millions of dollars on this case. The hope is that Gore
does not intend to make political capital out of this by painting the usually disagreeable Republican-controlled Congress as the bad guy
and hope the buck stops on the whole of current and future U.S. governments' conscience. Maybe there is nothing left to salvage in
Africa after all and this talk is about the African-American vote in November's U.S. presidential vote. Although the UN and the Security
Council cannot solve all African problems, the AIDS challenge is a fundamental one in that it threatens to wipe out man. The
challenge is not one of a single continent alone because Africa cannot be quarantined. The trouble is
that AIDS has no cure -- and thus even the West has stakes in the AIDS challenge. Once sub-Saharan Africa is wiped out,
it shall not be long before another continent is on the brink of extinction. Sure as death, Africa's
time has run out, signaling the beginning of the end of the black race and maybe the human race.
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--Disease O/W
If Earth doesn't do us in, our fellow organisms might be up to the task. Germs and people have
always coexisted, but occasionally the balance gets out of whack. The Black Plague killed one European in
four during the 14th century; influenza took at least 20 million lives between 1918 and 1919; the AIDS epidemic has produced a similar
death toll and is still going strong. From 1980 to 1992, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mortality from
infectious disease in the United States rose 58 percent.
Old diseases such as cholera and measles have
developed new resistance to antibiotics. Intensive agriculture and land development is bringing
humans closer to animal pathogens. International travel means diseases can spread faster than
ever. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert who recently left the Minnesota Department of Health,
described the situation as "like trying to swim against the current of a raging river." The
grimmest possibility would be the emergence of a strain that spreads so fast we are caught off
guard or that resists all chemical means of control, perhaps as a result of our stirring of the
ecological pot. About 12,000 years ago, a sudden wave of mammal extinctions swept through the Americas. Ross MacPhee of the
American Museum of Natural History argues the culprit was extremely virulent disease, which humans helped transport as they
migrated into the New World.
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Behind these broad population figures, the impacts of AIDS on demographic structure are seriously
worsening the imbalances between population and natural resource consumption/land use in sub-
Saharan Africa. The most economically active age group (15–49 years old) is most impacted by AIDS (UNAIDS 2004). When
individuals in this age group succumb to the disease, wages and agricultural labor are lost. Rural households
are forced to change their livelihood strategies in an ever-deepening spiral of poverty. They often
cultivate less labor-intensive but also less nutritious crops (Barnett and Whiteside 2002) and increase natural
resource consumption. Activities such as hunting, fishing, wild food-plant collection, and fuel-wood
extraction increase as families struggle to maintain diets and generate alternative income (Barany et al. 2001; Africa
Biodiversity Collaborative Group 2002). The subsequent increase in resource use is often unsustainable.
Indigenous knowledge of agriculture and resource management is often lost when parents die
before passing it on to their children. For example, using fire for agricultural clearing can increase as
indigenous knowledge of agricultural production disappears and less labor is available for farming. Uncontrolled fires
destroy natural resources such as forest foods and building materials (M Jurvelius pers comm) and can
accelerate erosion. As AIDS orphans grow up, they often have little indigenous knowledge and a
weak attachment to land and resources. This could result in unsustainable mining of natural
resources and future insecurity, both locally and nationally. Compounding this, law enforcement
capacity is being weakened by the epidemic, as is the ability of governments and non-governmental
organizations to provide technical support for rural development and resource management. At a
local level, AIDS can result in shifts in land and resource control, as traditional governance structures break down and power relations
change. Inefficient and unsustainable use can increase, particularly if knowledge of sustainable practices is lost or
there is less commitment to sound use. In addition, in some societies, widows and orphans cannot inherit land when the male head of
a household dies, because of patriarchal laws and traditions. Even if there is a legal basis for inheritance, land-grabbing may occur
(International Center for Research on Women 2004).
faunal biological diversity to re-establish itself. More importantly, the resurrection of biological
diversity assumes an intact zone of tropical forests to provide for new speciation after
extinction. Today, the tropical rain forests are disappearing more rapidly than any other bio-
region, ensuring that after the age of humans, the Earth will remain a biological, if not a literal desert
for eons to come. The present course of civilization points to ecocide -- the death of nature. Like a run-a-way train,
civilization is speeding along tracks of our own manufacture towards the stone wall of extinction. The
human passengers sitting comfortably in their seats, laughing, partying, and choosing to not look out the window. Environmentalists
are those perceptive few who have their faces pressed against the glass, watching the hurling bodies of plants and animals go
screaming by. Environmental activists are those even fewer people who are trying desperately to break into the fortified engine of
greed that propels this destructive specicidal juggernaut. Others are desperately throwing out anchors in an attempt to slow the
monster down while all the while, the authorities, blind to their own impending destruction, are clubbing, shooting and jailing those
who would save us all. SHORT MEMORIES Civilized humans have for ten thousand years been marching across the face of the Earth
leaving deserts in their footprints. Because we have such short memories, we forgot the wonder and splendor of a virgin nature. We
revise history and make it fit into our present perceptions. For instance, are you aware that only two thousand years ago, the coast of
North Africa was a mighty forest? The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians built powerful ships from the strong timbers of the region.
Rome was a major exporter of timber to Europe. The temple of Jerusalem was built with titanic cedar logs, one image of which adorns
the flag of Lebanon today. Jesus Christ did not live in a desert, he was a man of the forest. The Sumerians were renowned for clearing
the forests of Mesopotamia for agriculture. But the destruction of the coastal swath of the North African forest stopped the rain from
advancing into the interior. Without the rain, the trees died and thus was born the mighty Sahara, sired by man and continued to grow
southward at a rate of ten miles per year, advancing down the length of the continent of Africa. And so will go Brazil. The precipitation
off the Atlantic strikes the coastal rain forest and is absorbed and sent skyward again by the trees, falling further into the interior.
Twelve times the moisture falls and twelve times it is returned to the sky -- all the way to the Andes mountains. Destroy the coastal
swath and desertify Amazonia -- it is as simple as that. Create a swath anywhere between the coast and the mountains and the rains
will be stopped. We did it before while relatively primitive. We learned nothing. We forgot. So too, have we forgotten that walrus once
mated and bred along the coast of Nova Scotia, that sixty million bison once roamed the North American plains. One hundred years
ago, the white bear once roamed the forests of New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces. Now it is called the polar bear
because that is where it now makes its last stand. EXTINCTION IS DIFFICULT TO APPRECIATE Gone forever are the European elephant,
lion and tiger. The Labrador duck, gint auk, Carolina parakeet will never again grace this planet of ours. Lost for all time are the Atlantic
grey whales, the Biscayan right whales and the Stellar sea cow. Our children will never look upon the California condor in the wild or
watch the Palos Verde blue butterfly dart from flower to flower. Extinction is a difficult concept to fully appreciate. What has been is
no more and never shall be again. It would take another creation and billions of years to recreate the passenger pigeon. It is the loss of
billions of years of evolutionary programming. It is the destruction of beauty, the obliteration of truth, the removal of uniqueness, the
scarring of the sacred web of life To
be responsible for an extinction is to commit blasphemy against the divine. It is
the greatest of all possible crimes, more evil than murder, more appalling than genocide, more
monstrous than even the apparent unlimited perversities of the human mind. To be responsible for the
complete and utter destruction of a unique and sacred life form is arrogance that seethes with evil, for the very opposite of evil is live.
It is no accident that these two words spell out each other in reverse. And yet, a reporter in California recently told me that "all the
redwoods in California are not worth the life on one human being." What incredible arrogance. The rights a species, any species, must
take precedence over the life of an individual or another species. This is a basic ecological law. It is not to be tampered with by
primates who have molded themselves into divine legends in their own mind. For each and every one of the thirty million plus species
that grace this beautiful planet are essential for the continued well-being of which we are all a part, the planet Earth -- the divine entity
which brought us forth from the fertility of her sacred womb. As a sea-captain I like to compare the structural integrity of the
biosphere to that of a ship's hull. Each species is a rivet that keeps the hull intact. If I were to go into my engine room and find my
engineers busily popping rivets from the hull, I would be upset and naturally I would ask them what they were doing. If they told me
that they discovered that they could make a dollar each from the rivets, I could do one of three things. I could ignore them. I could ask
them to cut me in for a share of the profits, or I could kick their asses out of the engine room and off my ship. If I was a responsible
captain, I would do the latter. If I did not, I would soon find the ocean pouring through the holes left by the stolen rivets and very
shortly after, my ship, my crew and myself would disappear beneath the waves. And that is the state of the world today. The political
leaders, i.e., the captains at the helms of their nation states, are ignoring the rivet poppers or they are cutting themselves in for the
profits. There are very few asses being kicked out of the engine room of spaceship Earth. With the rivet poppers in command, it will
not be long until the biospheric integrity of the Earth collapses under the weight of ecological
strain and tides of death come pouring in. And that will be the price of progress -- ecological
collapse, the death of nature, and with it the horrendous and mind numbing specter of massive
human destruction.
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The manner in which AIDS can hollow out already weak states parallels that of its effect on militaries. In contrast to
other historic disease epidemics, which tended to kill off the weak and infirm first, AIDS in the developing world has
tended to claim the lives of the more productive members of society, who are not easily
replaced. The reason is that educated and well-off citizens are more mobile, and thus have often contracted the disease first. Many
states have clusters of the disease in the middle and upper levels of management in both business and government and AIDS is already
being blamed for shortages of skilled workers in a number of countries.27 For example, 10% of all African teachers are expected to be
killed by AIDS by 2005, while between 25-50% of health care workers in stricken states such as Malawi will similarly die from the
disease.28 In the words of Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, thedisease “…is devastating the ranks of the most
productive members of society with an efficacy history has reserved for great armed
conflicts.”29 The impact is felt not just in governance, but also the economy and development in
general. Besides acting as a new sort of tax on society, by increasing the health care costs of
business across the board, the disease also stymies foreign investment. Workforce productivity
is decreased, while prospective revenues also go down, as the local consumer base becomes
more impoverished.30 The disease also increases budgetary needs at the same time as it shrinks
the tax base. The consequence could well be shattering for already impoverished states. The
World Bank considers the disease to be the single biggest threat to economic development in
Africa, as it is expected to reduce GDP in many states by as much as 20%, in just the next
decade. The rapid spread in poverty-stricken post-Soviet states, including those in Central Asia newly important to the war on
terrorism, could be equally catastrophic.31 The precise security threat here is that AIDS causes dangerous
weaknesses in the pillars of a stable state, its military, its governing institutions, and its
economy. The disease is accordingly no longer just a symptom of a state crisis, as usually thought, but
actually a catalyst of them.32 As public institutions crumble and senior officials also suffer from
the disease, public confidence in governing bodies is further threatened.33 The weakening of
state bodies at point of crisis has repeatedly been the spark for coups, revolts, and other
political and ethnic struggles to secure control over resources. As the recent collapse of the DRC illustrates,
warlords, plunderers, and other violent actors effortlessly fill the void left by a failing state.
That the disease is concentrating in areas, such as Africa and the former Soviet Union, already
undergoing tenuous political transitions only heightens the risks of instability and state failure.
State collapse creates unique scenario for regional war in Africa that threatens vital
interests of great powers and causes global terrorism
Singer, 2 (Peter, John M. Olin Post-doctoral Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, Survival, Spring. This is not the bioethicist/activist
Peter Singer.)
The security danger of failed states extends beyond the simple human tragedy that is then
played out in the ensuring chaos and collapse. While stable states outside the region might
imagine themselves secure and able to stand aside from failed states, the realities of the global
system no longer permit this. At the very first brush, many of the regions that are most vulnerable to state
failure spurred by disease are of clear national interest concern to major state powers. The US,
for example, has greater economic investments in at risk areas in Africa than either the Middle
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East or Eastern Europe. Equally, a number of individual states at risk, such as Angola, Nigeria, and South
Africa, are core regional allies, as well as critical suppliers of oil (roughly 1/5th of all US imports) and
strategic minerals.34 The threats of economic and/or political collapse from the disease can also
lead to new refugee flows. Besides facilitating the spread of the disease, time and time again,
sudden and massive population movements prompted by these factors have led to heightened
regional-wide tensions and destabilization.35 With the likely increase to pandemic levels on their doorsteps in the
Caribbean and the former Soviet Union, American and European fears of past refugee crises (such as the 1990s Balkans wars and
Haitian collapse) could be revisited. Perhaps more important, in a direct security sense, is that failed
state zones tend to
become havens for the new enemies of global order. As the UN Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi noted, the events
of Sept. 11th were “…A wakeup call, [leading many]…to realize that even small countries, far away, like Afghanistan cannot be left to
sink to the depths to which Afghanistan has sunk.”36 Decaying
states give extremist groups freedom of
operation, with dangerous resulting consequences a world away. This hazard applies even to
seemingly disconnected state failures. Sierra Leone’s collapse in the 1990s, for example,
certainly was of little concern to policymakers in Washington and had little to do with radical
Islamic terrorist groups. The tiny West African state, nonetheless, has since served as a critical
node in the fundraising efforts of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.37
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AIDS creates a huge number of orphans who become child soldiers—this causes war,
makes it bloodier, and causes peace efforts to fail
Singer, 2 (Peter, John M. Olin Post-doctoral Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, Survival, Spring. This is not the bioethicist/activist
Peter Singer.)
Because of the overwhelming advantage U.S. forces have, Iraq's child soldiers will not change the final strategic outcome. However,
experiences from around the globe demonstrate that children make effective combatants and
often operate with terrifying audacity, particularly when infused with religious or political
fervor or when under the influence of narcotics. In general, children on the battlefield add to the overall
confusion of battle. Such units can slow down the progress of U.S. forces, particularly in urban
areas, and needlessly add to casualty totals on both sides. For professional forces, child soldiers present the
essential quandary, perhaps even more difficult than the issue of civilian casualties. Children are traditionally considered outside the
scope of war. Yet, now they are potential threats to soldiers' lives and missions. Using children as soldiers presents two added
concerns. First, children are not seen as hated enemies. U.S. soldiers usually exhibit a great amount
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of empathy toward children in war-torn counties. Consequently, engagements with child soldiers
can be incredibly demoralizing for professional troops and can also affect unit cohesion. For
example, there was little official dilemma or controversy over Allied actions against the Hitler Jugend in 1945. The youths were fighting
to defend an absolutely evil regime, and the general agreement among the Allies was that Hitler's regime had to be completely
defeated. Yet, the experience of fighting against the Jugend was so unsettling to U.S. Armed Forces
that troop morale fell to some of the lowest points of the entire war.(12) Likewise, British forces
operating in West Africa in 2001 faced deep problems of clinical depression and post-traumatic
stress disorder among individual soldiers who had faced child soldiers. (13) A second
consideration is the public-affairs nightmare that surrounds the use of child soldiers. In the
reports on the initial engagements with child soldiers, both the Arab and international press
focused on the immediate act of U.S. soldiers shooting Iraqi children, rather than on the context that led
them to be forced into such a terrible dilemma. The children were portrayed as heroic martyrs defending their
homes, facing the American Goliath. This image obviously damages U.S. public information efforts to
demonstrate the rightness of a cause or the special care U.S. and allied forces take to protect
innocents. The potential backlash could imperil already tenuous support from regional
allies and harden attitudes elsewhere against giving aid to the United States in the
broader war on terrorism. The backlash could increase popular support and recruiting for
terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda, who could claim to be avenging the youth. Finally, the effect caused by
seeing photographs of tiny bodies could become potent fodder for congressional criticism and
antiwar protestors.(14) These points underscore the general proviso that military force should only be used when and
where objectives warrant.
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As AIDS-affected rural households lose salary earners and agricultural labor, many are turning
to natural resources as a safety net. Activities such as hunting, fishing and charcoal making
increase as families seek alternative livelihoods. More water, firewood and medicinal plants are consumed
by households caring for the sick and timber logging has accelerated in many areas to supply
the growing coffin industry (Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group 2002, Barany et al. 2005). These widely
reported increases in resource use may not be sustainable and pose a long-term threat to
communities and their ecological wellbeing.
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The economic unit hit hardest by HIV/AIDS, however, is the family—especially as businesses and
governments under stress reduce benefits and shift costs to them. Studies in several countries in Africa have
shown that in families with an HIV/AIDS-infected adult, children eat less and are less likely to attend school, because they must work
to replace lost income and care for the sick adult. In one study of Cote d'Ivoire households experiencing HIV/AIDS-related deaths,
spending on schooling dropped by 50 percent and food consumption decreased by 41 percent, while health care costs quadrupled.
The cost to families and individuals will also reduce discretionary spending and the demand for
consumer goods, which could affect American exporters as well as local producers. In South Africa, JD
Group, a leading local manufacturer of small appliances and furniture, found that increased spending on HIV/AIDS-related expenses
would reduce discretionary spending on durable consumer goods. To ensure its market base, it opened retail outlets in Eastern
Europe. Shrinking
markets in AIDS-affected countries in the developing world could reduce investment
and increase inflation, further slowing already sluggish growth and reinforcing the
macroeconomic downturn predicted by the World Bank. With 42 percent of American exports destined
for developing countries, the effect of HIV/AIDS on some of the largest developing markets in
the world could harm U.S. exporters.
Nuclear war.
Friedberg and Schoenfeld, 8
[Aaron, Prof. Politics. And IR @ Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and Visiting Scholar @ Witherspoon
Institute, and Gabriel, Senior Editor of Commentary and Wall Street Journal, “The Dangers of a Diminished
America”, 10-28, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html]
With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America's geostrategic dominance likely
to diminish? If so, what would that mean? One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across
the world is that the primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face
an entirely new and adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year's federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237 billion
from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and expensive domestic relief
programs. In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to lay out what
portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has suggested a possible reduction -- foreign aid.
This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden's comment hints at where
we may be headed: toward a major reduction in America's world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-
induced isolationism. Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already
intense before this crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular.
Precipitous withdrawal -- attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion -- might well
become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions. Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow
stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun
to gather support among many Democrats and some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of
protectionism will blow. Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial
architecture. For decades now, Americans have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of that system. The worldwide use of
the dollar, and the stability of our economy, among other things, made it easier for us to run huge budget deficits, as we counted on
foreigners to pick up the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a safe haven. Will this be possible in the future? Meanwhile,
traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and Islamic
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terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished. Iran and North Korea are continuing on their
bellicose paths, while Pakistan and Afghanistan are progressing smartly down the road to
chaos. Russia's new militancy and China's seemingly relentless rise also give cause for concern. If
America now tries to pull back from the world stage, it will leave a dangerous power vacuum.
The stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing commitment to Europe, and our
position as defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply lines could all be
placed at risk. In such a scenario there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade and finance ground nearly
to a halt, the peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and aggressive powers led by the remorseless fanatics
who rose up on the crest of economic disaster exploited their divisions. Today we run the risk
that rogue states may choose to become ever more reckless with their nuclear toys, just at our
moment of maximum vulnerability. The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly
rock our principal strategic competitors even harder than they will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the
Russian stock market has demonstrated the fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on high oil prices,
now driven down by the global slowdown. China is perhaps even more fragile, its economic growth depending heavily on
foreign investment and access to foreign markets. Both will now be constricted, inflicting economic pain and perhaps even sparking
unrest in a country where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long march to prosperity. None
of this is good news if
the authoritarian leaders of these countries seek to divert attention from internal travails with
external adventures. As for our democratic friends, the present crisis comes when many European nations are struggling to
deal with decades of anemic growth, sclerotic governance and an impending demographic crisis. Despite its past dynamism, Japan
faces similar challenges. India is still in the early stages of its emergence as a world economic and geopolitical power. What does this
all mean? There is no substitute for America on the world stage. The choice we have before us is between the
potentially disastrous effects of disengagement and the stiff price tag of continued American leadership. Are we up for the task? The
American economy has historically demonstrated remarkable resilience. Our market-oriented ideology, entrepreneurial culture,
flexible institutions and favorable demographic profile should serve us well in whatever trials lie ahead. The American people, too,
have shown reserves of resolve when properly led. But experience after the Cold War era -- poorly articulated and executed policies,
divisive domestic debates and rising anti-Americanism in at least some parts of the world -- appear to have left these reserves
diminished. A recent survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs found that 36% of respondents agreed that the U.S. should "stay
out of world affairs," the highest number recorded since this question was first asked in 1947. The economic crisis could be
the straw that breaks the camel's back.
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Aids causes genocide, ethnic cleansing, and economic collapse—this both makes war more
likely and magnifies its impact
Singer, 2 (Peter, John M. Olin Post-doctoral Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, Survival, Spring. This is not the bioethicist/activist
Peter Singer.)
A recurring themes at all of these meetings was the new danger presented by the epidemic, not just in terms of direct victims of the
disease itself, but also to international security. Speaking at the UN Security Council session, James Wolfensohn, the head of the World
Bank, stated, “Many of us used to think of AIDS as a health issue. We were wrong…nothing we have seen is a greater
challenge to the peace and stability of African societies than the epidemic of aids…we face a major
development crisis, and more than that, a security crisis.”2 Peter Piot, chairman of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS),
similarly noted that “Conflicts and AIDS are linked like evil twins.”3 In fact, this connection made between the
epidemic of AIDS and the danger of increased instability and war was also one of the few continuities between the way the Clinton and
Bush administration foreign policy teams saw the world. Basing its assessment on a
CIA report that discussed an increased
prospects of “revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, genocide, and disruptive regime transitions”
because of the disease, the Clinton Administration declared it a “national security threat” in 2000.4 While it was originally
accused of pandering to certain activist groups, by the time of Secretary Powell’s confirmation hearings the next year, the lead foreign
policy voice of the new administration had also declared it a “national security problem.” He later affirmed that it
presented “a
clear and present danger to the world.”5 Similarly, US Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky stated that
“HIV/AIDS is a threat to security and global stability, plain and simple”6 The looming security implications of AIDS,
particularly within Africa, are thus now a baseline assumption of the disease’s danger. However, this threat has barely been fleshed
out and the mechanisms by which experts claim that “AIDS has changed the landscape of war” are barely understood. 7 This article
seeks to fill this space. AIDS
not only threatens to heighten the risks of war, but also multiply its
impact. The disease will hollow out military capabilities, as well as state capacities in general,
weakening both to the point of failure and collapse. Moreover, at these times of increased
vulnerability, the disease also creates new militant recruiting pools, who portend even greater
violence, as well putting in jeopardy certain pillars of international stability. In isolation, this
increased risk of war around the globe is bad enough, but there are also certain types of cross-
fertilization between the disease and conflict, intensifying the threat. The ultimate dynamic of
warfare and AIDS is that their combination makes both more likely and more devastating. It is
no overstatement that AIDS is “…the greatest disease challenge that humanity has faced in
modern history.”8 More people will die from the disease than any other disease outbreaks in
human history, including the global influenza epidemic of 1918-9 and the Bubonic Plague in the
1300s. Over 22 million worldwide have already been killed and it is projected that, at current
rates, another 100 million more will be infected just by 2005.9
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1NC – BioD
By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases,
so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s
in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each
new
animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined effects, could cause total
ecosystem collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster.
Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.
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--BioD O/W
Aside from the Great Dying, there have been four other mass extinctions, all of which severely pruned life's diversity. Scientists agree
that we're now in the midst of a sixth such episode. This new one, however, is different - and, in many ways, much worse. For, unlike
earlier extinctions, this one results from the work of a single species, Homo sapiens.We are relentlessly taking over the planet, laying it
to waste and eliminating most of our fellow species. Moreover, we're doing it much faster than the mass extinctions that came before.
Every year, up to 30,000 species disappear due to human activity alone. At this rate, we could lose
half of Earth's species in this century. And, unlike with previous extinctions, there's no hope that
biodiversity will ever recover, since the cause of the decimation - us - is here to stay. To scientists,
this is an unparalleled calamity, far more severe than global warming, which is, after all, only one of many threats to biodiversity. Yet
global warming gets far more press. Why? One reason is that, while the increase in temperature is easy to document, the decrease of
species is not. Biologists don't know, for example, exactly how many species exist on Earth. Estimates range widely, from three million
to more than 50 million, and that doesn't count microbes, critical (albeit invisible) components of ecosystems. We're not certain about
the rate of extinction, either; how could we be, since the vast majority of species have yet to be described? We're even less sure how
the loss of some species will affect the ecosystems in which they're embedded, since the intricate connection between organisms
means that the loss of a single species can ramify unpredictably. But we do know some things. Tropical rainforests are disappearing
at a rate of 2 percent per year. Populations of most large fish are down to only 10 percent of what they were in 1950. Many primates
and all the great apes - our closest relatives - are nearly gone from the wild. And we know that extinction and global warming act
synergistically. Extinction exacerbates global warming: By burning rainforests, we're not only polluting the atmosphere with carbon
dioxide (a major greenhouse gas) but destroying the very plants that can remove this gas from the air. Conversely, global warming
increases extinction, both directly (killing corals) and indirectly (destroying the habitats of Arctic and Antarctic animals). As extinction
increases, then, so does global warming, which in turn causes more extinction - and so on, into a downward spiral of destruction.
Why, exactly, should we care? Let's start with the most celebrated case: the rainforests. Their loss will worsen global warming -
raising temperatures, melting icecaps, and flooding coastal cities. And, as the forest habitat shrinks, so begins the inevitable contact
between organisms that have not evolved together, a scenario played out many times, and one that is never good. Dreadful diseases
have successfully jumped species boundaries, with humans as prime recipients. We have gotten aids from apes, sars from civets, and
Ebola from fruit bats. Additional worldwide plagues from unknown microbes are a very real possibility. But it isn't just the
destruction of the rainforests that should trouble us. Healthy
ecosystems the world over provide hidden
services like waste disposal, nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, and oxygen
production. Such services are best rendered by ecosystems that are diverse. Yet, through both intention and accident, humans
have introduced exotic species that turn biodiversity into monoculture. Fast-growing zebra mussels, for example, have outcompeted
more than 15 species of native mussels in North America's Great Lakes and have damaged harbors and water-treatment plants. Native
prairies are becoming dominated by single species (often genetically homogenous) of corn or wheat. Thanks to these developments,
soils will erode and become unproductive - which, along with temperature change, will diminish agricultural yields. Meanwhile,with
increased pollution and runoff, as well as reduced forest cover, ecosystems will no longer be
able to purify water; and a shortage of clean water spells disaster. In many ways, oceans are the most
vulnerable areas of all. As overfishing eliminates major predators, while polluted and warming waters kill off phytoplankton, the
intricate aquatic food web could collapse from both sides. Fish, on which so many humans depend, will be a fond memory. As
phytoplankton vanish, so does the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. (Half of the oxygen we breathe
is made by phytoplankton, with the rest coming from land plants.) Species extinction is also imperiling coral reefs - a major problem
since these reefs have far more than recreational value: They provide tremendous amounts of food for human populations and buffer
coastlines against erosion. In fact, the global value of "hidden" services provided by ecosystems - those services, like waste disposal,
that aren't bought and sold in the marketplace - has been estimated to be as much as $50 trillion per year, roughly equal to the gross
domestic product of all countries combined. And that doesn't include tangible goods like fish and timber. Life as we know it
would be impossible if ecosystems collapsed. Yet that is where we're heading if species extinction continues at its
current pace. Extinction also has a huge impact on medicine. Who really cares if, say, a worm in the remote swamps of French
Guiana goes extinct? Well, those who suffer from cardiovascular disease. The recent discovery of a rare South American leech has led
to the isolation of a powerful enzyme that, unlike other anticoagulants, not only prevents blood from clotting but also dissolves
existing clots. And it's not just this one species of worm: Its wriggly relatives have evolved other biomedically valuable proteins,
including antistatin (a potential anticancer agent), decorsin and ornatin (platelet aggregation inhibitors), and hirudin (another
anticoagulant). Plants, too, are pharmaceutical gold mines. The bark of trees, for example, has given us quinine (the first cure for
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mosquitoes keeps the vector populations in check. So the loss of biodiversity is itself a
threat to public health, and not only in the deforested Amazon; the denatured suburbs of the
United States bear increasing risks, too. Throughout the U.S., the patchy woodlands interspersed
among suburban homes are breeding grounds for Lyme disease, a flulike illness that can
produce neurological disorders and become impossible to cure. The ideal incubator for the
Lyme bacterium is the white-footed mouse, a remarkable survivor in fragmented habitats.
Infected mice don't get sick, but they allow the pathogen to multiply and pass it on to ticks who
feed on all the local mammals, including humans. Other kinds of forest life—opossums,
thrushes, flying squirrels—don't transmit the disease as well to ticks (they're "incompetent
hosts"), but fewer and fewer of them remain in the forests. The rising incidence of Lyme disease—27,000 cases
in the U.S. in 2007—is a direct result of disappearing forests and the decline of species. "The more nonmouse hosts you have in an
ecosystem," Ostfeld says, "the more of the ticks' blood meals will be taken off a host that will not infect them. That will make more of
the ticks harmless." Instead, ticks are finding their way to more disease-bearing mice because the mice are increasingly rid of both
their competitors and their predators—foxes, weasels, owls. A one- or two-acre scrap of forest poses five times more risk for Lyme
disease than a habitat of even five or six acres, with just a few more diverse species. A similar lack of ecological complexity is
responsible for the respiratory disease caused by hantavirus—which has a staggering mortality rate of one in three cases—and the
neurological disease caused by West Nile virus. These are not risks limited to bushwhackers and remote rice farmers. West Nile virus
landed in New York City in 1999 and, by 2004, reached the West Coast, having found ready reservoir hosts in several common bird
species and effective mosquito carriers. "We had vectors, in a sense, sitting in wait," says Ostfeld. "All we needed was the virus to jump
the pond." The risk of infection rises as the number of bird species falls: living in a town with more than just the common run of
birds—American robins, house sparrows, blue jays and common grackles—makes you 10 times less likely to be infected. But there's a
reason that most populated areas don't have much more than the common run, Ostfeld explains. "Those happen to be the bird species
that do really well in human-disturbed landscapes."
It destroyed the Roman Empire, wiped out most of the New World and killed millions in
Europe. How disease - not just Mexico's swine fever - has shaped the planet SCIENTISTS call it the
Big Die Off, when a terrifying new virus rips through a species and kills up to a third of the entire population.
And we all now could be facing a new apocalypse, though no one yet knows how potent the new strain of Mexican
swine fever will be, or how many millions could die. Yet if history teaches us anything it tells us that the greatest
danger the human race faces is not some crackpot North Korean dictator but a six-gene virus
that could wipe out one third of the global population. Our real enemy, a new plague virus, is so
small you can barely see it even with an advanced electron microscope. It has no morality, no
thought or no plan. All it wants to do is reproduce itself inside another human body. We are
just another biological opportunity, a nice warm place to feed and replicate. Viruses are as old as life itself.
What is startling though is how vulnerable our globalised societies are to the threat of a new deadly plague. Before World Health
Organisation scientists could identify this new H1N1 virus it had travelled halfway across the world
via international flights.
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We’re on the brink now-Biodiversity loss leads to a growing drain on the economy and
poorest people in the world losing their livelihood
Dugan 8, “Loss of biodiversity threatens livelihoods of world's poorest”, The Independent,
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/loss-of-biodiversity-threatens-livelihoods-of-worlds-poorest-836754.html
Mass extinctions of plants and animals could have a severe impact on the living
standards of the poorest people on the planet and cost up to £40bn a year, the first
major report into the economic impact of biodiversity loss has found. Scientists say biodiversity
is facing its greatest threat in millions of years, with three species dying out every hour. Now,
the economic cost of such destruction has been assessed. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity
(Teeb) review analyses the financial impact of the loss of natural life. It is hoped that, like the Stern Review of Climate Change, which
revolutionised the way countries looked at the economics of global warming, this report will galvanise government support for tackling
the problem. Mankindis causing almost £40bn-worth of damage to land ecosystems each year,
which is directly responsible for crises such as rocketing food prices. "Urgent remedial action is essential
because species loss and ecosystem degradation are inextricably linked to human well-being," said the report's author Pavan Sukhdev.
The Earth could lose 11 per cent of its natural areas by 2050 if we fail to combat loss of species
diversity. Agriculture, the expansion of infrastructure and climate change would all contribute
to this decline. "The loss of biodiversity and ecosystems is a threat to the functioning
of our planet, our economy and society," the study, funded by the EU and the German
government, warns. Environmentalists welcomed the report's "Stern-like" recognition of biodiversity. The subject has failed
to draw the same funding and interest as climate change despite links between the issues. "Biodiversity is not just a green
issue – it is life support, providing food, fuel, fibre, medicines, pollination, soil fertility and
water, said Gordon Shepherd, WWF International's director of international policy. "We have
to integrate biodiversity in all policies. The loss of biodiversity is now affecting the economy
through the depletion of fish stocks from overfishing and illegal fishing to agricultural activities
polluting river basins. The Teeb report recognises the economic value of biodiversity for the
millions of people directly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods." Overfishing is
one of the key areas explored in the study, which says all of the world's fisheries are likely to
have collapsed within 50 years if current trends are not reversed. For the billion people who
rely on fish protein, this would have a devastating impact. Deforestation, by those seeking a
profit from the woodlands, also causes a decline in species by destroying their habitats. It
makes the ground less productive for cultivation and fewer trees results in less CO2 being
absorbed, thus aiding global warming. This week, 60 countries meeting in Bonn pledged to halt
net deforestation by 2020.
Nuclear war.
Friedberg and Schoenfeld, 8
[Aaron, Prof. Politics. And IR @ Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and Visiting Scholar @ Witherspoon
Institute, and Gabriel, Senior Editor of Commentary and Wall Street Journal, “The Dangers of a Diminished
America”, 10-28, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html]
With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America's geostrategic dominance likely
to diminish? If so, what would that mean? One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across
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the world is that the primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face
an entirely new and adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year's federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237 billion
from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and expensive domestic relief
programs. In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to lay out what
portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has suggested a possible reduction -- foreign aid.
This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden's comment hints at where
we may be headed: toward a major reduction in America's world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-
induced isolationism. Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already
intense before this crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular.
Precipitous withdrawal -- attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion -- might well
become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions. Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow
stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun
to gather support among many Democrats and some Republicans. In a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of
protectionism will blow. Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial
architecture. For decades now, Americans have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of that system. The worldwide use of
the dollar, and the stability of our economy, among other things, made it easier for us to run huge budget deficits, as we counted on
foreigners to pick up the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a safe haven. Will this be possible in the future? Meanwhile,
traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and Islamic
terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished. Iran and North Korea are continuing on their
bellicose paths, while Pakistan and Afghanistan are progressing smartly down the road to
chaos. Russia's new militancy and China's seemingly relentless rise also give cause for concern. If
America now tries to pull back from the world stage, it will leave a dangerous power vacuum.
The stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing commitment to Europe, and our
position as defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply lines could all be
placed at risk. In such a scenario there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade and finance ground nearly
to a halt, the peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and aggressive powers led by the remorseless fanatics
who rose up on the crest of economic disaster exploited their divisions. Today we run the risk
that rogue states may choose to become ever more reckless with their nuclear toys, just at our
moment of maximum vulnerability. The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly
rock our principal strategic competitors even harder than they will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the
Russian stock market has demonstrated the fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on high oil prices,
now driven down by the global slowdown. China is perhaps even more fragile, its economic growth depending heavily on
foreign investment and access to foreign markets. Both will now be constricted, inflicting economic pain and perhaps even sparking
unrest in a country where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long march to prosperity. None
of this is good news if
the authoritarian leaders of these countries seek to divert attention from internal travails with
external adventures. As for our democratic friends, the present crisis comes when many European nations are struggling to
deal with decades of anemic growth, sclerotic governance and an impending demographic crisis. Despite its past dynamism, Japan
faces similar challenges. India is still in the early stages of its emergence as a world economic and geopolitical power. What does this
all mean? There is no substitute for America on the world stage. The choice we have before us is between the
potentially disastrous effects of disengagement and the stiff price tag of continued American leadership. Are we up for the task? The
American economy has historically demonstrated remarkable resilience. Our market-oriented ideology, entrepreneurial culture,
flexible institutions and favorable demographic profile should serve us well in whatever trials lie ahead. The American people, too,
have shown reserves of resolve when properly led. But experience after the Cold War era -- poorly articulated and executed policies,
divisive domestic debates and rising anti-Americanism in at least some parts of the world -- appear to have left these reserves
diminished. A recent survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs found that 36% of respondents agreed that the U.S. should "stay
out of world affairs," the highest number recorded since this question was first asked in 1947. The economic crisis could be
the straw that breaks the camel's back.
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Fewer species means crops are more susceptible to being wiped out by a single disease
causing mass starvation—Ireland proves
Bryant 94, “BIODIVERSITY: VARIETIES ARE THE SPICE OF LIFE; As rich and poor countries lock horns over who has the right to exploit the
world's plant resources, we look at the risks of ignoring a vital lesson of nature”, The Guardian, Lexis
Second, there is the danger of relying on fewer species for our food. The world now relies on
only 30 plant species for 95 per cent of its food needs. The huge variation within those few plant species is
important. Different varieties are adapted to dealing with different pests, diseases and growing
conditions, so seeds can be chosen to suit particular conditions. Losing diversity means reducing
a variety's ability to adapt to changing conditions and therefore making it vulnerable to disease.
Once a genetic variation within a variety is lost, it cannot be recaptured - it is lost forever. Take
the potato again. This vegetable originated in the Andes mountains in Latin America, and one
variety of potato was introduced to Spain and then to Britain in the late 1570s. For 250 years all the
potatoes grown in Europe were descendants of these two introductions. In Ireland, the potato became the staple
crop of the poor, and one-third of the population was totally dependent on it for food. When
the potato blight (Phytophtora infestans) struck in 1845, it wiped out Ireland's entire crop; that
particular variety of potato had no resistance to the disease. Between one and two million
people died of starvation partly because of this lack of biodiversity.
In Rome, Reuters reported Jacques Diouf, head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, warning
that with 37 countries already in crisis, each day brings greater risk of global famine . "I'm surprised
that I have not been summoned to the UN Security Council," Diouf said. "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of
starvation, they will react." India's finance minister was more direct. "It is becoming starker by the day," Palaniappan
Chidambaram said. "Unless we act fast for a global consensus on the price spiral, the social unrest
induced by food prices in several countries will conflagrate into a global contagion, leaving no
country -- developed or otherwise -- unscathed."
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Biodiversity is vital to preserve natural resources and prevent poverty, hunger, and war.
Justforests.org 08, www.justforests.org/.../Wol%20PRESS%20RELEASE%20mullingar.doc
Biodiversity includes the living resources we all use for food, fuel, shelter, medicine, crafts and
tools – such as trees, wild animals, crops, livestock, mushrooms and so on. It is fundamental to
human development and the well-being of us all. It is now clearly established that the loss of
biodiversity leads to poverty, hunger, dependency and in some countries, conflict and war.
Biodiversity is all forms of life on our planet –including plants, fungi, insects, fish, reptiles,
amphibians, birds, and mammals –and their habitats.
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Although China is an autocratic state, it still has legitimate security interests. The United States
would be smart to show some empathy with those concerns. In recent years, as the United States has become
alarmed at China’s expanded military spending, the Chinese have also become alarmed at large increases in the U.S. defense budget
and U.S. attacks on the sovereign nations of Serbia and Iraq. Many Chinese see the threat of an expanding U.S. empire that aims at
encircling China and preventing its legitimate rise to great power status. To lessen such perceptions and reduce the chance of conflict
between the two nuclear-armed nations, the United States should retract its forward military and alliance posture in Asia, including
repudiating any implied commitment to defend Taiwan. With
large bodies of water as moats and the most
formidable nuclear arsenal in the world, the United States hardly needs a security perimeter
that stretches across the entire Pacific Ocean to protect it from China. If the United States
continues to maintain an outdated Cold War-style empire, it is bound to come into needless
conflict with other powers, especially China. Instead of emulating the policies of pre-World War I Britain toward
Germany, the United States should take a page from another chapter in British history. In the late 1800s, although not without tension,
the British peacefully allowed the fledging United States to rise as a great power, knowing both
countries were protected by the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean that separated them. Taking advantage of that same kind separation by
a major ocean, the
United States could also safely allow China to obtain respect as a great power,
with a sphere of influence to match. If China went beyond obtaining a reasonable sphere of
influence into an Imperial Japanese-style expansion, the United States could very well need to
mount a challenge. However, at present, little evidence exists of Chinese intent for such
expansion, which would run counter to recent Chinese history. Therefore, a U.S. policy of coexistence, rather than
neo-containment, might avoid a future catastrophic war or even a nuclear conflagration.
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Chinese-made weapons and ammunition are plentiful in Africa, and China does not usually
impose political, human rights, or humanitarian conditions on arms sales, though it has refused to
supply un-sanctioned states such as Ivory Coast. Countries like Sudan and Zimbabwe are reportedly major
recipients of Chinese weapons. China has supplied 12 fighter jets and 100 trucks to the army in Zimbabwe, a country
subject to an arms embargo by the United States and the EU, though Beijing has turned down other Zimbabwean requests. China has
supplied the Khartoum govern- ment with arms since at least 1985, with transfers between 1985 and 1989 totalling $50 million.
China became Sudan’s principal arms sup- plier around 1994 and remains so to this day. It is estimated that as much as 80 percent
of the revenue generated by Sudan’s oil fields has been invested in fighting the recently resolved north- south civil war, the ongoing
conflict in Darfur, and the mounting conflict in the country’s northeast. China has threatened to use its veto on the un Security
Council to protect Khartoum from pro- posed oil sanctions and has been able to dilute every resolution on the killing in Darfur in
order to protect its interests. This is not surprising, since China is against sanctions in principle . Assistant
Foreign Minister Zhai Jun in January was clear: “Using pressure and imposing sanctions is not practical and will not help settle the
issue.” Sudan exported 14 million barrels of crude to China in 2006 and is currently the only country in Africa where oil is produced
by Chinese companies. (All the other imports result from production-sharing agreements with other companies.)
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1NC – Oil
"Within a decade, the US will be heavily dependent on African oil. Little wonder the Pentagon is preparing a
strategy for the region." This article originally appeared in The New Statesman (UK). The Pentagon is to reorganize its military
command structure in response to growing fears that the United States is seriously ill-equipped to fight the war against terrorism in
Africa. It is a dramatic move, and an admission that the US must reshape its whole military policy if it is to maintain control of Africa for
the duration of what Donald Rumsfeld has called "the long war." Suddenly
the world's most neglected continent is
assuming an increasing global importance as the international oil industry begins to exploit
more and more of the west coast of Africa's abundant reserves. The Pentagon at present has five geographic
Unified Combatant Commands around the world, and responsibility for Africa is awkwardly divided among three of these. Most of
Africa - a batch of 43 countries - falls under the European Command (Eucom), with the remainder divided between the Pacific
Command and Central Command (which also runs the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Now the Pentagon - under the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and the defense department - is working on formal proposals for a unified military command for the continent under the name
"Africom." This significant shift in US relations with Africa comes in the face of myriad threats: fierce economic competition from Asia;
increasing resource nationalism in Russia and South America; and instability in the Middle East that threatens to spill over into Africa.
"The US must reshape its whole military policy if it is to maintain control of Africa ." The Pentagon
hopes to finalize Africom's structure, location and budget this year. The expectation is that it can break free from Eucom and become
operative by mid-2008. "The break from Europe will occur before 30 September 2008," Professor Peter Pham, a US adviser on Africa
to the Pentagon told the New Statesman. "The independent command should be up and running by this time next year." A Pentagon
source says the new command, which was originally given the green light by the controversial former US defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, is likely to be led by William "Kip" Ward, the US army's only four-star African-American general. In 2005, Ward was
appointed the US security envoy to the Middle East and he is reportedly close to President George W. Bush. He also has boots-on-the-
ground experience in Africa: he was a commander during Bill Clinton's ill-fated mission in Somalia in 1993 and he served as a military
America's new Africa strategy reflects its
representative in Egypt in 1998. Ward is now the deputy head of Eucom.
key priorities in the Middle East: oil and counter-terrorism. Currently, the US has in place the loosely defined
Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative, incorporating an offshoot of Operation Enduring Freedom that is intended to keep terrorist
networks out of the vast, unguarded Sahel. But the lack of a coherent and unified policy on Africa is, according to some observers,
hampering America's efforts in the Middle East. US military sources estimate that up to a quarter of all foreign fighters in Iraq are from
Africa, mostly from Algeria and Morocco. Moreover, there is increasing alarm within the US defense establishment at the creeping
"radicalization" of Africa's Muslims, helped along by the export of hardline, Wahhabi-style clerics from the Arabian peninsula. "The
terrorist challenge [has] increased in Africa in the past year - it's gotten a new lease on life," according to Pham. But it is the west's
increasing dependency on African oil that gives particular urgency to these new directions in the fight against terrorism. Africa's
enormous, and largely untapped, reserves are already more important to the west than most Americans recognize. In March 2006,
speaking before the Senate armed services committee, General James Jones, the then head of Eucom, said: "Africa
currently
provides over 15 per cent of US oil imports, and recent explorations in the Gulf of Guinea region
indicate potential reserves that could account for 25-35 per cent of US imports within the next
decade." "Africa's enormous, and largely untapped, reserves are already more important to the
west than most Americans recognize." These high-quality reserves - West African oil is typically low in sulphur
and thus ideal for refining - are easily accessible by sea to western Europe and the US. In 2005, the
US imported more oil from the Gulf of Guinea than it did from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
combined. Within the next ten years it will import more oil from Africa than from the entire
Middle East. Western oil giants such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, France's Total and Britain's BP and Shell plan to invest
tens of billions of dollars in sub-Saharan Africa (far in excess of "aid" inflows to the region). But though the Gulf of
Guinea is one of the few parts of the world where oil production is poised to increase exponentially in the near
future, it is also one of the most unstable.
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a disaster of such magnitude could be repeated within this century because of human activities.
Mark Lynas, an author who has written extensively on global warming and recently travelled around the world cataloguing impacts of
climate change, said the findings must be a wake-up call for politicians and citizens alike. "This
is a global emergency," he
said. "We
are heading for disaster and yet the world is still on fossil fuel autopilot. There needs to
be an immediate phase-out of coal, oil and gas, and a phase-in of clean energy sources. "People
can no longer ignore this looming catastrophe."
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1. Our Thompson 07 ev says the US has become reliant on African oil. In years, it will
account for 35% of supply, usurping the Middle East – but SSA instability threatens the
global market.
Despite the optimism, the possible impact of the West African oil and gas reserves should however not be overestimated. The West
African oil province (the so-called Ecowas region or Gulf of Guinea) holds 33.8 bln barrels of proven oil reserves, 3.1% of the global
total. Taking into account unproven reserves increases West Africa's share to around 7% of the world's total. In comparison to known
oil reserves in the Middle East - 690 bln barrels - West Africa is at present nothing more than a
minor player. Much of
West Africa's oil reserves are offshore and thus more expensive to extract. While analysts look to the
potential of West African oil to stabilize the international oil markets by adding a new layer of supply under the current volatile oil
sector, giving traders and consumers more leeway to cope with crisis such as strikes in Venezuela or an Iraq war, current optimism is
based on prerequisites of stability in the region, increased foreign investment, transparency and liberalization in the domestic
Revolutions, violence, ethnic unrest and
petroleum sectors of West Africa and geo-strategic considerations.
corruption undermine the growth potential of the petroleum sector in this vast region. Domestic
political strife brought several African countries to a standstill this past year. In March, international oil majors
ChevronTexaco and Shell were forced to suspend production in the Niger Delta region following violent clashes
and even outright kidnapping of international personnel. The 266,000 barrels per day (bpd) of lost oil
represented approximately 13% of Nigeria's total average production of 2.1 million bpd. International oil markets felt the pressure.
The ever-growing illicit small-arms trade has added fuel to the fire. Warlords have wreaked
havoc in huge countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, parts of Nigeria and Liberia. Over the last
months, international security services from the U.S, the EU and Asia, have turned their attention to al-Qaeda operatives in West
African countries, such as Mauritania, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. Illegal finance schemes involving diamonds, arms and
terrorist networks have also surfaced. Bi- or even multilateral border disputes over control of potentially
oil rich territories pose a threat to on- and offshore developments. Congo and Angola are in
conflict over access to offshore oil; according to Congo the dispute is depriving it of as much as 200,000 bpd.
Nigeria has multiple disputes with other states, of which the disputed Bakassi peninsula is the most pressing one. Since West African
oil producing states are almost solely dependent on oil income, volatile international oil prices have profound impact on local
economies, leading, as in the case of Nigeria, to potentially
paralyzing national strikes. Oil related corruption
is rampant in the region. According to Transparency International, Nigeria is the world's second most corrupt
country, and corruption is growing in Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Ghana, and various other West
African countries, including oil newcomers such as Sao Tome, whose government was just toppled by a military coup. In an effort
to combat this problem, a push for transparency and liberalization has increased pressure on international oil operators, such as Shell
or BP, to open their books. The "Publish What You Pay" campaign, sponsored by George Soros' Open Society Institute and Global
Witness, and supported by over 130 NGOs, has called on international extraction companies to "publish net taxes, fees, royalties, and
other payments made so civil society can more accurately assess the amount of money misappropriated and lobby for full
transparency in local government spending." Underlining the effort, British Prime Minister Blair announced the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative, endorsed by a coalition of institutional investors, during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg this past September. Nigeria, by far the largest West African producer, provides a concrete
example of the risks of relying on the region. Nigeria was the fifth largest crude exporter to the US in 2002, behind
Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada and Venezuela. According to the DOE's Energy Information Administration (EIA,) Nigeria's exports to
the U.S. declined from 842,000 bpd in 2001 (9.03% of total U.S. imports) to around 567,000 bpd in 2002 (6.27% of
U.S. imported crude oil.) Increased reliance on Nigeria means increased exposure to unrest, disputes and
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instability in this volatile country. Since Nigeria is a member of OPEC its crude oil exports are also limited by the oil
cartel's policy restrictions, which already constrain further expansion of production.
In Nigeria, political corruption, criminal networks, violent Islamist groups, and domestic rebels
threaten to take the world's eighth-largest oil exporter off the market. It is estimated that 70,000 to
300,000 barrels of oil are stolen daily in Nigeria. Even at the low end of this estimate, this would generate more
than $1.5 billion every year -- more than enough capital to buy arms and political influence and
threaten the government's survival. Another 500,000 bpd have been taken off the market by the recent kidnappings
and violence perpetuated by the Movement for the Emancipation of the People of the Niger Delta. [See: "Intelligence Brief: Iran,
Nigeria"] In the midst of this instability, the world's largest and second-largest oil importers are playing an increasingly dangerous
game of power politics. For both Washington
and Beijing, the nightmare of rebel groups halting oil
extraction in the delta -- which will dry up revenues on which the northern elites depend, potentially leading to
a northern Muslim general ousting the president -- appears distinctly possible.
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The price of oil is what investors look to when making investment decisions – high oil
prices cause alternative energy investment
Huang et. al 11 (Alex YiHou, Department of Finance, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan, Chiao-Ming Cheng Graduate School of Management, Yuan Ze University,
Taiwan, Chih-Chun Chen Graduate School of Management, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan, Wen-Cheng Hu Graduate School of Management, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan “Oil
Prices and Stock Prices of Alternative Energy Companies: Time Varying Relationship with Recent Evidence” http://www.southwesternfinance.org/conf-
2011/swfa2011_submission_30.pdf kdej)
In sum, whileprice uncertainty of crude oil rises and green energy gains greater deal of attention
in recent years, the interrelationships between oil prices and stock performances of alternative
energy companies become more significant. For Periods I and II, time before the Lebanon War from 2001 to
late 2006, no causality is shown from oil prices to ECO index or vice verse, implying that the movements of crude oil prices
do not affect how the investors trade with the stocks of alternative energy industry. In the most recent period, when
oil
prices reach historical high and crash back with volatile dynamics, oil price behavior becomes
responsible for stock performances of alternative energy companies. Also only recently, the
dynamics in oil trading also depend on how stocks of oil companies perform. These results add to
literature showing that investors of alternative energy companies conduct their trading decisions
upon observation of crude oil price shocks. The two markets, i.e. crude oil market and stock market
for green energy sector, seem to be more closely interactive with each other. The full picture of how the
crude oil markets react to the development of green energy, however, requires additional examinations and is certainly an
area worthy of future exploration.
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--Warming O/W
Warming causes all scenarios for war and makes them more destructive
Schwarts, 3 Peter Schwartz, chair of the Global Business Network, and Doug Randall, co-head of the Global Business Network’s
consulting practice, October ‘3 (An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security, p. Google)
Today, carrying capacity, which is the ability for the Earth and its natural ecosystems including social, economic, and cultural
systems to support the finite number of people on the planet, is being challenged around the world. According to the
International Energy Agency, global demand for oil will grow by 66% in the next 30 years, but it’s unclear where the supply will come
from. Clean water is similarly constrained in many areas around the world. With 815 million people receiving insufficient sustenance
worldwide, some would say that as a globe, we’re living well above our carrying capacity, meaning there are not sufficient natural
resources to sustain our behavior. Many point to technological innovation and adaptive behavior as a means for managing the global
ecosystem. Indeed it has been technological progress that has increased carrying capacity over time. Over centuries we have learned
how to produce more food, energy and access more water. But will the potential of new technologies be sufficient when a crisis like
the one outlined in this scenario hits? Abrupt
climate change is likely to stretch carrying capacity well
beyond its already precarious limits. And there’s a natural tendency or need for carrying capacity to become realigned.
As abrupt climate change lowers the world’s carrying capacity aggressive wars are likely to be
fought over food, water, and energy. Deaths from war as well as starvation and disease will decrease population size,
which overtime, will re-balance with carrying capacity. When you look at carrying capacity on a regional or state level it is apparent
that those nations with a high carrying capacity, such as the United States and Western Europe, are likely to adapt most effectively to
abrupt changes in climate, because, relative to their population size, they have more resources to call on. This may give rise to a more
severe have, have-not mentality, causing resentment toward those nations with a higher carrying capacity. It may lead to finger-
pointing and blame, as the wealthier nations tend to use more energy and emit more greenhouse gasses such as CO2 into the
atmosphere. Less important than the scientifically proven relationship between CO2 emissions and climate change is the perception
that impacted nations have – and the actions they take. The Link Between Carrying Capacity and Warfare Steven LeBlanc,
Harvard archaeologist and author of a new book called Carrying Capacity, describes the relationship between carrying
capacity and warfare. Drawing on abundant archaeological and ethnological data, LeBlanc argues that historically humans
conducted organized warfare for a variety of reasons, including warfare over resources and the environment. Humans fight
when they outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment. Every time there is a choice
between starving and raiding, humans raid. From hunter/gatherers through agricultural tribes, chiefdoms, and early complex societies,
25% of a population’s adult males die when war breaks out. Peace occurs when carrying capacity goes up, as with
the invention of agriculture, newly effective bureaucracy, remote trade and technological breakthroughs. Also a large scale die-back
such as from plague can make for peaceful times---Europe after its major plagues, North American natives after European diseases
decimated their populations (that's the difference between the Jamestown colony failure and Plymouth Rock success). But such
peaceful periods are short-lived because population quickly rises to once again push against carrying capacity, and warfare resumes.
Indeed, over the millennia most societies define themselves according to their ability to conduct war, and warrior culture becomes
deeply ingrained. The most combative societies are the ones that survive. However in the last three centuries, LeBlanc points out,
advanced states have steadily lowered the body count even though individual wars and genocides
have grown larger in scale. Instead of slaughtering all their enemies in the traditional way, for example, states merely kill enough to
get a victory and then put the survivors to work in their newly expanded economy. States also use their own bureaucracies,
advanced technology, and international rules of behavior to raise carrying capacity and bear a more
careful relationship to it. All of that progressive behavior could collapse if carrying capacities
everywhere were suddenly lowered drastically by abrupt climate change. Humanity would
revert to its norm of constant battles for diminishing resources, which the battles themselves would further
reduce even beyond the climatic effects. Once again warfare would define human life.
We rate Global Climate Change as a greater threat for human extinction in this century. Most
scientists forecast disruptions and dislocations, if current trends persist. The extinction danger is more likely if we
alter an environmental process that causes harmful effects and leads to conditions that make
the planet uninhabitable to humans. Considering that there is so much that is unknown about
global systems, we consider climate change to be the greatest danger to human extinction.
However, there is no evidence of imminent danger. Nuclear war at some point in this century might happen.
It is unlikely to cause human extinction though. While several countries have nuclear weapons,
there are few with the firepower to annihilate the world. For those nations it would be suicidal to exercise that
option. The pattern is that the more destructive technology a nation has, the more it tends
towards rational behavior. Sophisticated precision weapons then become better tactical
options. The bigger danger comes from nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists with the help
of a rogue state, such as North Korea. The size of such an explosion would not be sufficient to
threaten humanity as a whole. Instead it could trigger a major war or even world war. Under this
scenario human extinction would only be possible if other threats were present, such as disease and
climate change. We monitor war separately. However we also need to incorporate the dangers here .
Even if we don’t win a 100% risk of warming vote to stop warming - need to avoid large
impacts.
Goodman, 7 Sheri Goodman [et al.], Executive Director of the Military Advisory Board, The CNA Corporation, ‘7 (National security and
the threat of climate change, The CNA Corporation Military Advisory Board, Google)
Adm. Bowman notes that today, a raging debate is underway over a potential set of climate-induced global
changes that could have a profound impact on America’s national security interests. Our Military Advisory Board has heard the
arguments, some depicting neardoomsday scenarios of severe weather and oceanic changes exacerbated by man-made emissions of
greenhouse gases to our environment, others depicting a much less severe outcome as merely one in many observed cyclic weather
patterns over time, with virtually no man-made component. Adm. Bowman concludes that regardless of the probability of
the occurrence, the projected weather-driven global events could be dire and could adversely
affect our national security and military options significantly. He therefore argues that the prudent course is to
begin planning, as we have in submarine operations, to develop a similar defense in depth that would reduce national security
risks even if this is a low probability event, given the potential magnitude of the consequences. He
feels that as the debate over cause, effect, and magnitude continues, we in the military should begin now to take action to provide a
resilient defense against the effects of severe climate change, not only within our own borders, but also to provide resiliency to those
regions of unrest and stress that already are threatening our national security today.
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The Mexican government depends on oil revenue for approximately 40 per cent of its budget.
Politicians have preferred to depend heavily on Pemex revenue instead of raising other taxes, leaving the
company indebted and lacking adequate funds in past years for exploration and maintenance. Non-oil tax revenue
amounts to approximately 10 per cent of GDP, one of the lowest rates in Latin America.
Yes, the “rapid collapse” of Mexico would change everything with respect to the global security
environment. Such a collapse would have enormous humanitarian, constitutional, economic,
cultural, and security implications for the U.S. It would seem the U.S. federal government,
indeed American society at large, would have little ability to focus serious attention on much
else in the world. The hypothetical collapse of Pakistan is a scenario that has already been well discussed. In the worst
case, the U.S. would be able to isolate itself from most effects emanating from south Asia. However, there would be no
running from a Mexican collapse.
The stakes are high. In modern history, the longest period of peace among the great powers has been the era of U.S. In modern
history, the longest period of peace among the great powers has been the era of U.S.
leadership. By contrast, multi-polar systems have been unstable, with their competitive dynamics
resulting in frequent crises and major wars among the great powers. Failures of multi-polar
international systems produced both world wars. American retrenchment could have devastating consequences.
Without an American security blanket, regional powers could rearm in an attempt to balance
against emerging threats. Under this scenario, there would be a heightened possibility of arms races,
miscalculation, or other crises spiraling into all-out conflict. Alternatively, in seeking to accommodate the
stronger powers, weaker powers may shift their geopolitical posture away from the United States. Either way, hostile states
would be emboldened to make aggressive moves in their regions. As rival powers rise, Asia in
particular is likely to emerge as a zone of great-power competition. Beijing’s economic rise has
enabled a dramatic military buildup focused on acquisitions of naval, cruise, and ballistic missiles, long-range stealth
aircraft, and anti-satellite capabilities. China’s strategic modernization is aimed, ultimately, at denying the
United States access to the seas around China. Even as cooperative economic ties in the region have grown,
China’s expansive territorial claims — and provocative statements and actions following crises in Korea and incidents at
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sea — haveroiled its relations with South Korea, Japan, India, and Southeast Asian states. Still, the
United States is the most significant barrier facing Chinese hegemony and aggression.
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What impact do higher oil revenues have on Iran economically? Higher oil prices will result in increased
revenues and a bigger national budget, allowing Iran to increase its foreign exchange reserves .
Oil money accounts for about 27 percent of Iran's total revenues, while crude oil accounts for 83 percent
of the total value of exports. What impact do higher oil revenues have on Iran politically? Higher oil revenues may
help the regime increase its welfare services and thereby improve its political position in the
country. The government has recently implemented a subsidy reform program that compensates price hikes with cash
subsidies to the bulk of the population. More oil revenues can help ensure the flow of cash handouts, at
least in the early stages of implementation. But the government will need to avoid a spending spree, which
can lead to inflation. Iran has the world's third largest oil reserves and the second largest gas
reserves. It is also the fifth largest global producer of oil, after Saudi Arabia. What role is Iran playing or
likely to play as oil increasingly becomes a factor in the regional crises? The regional situation and the threat for
greater oil supply disruption and oil prices may reduce the enthusiasm with which Europe and the
United States push for an oil embargo on Iran. Iran's main gas field -- and the world's largest -- is
the offshore South Pars field in the Persian Gulf, a shared field with Qatar. But parts of the field are still under construction.
Are the events in the Gulf a source of concern for Iran when it comes to the development of South Pars? Political events in
the Gulf are unlikely to affect development of the South Pars gas field. The pace of that development depends on Iran's
funding ability and its relations with foreign companies. Iran's main problem is the declining interest by foreign companies
to invest in the South Pars project. China's CNPC remains the sole non-Iranian company known to be working on the field.
CNPC replaced France's Total, which left in 2009.
Of all the pleasures to be found in the pain of others, though, none seems more justified than smugness over the panic in Moscow,
Caracas and Tehran as oil prices plummet. We may need to be careful what we wish for. Successful states
may generate trouble, but failures produce catastrophes: Nazi Germany erupted from the bankrupt Weimar Republic;
Soviet Communism's economic disasters swelled the Gulag; a feckless state with unpaid armies enabled Mao's rise. Economic
competition killed a million Tutsis in Rwanda. The deadliest conflict of our time, the multi-sided civil war in Congo, exploded into the
power vacuum left by a bankrupt government. A resource-starved Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The crucial point: The more a
state has to lose, the less likely it is to risk losing it. "Dizzy with success," Russia's Vladimir Putin may have
dismembered Georgia, but Russian tanks stopped short of Tbilisi as he calculated exactly how much he could get away with. But now,
while our retirement plans have suffered a setback, Russia's stock market has crashed to a fifth of its value last May. Foreign
investment has begun to shun Russia as though the ship of state has plague aboard. The murk of Russia's economy is ultimately
impenetrable, but analysts take Moscow's word that it entered this crisis with over $500 billion in foreign-exchange reserves. At least
$200 billion of that is now gone, while Russian markets still hemorrhage. And the price of oil - Russia's lifeblood - has fallen by nearly
two-thirds. If oil climbs to $70 a barrel, the Russian economy may eke by. But the Kremlin can kiss off its military-modernization plans.
Urgent infrastructure upgrades won't happen, either. And the population trapped outside the few garish city centers will continue to
live lives that are nasty, brutish and short - on a good day. Should oil prices and shares keep tumbling, Russia will slip into polni bardak
mode - politely translated as "resembling a dockside brothel on the skids." And that assumes that other aspects of the economy hold
up - a fragile hope, given Russia's overleveraged concentration of wealth, fudged numbers and state lawlessness. Should we rejoice if
the ruble continues to drop? Perhaps. But what incentive would Czar Vladimir have to halt his tanks short of Kiev, if his economy were
a basket case shunned by the rest of the world? Leaders with failures in their laps like the distraction wars provide. (If religion is the
opium of the people, nationalism is their methamphetamine.) The least we might expect would be an increased willingness on
Moscow's part to sell advanced weapons to fellow rogue regimes. Of course, those rogues would need money to pay for the weapons
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ARMAGEDDON Could This Be the Start of World War III? As the Middle East erupts, there are plenty of
scenarios for global conflagration. IT WAS LATE JUNE in Sarajevo when Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.
After emptying his revolver, the young Serb nationalist jumped into the shallow river that runs through the city and was quickly seized.
The understanding
But the events he set in motion could not be so easily restrained. Two months later, Europe was at war.
that small but violent acts can spark global conflagration is etched into the world's
consciousness. The reverberations from Princip's shots in the summer of 1914 ultimately took the lives of more than 10 million
people, shattered four empires and dragged more than two dozen countries into war. This hot summer, as the world watches the
violence in the Middle East, the awareness of peace's fragility is particularly acute. The bloodshed in Lebanon appears to be part of a
broader upsurge in unrest. Iraq is suffering through one of its bloodiest months since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Taliban militants
are burning schools and attacking villages in southern Afghanistan as the United States and NATO struggle to defend that country's
fragile government. Nuclear-armed India is still cleaning up the wreckage from a large terrorist attack in which it suspects militants
from rival Pakistan. The world is awash in weapons, North Korea and Iran are developing nuclear capabilities, and
long-range missile technology is spreading like a virus. Some see the start of a global conflict.
"We're in the early stages of what I would describe as the Third World War," former House Speaker
Newt Gingrich said last week. Certain religious websites are abuzz with talk of Armageddon. There may be as much
hyperbole as prophecy in the forecasts for world war. But it's not hard to conjure ways that
today's hot spots could ignite. Consider the following scenarios: • Targeting Iran: As Israeli troops seek
out and destroy Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon, intelligence officials spot a shipment of
longer-range Iranian missiles heading for Lebanon. The Israeli government decides to strike the
convoy and Iranian nuclear facilities simultaneously. After Iran has recovered from the shock,
Revolutionary Guards surging across the border into Iraq, bent on striking Israel's American
allies. Governments in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia face violent street protests
demanding retribution against Israel — and they eventually yield, triggering a major regional
war.
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In Russia historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is
rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the former Soviet
Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately acquainted with their nation’s history,
are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russia’s economic crisis will endanger the
nation’s political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union. Already,
strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their salaries. Recent polling
demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the political elites are the
financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a desperate attempt to raise
cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic collapse is not out of the question, the
impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an outcome would be for the Global
Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic
vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia remains one of only two nations on earth
with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability to destroy the world as we know it. For that
reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a
national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent and destabilizing social and political
upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obama’s national security team has already briefed him about the
consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world. After all, the most recent national intelligence
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Saudi Arabia’s economy will expand 5.3 percent this year, powered by higher oil prices and
more government spending in the Arab world’s largest economy, National Commercial Bank said. The kingdom, which
depends on oil for 86 percent of its revenue, announced increases in government spending in March as protests
calling for more job opportunities and democracy engulfed the Middle East. The package included $67 billion on housing and funds for
the military and religious groups that backed the government’s ban on domestic protests, and followed a $36 billion handout
announced on Feb. 23. With higher oil prices, Saudi Arabia will record a budget surplus of 62.8 billion
riyals ($16.8 billion), National Commercial said. Oil revenue this year is expected at 828.2 billion riyals, it said. The break-even
oil price required to balance the budget this year will increase to $84 a barrels this year from $65 a barrel last
year, the bank said. Oil prices have increased 8.8 percent this year. Crude oil for June delivery gained 68 cents to $99.65 a barrel on
May 13 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Decreased oil prices cause Iranian nuclearization and Saudi civil war
Arena Resources 7. (“Why Flooding the Worldwide Market Place with Oil Will Not Stop Iran from Achieving their Nuclear Ambitions,”
on January 11, 2007 from http://doktorstocks.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-flooding-worldwide-market-place.html)
Iran vs. OPEC. OPEC would be badly damaged. Any price cuts would not only bring down the Iranian economy but also the
economy of Saudi Arabia and all the rest of the OPEC countries. The OPEC countries are not willing to allow self inflicted
wounds to their economies. Damage to the Saudi Economy would do more harm to their economy than Iran. A damaged Saudi
economy could drive their citizens to revolt and a more dangerous radical regime could emerge
to power in that country. FSU and Lower Prices Sharply lower oil prices could create incentive for the FSU
to sell some of their nuclear warheads on the black market. Iran would be a customer. In summary,
lower oil prices will not stop Iran from building a nuclear arsenal. Investors should doubt any conspiracy
theories that surround Saudi Arabia opening the wellheads to flood the worldwide marketplace with oil in order to drive down prices
and bankrupt Iran. Such
a move would increase instability within Saudi Arabia, threaten the very
existence of the Saudi monarchy and would not stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. The only way to prevent Iran
from becoming a nuclear power is the use of military force.
total, would have a massive and protracted impact on the price and availability of oil worldwide.
As the disruptions of 1973 and 1979 showed, the mere threat of diminished oil supply can cause panic
buying, national hysteria, gas lines, and infighting. Prices for oil shot up 400 percent in 1973, 150 percent in 1979,
and 50 percent (in just 15 days) in 1990. The oil shocks of the 1970s threw the United States into recession, causing spiraling inflation
and a decline in savings rates that plagues the U.S. economy even now. Trillions of dollars were lost worldwide. And all this occurred at
a time when the United States was less dependent on foreign petroleum than it is now. Cutting
the Saudi pipeline today
would cause a severe worldwide recession or depression. Short of physical attack, it is the
gravest threat imaginable to American interests.
Meanwhile, the existence of an arsenal of mass destruction in such an unstable region in turn has
serious implications for future arms control and disarmament negotiations, and even the threat
of nuclear war. Seymour Hersh warns, "Should war break out in the Middle East again,... or should any Arab
nation fire missiles against Israel, as the Iraqis did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would
now be a strong probability."(41) and Ezar Weissman, Israel's current President said "The nuclear issue is gaining
momentum(and the) next war will not be conventional."(42) Russia and before it the Soviet Union has long been
a major(if not the major) target of Israeli nukes. It is widely reported that the principal purpose of Jonathan Pollard's spying for Israel
was to furnish satellite images of Soviet targets and other super sensitive data relating to U.S. nuclear targeting strategy. (43) (Since
launching its own satellite in 1988, Israel no longer needs U.S. spy secrets.) Israeli
nukes aimed at the Russian
heartland seriously complicate disarmament and arms control negotiations and, at the very least, the
unilateral possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is enormously destabilizing, and dramatically lowers
the threshold for their actual use, if not for all out nuclear war. In the words of Mark Gaffney, "... if the familar pattern(Israel refining
its weapons of mass destruction with U.S. complicity) is not reversed soon- for whatever reason- the deepening Middle East
conflict could trigger a world conflagration." (44)
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1NC – Overpopulation
1. Halting overpopulation in Africa is key to stability for the rest of the world.
Hira, 7 Anil Hira, Professor of Political Science at Simon Fraiser University. The Futurist, May 1, 2007. Pg. 27(6) Vol. 41 No. 3 ISSN: 0016-
3317. “Time for a global welfare system?”
Healthy families where women have the opportunity to work have fewer children. This means slower
population growth,
which reduces pressures on immigration, the creation of new terrorists, and competition linked
to weak labor and environmental standards. The slash-and-burn agricultural practices that are
destroying the rain forests and the desperate turn to narcotrafficking or to jobs in sweatshop conditions
to support oneself would all be diminishing enterprises, if we treated one of the chief causes
rather than symptoms of global problems. Reducing population pressure is a chicken-and-egg problem. Urbanization
reduces family size, as do access to contraceptives, education, and health care. Ensuring female access to education and health care
are the surest ways to reduce population growth without controversy over abortions or contraceptive use. More-prosperous families
are healthier and provide a productive contribution, rather than a drain or threat, to the global economy. However, huge
populations in developing countries, even at a reduced pace, make such transformations seem glacially
slow and overwhelming. The fastest-growing populations, indeed, are in the poorest regions, including South
Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. A global system is needed to accelerate the change to a low-
population, high-quality-of-life economy. Without such attention, the average American,
Japanese, European, and Canadian will find it impossible to compete with the thousands of hungry, hard-
working, and, in Asia, well-educated growing middle classes. Such a system would ensure that no one starves, that
labor has reasonable bargaining rights, that a policy that respects the environmentis enforceable, and that basic
human rights are afforded to all. Indeed, the one major global welfare transfer, namely, the Marshall Plan, set the world on a growth
spree for two decades, simultaneously creating new markets while lifting millions out of poverty. By recognizing that we are now living
in a global economy, we simply move to regulate that economy so it can thrive. Not only do we reduce the costs of such problems as
terrorism, pandemics, and environmental degradation, but we can create a whole new generation of consumers.
The world's population is increasing at a rate of over 1.5 million people a week—95 million people a year—equivalent to a country the
size of Mexico. Population
is the key to the matrix of environmental degradation, scarcity of
resources and political disorder. It is the most easily controlled factor and therefore should be
the highest priority on any agenda. Overpopulation results in a scarcity of water, a scarcity of
arable land, deforestation and depletion of fish stocks in the oceans. Because of population pressures, especially
in the third world, the environment is being continually despoiled. There are limits to the resources needed to satisfy basic human
needs: food, shelter, education and health care. Poverty, ignorance, fear and hunger exacerbate ethnic conflict and political instability.
The inevitable result is violence, civil war and inter-state strife. Anwar Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of
Jordan both stated that the only reason they would go to war would be over water. Both countries have high birthrates and a pressing
need for water. Syria and Iraq both rely on water from the Euphrates. This river originates in Turkey and its flow is now being altered
by the Turkish southeast Anatolia project. This will have serious consequences for the region. India and Bangladesh both have
increasing population pressures on their shared river, the Ganges. China with 23% of the earth's people has only 8% of the world's
water. Butas much of a tinderbox is the paucity of arable land on our precious planet. This is the
root cause of many explosive situations around the world. Some recent examples are Haiti,
Central America and Rwanda. As land is subdivided because of inheritance, farmers are no
longer able to support themselves on family farms and so migrate to the cities. The scarcity of
land is often a conflagration point for ethnic and tribal warfare. Moreover, landowners in certain countries
are under pressure to share ownership of the land with the tenants who traditionally farmed for them. As good land gets scarcer, the
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1NC – Russia
In Russia historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is
rarely encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the former Soviet
Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately acquainted with their nation’s history,
are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russia’s economic crisis will endanger the
nation’s political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise of the Soviet Union. Already,
strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing unemployment or non-payment of their salaries. Recent polling
demonstrates that the once supreme popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the political elites are the
financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets in a desperate attempt to raise
cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where economic collapse is not out of the question, the
impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such an outcome would be for the Global
Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic
vulnerabilities and perceived decline from superpower status, Russia remains one of only two nations on earth
with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient scope and capability to destroy the world as we know it. For that
reason, it is not only President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a
national economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent and destabilizing social and political
upheaval. It just may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obama’s national security team has already briefed him about the
consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world. After all, the most recent national intelligence
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--Russia Econ UQ
yesterday. The
ruble may strengthen to 28 versus the dollar by the end of 2012 and maintain a
“trend toward appreciation” in the next three years, according to a government report this month. The ruble may gain 20
percent in the next three years against the currencies of Russia’s major trading partners with the effects of inflation stripped out, the
report said.
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In fact, none of the arms-controls treaties and military cooperation agreements signed between
Moscow and Western capitals requires small arms to be counted, according to arms-control experts. "The
West was worried about nuclear missiles, tanks and aircraft, not hand-held weapons," explained
Dosim Sapayev, an analyst from the International War and Peace Institute, a London-based think tank. Without accurate statistics,
there can be no adequate controls. And without adequate controls, corruption flourishes and arms transfers are easily carried out
under a veil of secrecy. Such a case occurred in February, when the Anastasia, a freighter flying the flag of the former Soviet republic
of Georgia, set sail from the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Oktyabarskii and docked at Spain's Canary Islands to refuel. Its manifest said it
was carrying auto parts, but the destination was illegible. Intrigued, the port authority demanded access to the ship to inspect the
cargo. What they found was 650 tons of assault rifles, ammunition and infantry gear. After Spanish authorities complained, Russia's
Rosoboronexport claimed the shipment was part of a legal sale from Moscow to Angola, thus giving the Anastasia a green light to
leave port once the ship's captain had paid a small fine. After its departure, Spanish officials said they had no legal basis to monitor its
journey, and the ship's owners could not be found in the Georgian town where it was registered. Rosoboronexport officials, agreeing
to talk only after the ship had sailed, told Cox Newspapers that the details of the deal were "a commercial secret." When pressed
whether the sale was to the government of Angola or the rebel group UNITA, the agency refused further comment. The group is under
international sanctions, which makes arms shipments illegal. Not surprisingly,
the main destinations for Kalashnikov
rifles are developing nations in which central governments are weak, civil conflict is rife, and
rule of law is thin, at best.
Competitive arms exports are key to the Russian economy and defense
RIVLIN 5 (Dr. Paul, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern & African Studies, The Russian Economy
and Arms Exports to the Middle East, November, www.tau.ac.il/jcss/memoranda/memo79.pdf)
Russia’s military exports played a vital role in its economic turnaround. Acritical part of the Soviet legacy
was a large arms industry, a function of the Soviet Union's political isolation and its experiences in the Second World War and the Cold
War. Soviet policy meant that arms transfers were made primarily for political reasons and the economy paid the price through large
government subsidies. When the Cold War ended and Russia emerged as an independent state, local
demand for its defense products collapsed. Russia could no longer afford to give away arms as the Soviet Union had
done, and its ability to buy influence decreased. The need to export arms for economic reasons increased at the
same time as the ideological imperative declined. For Russia, selling arms thus became a vital source of
foreign economic exchange and a way of financing defense industries threatened with closure.
As such, the industry, part of which is relatively technologically advanced, preserves
employment at home, especially of key personnel, and helps to maintain markets and influence
abroad.
With the exception of arms, Russia has never been a major exporter of manufactured goods.
Traditionally, the USSR exported raw materials and this trend has been reinforced in Russia in recent years because of the increase in
oil prices.1 The
sale of arms, therefore, represents one of the few areas where Russia’s
manufacturing industry has a competitive international position. It also provides employment
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for skilled workers and scientists otherwise unemployed by the economy. Arms production and
exports is a means of keeping this vital manpower in the country and funding research and
development.
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The primary purpose of this increased spending is to push new weapons systems from the
research and development stage to actual procurement for Russia’s armed forces. Over the course of
2007-2015, Russia’s army and navy will replace almost half (45 percent) of their military equipment. In the past, poor government and
industry practices frustrated similar plans to supply large numbers of advanced conventional weapons to Russia’s armed forces. The
country’s military-industrial sector suffers from limited domestic orders and extensive
overcapacity. Purchases for the Russian army and navy have been increasing, but still only
sustain about one-fourth of Russia’s existing military production capacity. The Russian government now
spends more on new Russian-made conventional weapons than do foreign purchasers. Yet, persistent inefficiencies in the Russian
defence procurement system result in foreign buyers receiving more new systems than the Russian military. As a result,
Russia’s leading defence firms remain heavily dependent on foreign sales. Although Russia’s arms exports
have decreased considerably since the Soviet period, its revenue per transaction is now greater because Russian firms have yielded
much of the lower-end market to less expensive suppliers like China, India, and other former Soviet bloc allies. Moreover, where the
USSR transferred much weaponry under easy commercial terms or without charge (e.g., under long-term loans not expected to be
repaid), Russia now discounts arms only for its closest allies. On March 27, 2007, the
Defence Ministry announced that
Russia’s annual arms exports increased by 50 percent, from $4 billion to $6.5 billion, from 2001 to 2006. In an
effort to both maximise foreign revenue and strengthen Russia’s own military potential , former
Russian defence minister Sergei Ivanov, who now oversees Russia’s military-industrial complex and is one of the two leading
candidates to succeed Putin as president, stressed the need for “the national defence industry to find a
balance between a commitment to arm the Russian military and an opportunity to export arms
to countries not subject to UN sanctions”. Besides helping to sustain the health of Russia’s military
industrial complex, many Russian officials think that arms sales will promote Russia’s diplomatic interests
by strengthening ties with recipient states.
To compensate for Russia’s current conventional weakness, Russian strategists have explicitly sought
to “extend the threshold for escalation downward,”28 thereby increasing the likelihood of tactical
nuclear release in the face of hostilities. Thus there are two distinct concepts at work: (1) the procedure of pre-
delegating the launch codes; and (2) the operational doctrine of lowering the nuclear threshold. These trends are corroborated by
interviews with Russian officials familiar with nuclear weapons strategies. Dr. Nikolai Sokov, an expert on the Soviet delegation to
START I as well as other US-Soviet summit meetings, affirms that with such a doctrine in place, one “cannot rule out that a
local
commander could individually take the authority to launch a weapon.”29 The assumption that
the Russian weapons control system is more stable during peace-time is also suspect. Due to the
lack of technical safeguards, especially on air-delivered weapons (cruise missiles and gravity bombs), individual
attempts to acquire these weapons even during times of peace are possible. Moreover, the lack of
adequate locking mechanisms on these weapons would then make them deliverable, with a full
nuclear yield, even without launch authorization. Media attention has been overwhelmingly dedicated to the apex
of the control system; this focus seems to be at least partially misplaced. While it is largely true that the absence of a stable political
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Could the current economic crisis affecting this country and the world lead to another world
war? The answer may be found by looking back in history. One of the causes of World War I was the economic
rivalry that existed between the nations of Europe. In the 19th century France and Great Britain became wealthy through
colonialism and the control of foreign resources. This forced other up-and-coming nations (such as Germany) to be more competitive
in world trade which led to rivalries and ultimately, to war. After
the Great Depression ruined the economies of
Europe in the 1930s, fascist movements arose to seek economic and social control. From there fanatics like
Hitler and Mussolini took over Germany and Italy and led them both into World War II. With most of North America and Western
Europe currently experiencing a recession, will
competition for resources and economic rivalries with the
Middle East, Asia, or South American cause another world war? Add in nuclear weapons
and Islamic fundamentalism and things look even worse. Hopefully the economy gets
better before it gets worse and the terrifying possibility of World War III is averted. However
sometimes history repeats itself.
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--A2: Resilient
======Conflict/Instability Bad======
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***Conflict Bad***
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The Rabid Tiger Project believes that a nuclear war is most likely to start in Africa. Civil wars in the Congo (the
country formerly known as Zaire), Rwanda, Somalia and Sierra Leone, and domestic instability in Zimbabwe, Sudan and other
countries, as well as occasional brushfire and other wars (thanks in part to "national" borders that cut across tribal ones) turn into a
really nasty stew. We've got all too many rabid tigers and potential rabid tigers, who are willing to push the button rather than risk
being seen as wishy-washy in the face of a mortal threat and overthrown. Geopolitically speaking, Africa is open range. Very few
countries in Africa are beholden to any particular power. South Africa is a major exception in this respect - not
to mention in that she also probably already has the Bomb. Thus, outside powers can more easily find client
states there than, say, in Europe where the political lines have long since been drawn, or Asia where many of the
countries (China, India, Japan) are powers unto themselves and don't need any "help," thank you. Thus, an African war can
attract outside involvement very quickly. Of course, a proxy war alone may not induce the Great Powers to fight each
other. But an African nuclear strike can ignite a much broader conflagration, if the other powers
are interested in a fight. Certainly, such a strike would in the first place have been facilitated by outside help - financial,
scientific, engineering, etc. Africa is an ocean of troubled waters, and some people love to go fishing.
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African instability is the most likely scenario for WMD spread and use
Henk 98. (Dan, Director of African Studies at Africa Center for Strategic Studies and former professor at U.S. Military Academy, “US
National Interests in Sub-Saharan Africa”, Parameters, Winter 1997-98, pp. 92-107)
The term "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) refers to nuclear, chemical, or biological
agents designed to kill or incapacitate human populations, or to render livestock, crops, and water unfit for
human consumption. Almost by definition, but reinforced by recollections of the nuclear terror of the Cold War,
nonproliferation of such weapons is a vital national interest. The Clinton Administration unambiguously
asserts that "weapons of mass destruction pose the greatest potential threat to global security."[22]
Not surprisingly, the Administration has strongly promoted, in Africa as elsewhere, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Sub-Saharan
Africa has not been a significant venue for development or deployment of weapons of mass destruction. Save for South Africa, no
country in the region is known to have possessed nuclear weapons, or even to have indicated a serious desire to possess them.[23]
Only a handful of Sub-Saharan African countries are known to have chemical weapons. No country in
the region is known to have a current interest in the development of biological weapons. Unfortunately, technology
at the
end of the 20th century is sufficiently advanced that some forms of WMD could be developed
surreptitiously and relatively rapidly anywhere in the world. Such weapons may be attractive to
future leaders of rogue states, including those that might emerge in Sub-Saharan Africa. The most
remote areas of the world probably also provide the best protection against discovery, and could thus be
attractive to outside terrorist groups or criminal organizations willing to pay for locations for covert
laboratories. Africa also could be the venue for the development of natural WMD. As one of the world's
"hot-zones," Central Africa seems to have been the origin of several virulent diseases, particularly
hemorrhagic fevers, with the potential to develop into pandemics of tremendous lethality. Such
diseases pose a threat not only to residents of the region, but to the world beyond the continent as well. At the end of the 20th
century, any disease is but a plane ride away from the population centers of the world.[24]
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1NC – China
China's booming economy, which has averaged 9 percent growth per year for the last two
decades, requires massive levels of natural resources to sustain its growth. Once the largest oil exporter in
Asia, China became a net importer of oil in 1993. By 2045, China is projected to depend on imported oil for 45
percent of its energy needs. The country needs to lock in supplies from relatively low-cost
African or Middle Eastern sources, experts say. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent
upheaval throughout the Middle East, China is actively trying to diversify its supply lines away from Middle
Eastern crude. Experts say China has adopted an aid-for-oil strategy that has resulted in increasing
supplies of oil from African countries.
Despite China's problems with its food supply, the Chinese do not appear to be in danger of widespread starvation. Nevertheless, one
cannot rule out the prospect entirely, especially if the earth's climate actually is getting warmer. The consequences of general famine
The effects of oil shortages and industrial
in a country with over a billion people clearly would be catastrophic.
stagnation would be less lurid, but economic collapse would endanger China's political stability
whether that collapse came with a bang or a whimper. PRC society has become dangerously fractured. As the
coastal cities grow richer and more cosmopolitan while the rural inland provinces grow poorer, the political interests of the two
regions become ever less compatible. Increasing the prospects for division yet further, Deng Xiaoping's administrative reforms have
strengthened regional potentates at the expense of central authority. As Kent Calder observes, In part, this change [erosion of power
at the center] is a conscious devolution, initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1991 to outflank conservative opponents of economic reforms in
Beijing nomenclature. But devolution has fed on itself, spurred by the natural desire of local authorities in the affluent and increasingly
powerful coastal provinces to appropriate more and more of the fruits of growth to themselves alone. [49] Other social and economic
developments deepen the rifts in Chinese society. The one-child policy, for instance, is disrupting traditional family life, with
unknowable consequences for Chinese mores and social cohesion. [50] As families resort to abortion or infanticide to ensure that their
one child is a son, the population may come to include an unprecedented preponderance of young, single men. If common gender
prejudices have any basis in fact, these males are unlikely to be a source of social stability. Under these circumstances, China
is
vulnerable to unrest of many kinds. Unemployment or severe hardship, not to mention actual starvation, could
easily trigger popular uprisings. Provincial leaders might be tempted to secede, perhaps openly or
perhaps by quietly ceasing to obey Beijing's directives. China's leaders, in turn, might adopt drastic
measures to forestall such developments. If faced with internal strife, supporters of China's
existing regime may return to a more overt form of communist dictatorship. The PRC has, after all, oscillated
between experimentation and orthodoxy continually throughout its existence. Spectacular examples include Mao's Hundred Flowers
campaign and the return to conventional Marxism-Leninism after the leftist experiments of the Cultural Revolution, but the process
continued throughout the 1980s, when the Chinese referred to it as the "fang-shou cycle." (Fang means to loosen one's grip; shou
means to tighten it.) [51] If order broke down, the Chinese would not be the only people to suffer. Civil
unrest in the PRC would
disrupt trade relationships, send refugees flowing across borders, and force outside powers to
consider intervention. If different countries chose to intervene on different sides, China's struggle
could lead to major war. In a less apocalyptic but still grim scenario, China's government might try to ward
off its demise by attacking adjacent countries.
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1NC – Oil
1. African instability wreaks havoc on the oil market – and the US is dependent on its
supply
Thompson 7 (Christopher, reporter for the Black Agenda Report, a journal about African American political thought and action. The
Scramble for Africa’s Oil. June 20, http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=255&Itemid=37)
"Within a decade, the US will be heavily dependent on African oil. Little wonder the Pentagon is preparing a
strategy for the region." This article originally appeared in The New Statesman (UK). The Pentagon is to reorganize its military
command structure in response to growing fears that the United States is seriously ill-equipped to fight the war against terrorism in
Africa. It is a dramatic move, and an admission that the US must reshape its whole military policy if it is to maintain control of Africa for
the duration of what Donald Rumsfeld has called "the long war." Suddenly
the world's most neglected continent is
assuming an increasing global importance as the international oil industry begins to exploit
more and more of the west coast of Africa's abundant reserves. The Pentagon at present has five geographic
Unified Combatant Commands around the world, and responsibility for Africa is awkwardly divided among three of these. Most of
Africa - a batch of 43 countries - falls under the European Command (Eucom), with the remainder divided between the Pacific
Command and Central Command (which also runs the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Now the Pentagon - under the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and the defense department - is working on formal proposals for a unified military command for the continent under the name
"Africom." This significant shift in US relations with Africa comes in the face of myriad threats: fierce economic competition from Asia;
increasing resource nationalism in Russia and South America; and instability in the Middle East that threatens to spill over into Africa.
"The US must reshape its whole military policy if it is to maintain control of Africa." The Pentagon
hopes to finalize Africom's structure, location and budget this year. The expectation is that it can break free from Eucom and become
operative by mid-2008. "The break from Europe will occur before 30 September 2008," Professor Peter Pham, a US adviser on Africa
to the Pentagon told the New Statesman. "The independent command should be up and running by this time next year." A Pentagon
source says the new command, which was originally given the green light by the controversial former US defense secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, is likely to be led by William "Kip" Ward, the US army's only four-star African-American general. In 2005, Ward was
appointed the US security envoy to the Middle East and he is reportedly close to President George W. Bush. He also has boots-on-the-
ground experience in Africa: he was a commander during Bill Clinton's ill-fated mission in Somalia in 1993 and he served as a military
America's new Africa strategy reflects its
representative in Egypt in 1998. Ward is now the deputy head of Eucom.
key priorities in the Middle East: oil and counter-terrorism. Currently, the US has in place the loosely defined
Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative, incorporating an offshoot of Operation Enduring Freedom that is intended to keep terrorist
networks out of the vast, unguarded Sahel. But the lack of a coherent and unified policy on Africa is, according to some observers,
hampering America's efforts in the Middle East. US military sources estimate that up to a quarter of all foreign fighters in Iraq are from
Africa, mostly from Algeria and Morocco. Moreover, there is increasing alarm within the US defense establishment at the creeping
"radicalization" of Africa's Muslims, helped along by the export of hardline, Wahhabi-style clerics from the Arabian peninsula. "The
terrorist challenge [has] increased in Africa in the past year - it's gotten a new lease on life," according to Pham. But it is the west's
increasing dependency on African oil that gives particular urgency to these new directions in the fight against terrorism. Africa's
enormous, and largely untapped, reserves are already more important to the west than most Americans recognize. In March 2006,
speaking before the Senate armed services committee, General James Jones, the then head of Eucom, said: "Africa
currently
provides over 15 per cent of US oil imports, and recent explorations in the Gulf of Guinea region
indicate potential reserves that could account for 25-35 per cent of US imports within the next
decade." "Africa's enormous, and largely untapped, reserves are already more important to the
west than most Americans recognize." These high-quality reserves - West African oil is typically low in sulphur
and thus ideal for refining - are easily accessible by sea to western Europe and the US. In 2005, the
US imported more oil from the Gulf of Guinea than it did from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait
combined. Within the next ten years it will import more oil from Africa than from the entire
Middle East. Western oil giants such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, France's Total and Britain's BP and Shell plan to invest
tens of billions of dollars in sub-Saharan Africa (far in excess of "aid" inflows to the region). But though the Gulf of
Guinea is one of the few parts of the world where oil production is poised to increase exponentially in the near
future, it is also one of the most unstable.
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3. Nuclear war.
Friedberg and Schoenfeld, 8
[Aaron, Prof. Politics. And IR @ Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and Visiting Scholar @ Witherspoon
Institute, and Gabriel, Senior Editor of Commentary and Wall Street Journal, “The Dangers of a Diminished
America”, 10-28, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122455074012352571.html]
With the global financial system in serious trouble, is America's geostrategic dominance likely
to diminish? If so, what would that mean? One immediate implication of the crisis that began on Wall Street and spread across
the world is that the primary instruments of U.S. foreign policy will be crimped. The next president will face
an entirely new and adverse fiscal position. Estimates of this year's federal budget deficit already show that it has jumped $237 billion
from last year, to $407 billion. With families and businesses hurting, there will be calls for various and expensive domestic relief
programs. In the face of this onrushing river of red ink, both Barack Obama and John McCain have been reluctant to lay out what
portions of their programmatic wish list they might defer or delete. Only Joe Biden has suggested a possible reduction -- foreign aid.
This would be one of the few popular cuts, but in budgetary terms it is a mere grain of sand. Still, Sen. Biden's comment hints at where
we may be headed: toward a major reduction in America's world role, and perhaps even a new era of financially-
induced isolationism. Pressures to cut defense spending, and to dodge the cost of waging two wars, already
intense before this crisis, are likely to mount. Despite the success of the surge, the war in Iraq remains deeply unpopular.
Precipitous withdrawal -- attractive to a sizable swath of the electorate before the financial implosion -- might well
become even more popular with annual war bills running in the hundreds of billions. Protectionist sentiments are sure to grow
stronger as jobs disappear in the coming slowdown. Even before our current woes, calls to save jobs by restricting imports had begun
to gather support among many Democrats and some Republicans. In
a prolonged recession, gale-force winds of
protectionism will blow. Then there are the dolorous consequences of a potential collapse of the world's financial
architecture. For decades now, Americans have enjoyed the advantages of being at the center of that system. The worldwide use of
the dollar, and the stability of our economy, among other things, made it easier for us to run huge budget deficits, as we counted on
foreigners to pick up the tab by buying dollar-denominated assets as a safe haven. Will this be possible in the future? Meanwhile,
traditional foreign-policy challenges are multiplying. The threat from al Qaeda and Islamic
terrorist affiliates has not been extinguished. Iran and North Korea are continuing on their
bellicose paths, while Pakistan and Afghanistan are progressing smartly down the road to
chaos. Russia's new militancy and China's seemingly relentless rise also give cause for concern. If
America now tries to pull back from the world stage, it will leave a dangerous power vacuum.
The stabilizing effects of our presence in Asia, our continuing commitment to Europe, and our
position as defender of last resort for Middle East energy sources and supply lines could all be
placed at risk. In such a scenario there are shades of the 1930s, when global trade and finance ground nearly
to a halt, the peaceful democracies failed to cooperate, and aggressive powers led by the remorseless fanatics
who rose up on the crest of economic disaster exploited their divisions. Today we run the risk
that rogue states may choose to become ever more reckless with their nuclear toys, just at our
moment of maximum vulnerability. The aftershocks of the financial crisis will almost certainly
rock our principal strategic competitors even harder than they will rock us. The dramatic free fall of the
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Russian stock market has demonstrated the fragility of a state whose economic performance hinges on high oil prices,
now driven down by the global slowdown. China is perhaps even more fragile, its economic growth depending heavily on
foreign investment and access to foreign markets. Both will now be constricted, inflicting economic pain and perhaps even sparking
unrest in a country where political legitimacy rests on progress in the long march to prosperity. None
of this is good news if
the authoritarian leaders of these countries seek to divert attention from internal travails with
external adventures. As for our democratic friends, the present crisis comes when many European nations are struggling to
deal with decades of anemic growth, sclerotic governance and an impending demographic crisis. Despite its past dynamism, Japan
faces similar challenges. India is still in the early stages of its emergence as a world economic and geopolitical power. What does this
all mean? There is no substitute for America on the world stage. The choice we have before us is between the
potentially disastrous effects of disengagement and the stiff price tag of continued American leadership. Are we up for the task? The
American economy has historically demonstrated remarkable resilience. Our market-oriented ideology, entrepreneurial culture,
flexible institutions and favorable demographic profile should serve us well in whatever trials lie ahead. The American people, too,
have shown reserves of resolve when properly led. But experience after the Cold War era -- poorly articulated and executed policies,
divisive domestic debates and rising anti-Americanism in at least some parts of the world -- appear to have left these reserves
diminished. A recent survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs found that 36% of respondents agreed that the U.S. should "stay
out of world affairs," the highest number recorded since this question was first asked in 1947. The economic crisis could be
the straw that breaks the camel's back.
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1. Our Thompson 07 ev says the US has become reliant on African oil. In years, it will
account for 35% of supply, usurping the Middle East – but SSA instability threatens the
global market.
Despite the optimism, the possible impact of the West African oil and gas reserves should however not be overestimated. The West
African oil province (the so-called Ecowas region or Gulf of Guinea) holds 33.8 bln barrels of proven oil reserves, 3.1% of the global
total. Taking into account unproven reserves increases West Africa's share to around 7% of the world's total. In comparison to known
oil reserves in the Middle East - 690 bln barrels - West Africa is at present nothing more than a
minor player. Much of
West Africa's oil reserves are offshore and thus more expensive to extract. While analysts look to the
potential of West African oil to stabilize the international oil markets by adding a new layer of supply under the current volatile oil
sector, giving traders and consumers more leeway to cope with crisis such as strikes in Venezuela or an Iraq war, current optimism is
based on prerequisites of stability in the region, increased foreign investment, transparency and liberalization in the domestic
Revolutions, violence, ethnic unrest and
petroleum sectors of West Africa and geo-strategic considerations.
corruption undermine the growth potential of the petroleum sector in this vast region. Domestic
political strife brought several African countries to a standstill this past year. In March, international oil majors
ChevronTexaco and Shell were forced to suspend production in the Niger Delta region following violent clashes
and even outright kidnapping of international personnel. The 266,000 barrels per day (bpd) of lost oil
represented approximately 13% of Nigeria's total average production of 2.1 million bpd. International oil markets felt the pressure.
The ever-growing illicit small-arms trade has added fuel to the fire. Warlords have wreaked
havoc in huge countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, parts of Nigeria and Liberia. Over the last
months, international security services from the U.S, the EU and Asia, have turned their attention to al-Qaeda operatives in West
African countries, such as Mauritania, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. Illegal finance schemes involving diamonds, arms and
terrorist networks have also surfaced. Bi- or even multilateral border disputes over control of potentially
oil rich territories pose a threat to on- and offshore developments. Congo and Angola are in
conflict over access to offshore oil; according to Congo the dispute is depriving it of as much as 200,000 bpd.
Nigeria has multiple disputes with other states, of which the disputed Bakassi peninsula is the most pressing one. Since West African
oil producing states are almost solely dependent on oil income, volatile international oil prices have profound impact on local
economies, leading, as in the case of Nigeria, to potentially
paralyzing national strikes. Oil related corruption
is rampant in the region. According to Transparency International, Nigeria is the world's second most corrupt
country, and corruption is growing in Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Ghana, and various other West
African countries, including oil newcomers such as Sao Tome, whose government was just toppled by a military coup. In an effort
to combat this problem, a push for transparency and liberalization has increased pressure on international oil operators, such as Shell
or BP, to open their books. The "Publish What You Pay" campaign, sponsored by George Soros' Open Society Institute and Global
Witness, and supported by over 130 NGOs, has called on international extraction companies to "publish net taxes, fees, royalties, and
other payments made so civil society can more accurately assess the amount of money misappropriated and lobby for full
transparency in local government spending." Underlining the effort, British Prime Minister Blair announced the Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative, endorsed by a coalition of institutional investors, during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg this past September. Nigeria, by far the largest West African producer, provides a concrete
example of the risks of relying on the region. Nigeria was the fifth largest crude exporter to the US in 2002, behind
Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Canada and Venezuela. According to the DOE's Energy Information Administration (EIA,) Nigeria's exports to
the U.S. declined from 842,000 bpd in 2001 (9.03% of total U.S. imports) to around 567,000 bpd in 2002 (6.27% of
U.S. imported crude oil.) Increased reliance on Nigeria means increased exposure to unrest, disputes and
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instability in this volatile country. Since Nigeria is a member of OPEC its crude oil exports are also limited by the oil
cartel's policy restrictions, which already constrain further expansion of production.
In Nigeria, political corruption, criminal networks, violent Islamist groups, and domestic rebels
threaten to take the world's eighth-largest oil exporter off the market. It is estimated that 70,000 to
300,000 barrels of oil are stolen daily in Nigeria. Even at the low end of this estimate, this would generate more
than $1.5 billion every year -- more than enough capital to buy arms and political influence and
threaten the government's survival. Another 500,000 bpd have been taken off the market by the recent kidnappings
and violence perpetuated by the Movement for the Emancipation of the People of the Niger Delta. [See: "Intelligence Brief: Iran,
Nigeria"] In the midst of this instability, the world's largest and second-largest oil importers are playing an increasingly dangerous
game of power politics. For both Washington
and Beijing, the nightmare of rebel groups halting oil
extraction in the delta -- which will dry up revenues on which the northern elites depend, potentially leading to
a northern Muslim general ousting the president -- appears distinctly possible.
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African oil exports to US growing increasingly important as we move away from the
Middle East.
BBC News 3 (How Important is Africa Oil. July 9 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3054948.stm)
The US imports two thirds of
But his visit has also highlighted the growing importance of oil imports for the United States.
its oil needs. About 15% of that amount comes from West Africa and that figure is projected to rise to 25% in the
next 10 years. The oil sector in Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the fastest growing in the world. Click
here to see a map of Africa's oilfields Production has taken off in the Gulf of Guinea which includes Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea,
Cameroon, Gabon, Angola and Congo. By the end of 2003, hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude will be
flowing from oil fields in Chad, through rain forests in Cameroon to tankers docked off the
Atlantic coast. Political problems are much more localised in Africa Douglas Mason, EIU An American company has
secured a concession in the neighbouring Central African Republic. In the aftermath of 11 September 2001, America
is seen as looking to reduce its dependence on the Middle East by looking elsewhere for energy supplies.
Despite a reputation for political and economic instability, oil flows from Africa can be reliable, especially as production
often takes place off-shore. "Usually oil production takes place in enclaves, so continues regardless of
what goes on around," said Douglas Mason, Africa specialist at the Economist Intelligence Unit. "Political problems are much
more localised in Africa." US military involvement America may even eventually increase its military presence in the region to secure
its oil supplies. Sao Tome - which has big oil reserves - has invited the US Navy to build a port from which to
patrol the Gulf of Guinea.
Africa is becoming an increasingly important factor in global energy markets. By the end of the decade, the continent's
significance will rise dramatically. Africa currently contributes 12 percent of the world's liquid hydrocarbon production,
and one in four barrels of oil discovered outside of the U.S. and Canada between 2000 and 2004 came from
Africa. IHS Energy, an oil and gas consulting firm, calculates that Africa will supply 30 percent of the world's growth in
hydrocarbon production by 2010. West Africa's low-sulfur oil is highly desirable for environmental reasons, is
readily transported to the eastern U.S. seaboard, and can be easily processed by China's refineries.
Fifteen percent of U.S. oil imports come from Africa; by 2010 this could reach 20 percent. In this decade, US$50 billion
will be invested in the Gulf of Guinea's energy sector, according to a recent report by the Council on Foreign Relations. While U.S.
companies will account for 40 percent of this investment, other major players -- particularly state-owned energy companies -- will play
a critical role in determining the shape of Africa's energy industry. From 1995 to 2005, national oil companies more than
doubled the number of licenses they hold in Africa, from 95 to 216. China's energy firms are the largest state-owned investors, but
India has also made significant investments and is looking to expand its presence in the region.
African oil imports to the US are matching Middle Eastern imports and other countries.
Joannidis 3 (Marie- French ministry of foreign affairs. Oil: A regional and global issue. http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-
files_156/subsaharan-africa_1962/oil-regional-and-global-issue_2073.html.)
Soaring crude oil prices as a result of sabre-rattling in the Middle East have increased the
importance of Africa’s oil and gas reserves. Those of the Gulf of Guinea, in particular, have triggered sharp competition
among the consumers, led by the United States. The Africans want to take advantage of this to strengthen their regional cooperation
and give a boost to their development projects. The Americans, the world’s biggest consumers of energy, recognised
after
September 11, 2001, the strategic value of the continent’s hydrocarbon reserves, which explains
their renewed interest for African countries. US crude imports from Nigeria and Angola - the two
leading sub-Saharan producers - are already matching those of purchases from Venezuela and Mexico,
their closest oil-exporting neighbours. And the United States imports as much oil from the west coast of Africa as
it does from Saudi Arabia.
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1NC – Terrorism
Anarchy in Africa undermines the global war on terrorism and causes nuclear terror
Dempsey, 6 Thomas Dempsey ‘6 Director of African Studies at Army War College, April 2006 [“Counterterrorism in African Failed States,”
http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub649.pdf]
Failed states offer attractive venues for terrorist groups seeking to evade counterterrorism
efforts of the United States and its partners in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). State failure entails, among its other
features, the disintegration and criminalization of public security forces, the collapse of the state administrative structure responsible
for overseeing those forces, and the erosion of infrastructure that supports their effective operation. These circumstances make
identification of terrorist groups operating within failed states very difficult, and action against such groups, once identified,
problematic. Terrorist groups that are the focus of the current GWOT display the characteristics of a network organization with two
very different types of cells: terrorist nodes and terrorist hubs.1 Terrorist nodes are small, closely knit local cells that actually commit
terrorist acts in the areas in which they are active. Terrorist hubs provide ideological guidance, financial support, and access to
resources enabling node attacks. An
examination of three failed states in Sub-Saharan Africa— Liberia, Sierra
Leone, and Somalia—reveals the presence of both types of cells and furnishes a context for assessing
the threat they pose to the national interests of the United States and its partners. Al Qaeda
established terrorist hubs in Liberia and Sierra Leone to exploit the illegal diamond trade, laundering money, and
building connections with organized crime and the illegal arms trade. In Somalia, Al Qaeda and Al Ittihad Al
Islami established terrorist hubs that supported terrorist operations throughout East Africa. A new organization led by Aden Hashi
’Ayro recruited terrorist nodes that executed a series of attacks on Western nongovernment organization (NGO) employees and
journalists within Somalia. Analysis of these groups suggests that while the terrorist nodes in failed states pose little threat to the
interests of the United States or its GWOT partners, terrorist hubs operating in the same states may be highly dangerous. The hubs
observed in these three failed states were able to operate without attracting the attention or
effective sanction of the United States or its allies. They funneled substantial financial
resources, as well as sophisticated weaponry, to terrorist nodes operating outside the failed states in
which the hubs were located. The threat posed by these hubs to U.S. national interests and to the interests of its partners
is significant, and is made much more immediate by the growing risk that nuclear Weapons of Mass
Destruction (WMD) will fall into terrorist hands. The burgeoning proliferation of nuclear weapons and the
poor security of some existing nuclear stockpiles make it more likely that terrorist groups like Al
Qaeda will gain access to nuclear weapons. The accelerating Iranian covert nuclear weapons program, estimated to
produce a nuclear capability within as little as one year, is especially disturbing in this context.2 A failed state terrorist hub
that secures access to a nuclear weapon could very conceivably place that weapon in the hands
of a terrorist node in a position to threaten vital American national interests.
What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would
further exacerbate the negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living.
Societies would close in on themselves, police measures would be stepped up at the expense of human rights, tensions
between civilisations and religions would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate. It would
also speed up the arms race and develop the awareness that a different type of world order is imperative if humankind is to
survive. But the still more critical scenario is if the attack succeeds. This could lead to a third world war, from
which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike a conventional war which ends when one side triumphs over another, this
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war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution infects the whole planet, we will all be
losers.
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1. Extend our 1NC Lyman ev – Africa exhibits all the preconditions for terrorism. Failure
to solve there allows recruits and financing to ignite global terrorism. Alexander impacts
this with extinction.
2. More ev that Africa is the lynchpin for global terrorism – multiple reasons
a) vulnerability**
Carfano and Gardener 3. (James Jay, PhD and Senior Research Fellow at Institute for Int’l Studies, and Niles, PhD and Fellow at
the Heritage Foundation, Heritage Backgrounder #1697, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Africa/bg1697.cfm)
Africa's troubles are many, and they have global implications. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world's
poorest region, with a GDP per capita income of just $575 in 2002.4 Average life expectancy is only 48 years. In addition, an
estimated 30 million Africans are infected with HIV/AIDS.5 Among the disease's many victims are the continent's military forces, whose
weakened ranks are rife not only with those who have contracted HIV/AIDS, but also with those who spread it.6 The spread of global
infectious disease will become a more significant problem in the 21st century if Africa becomes the source of deadly pathogens that
could plague American shores.7 Nor is disease the only African crisis that could draw in the United States. Of even more immediate
concern are political, economic, and environmental stresses that could well lead to internal violence and resulting demands for U.S.
intervention. The civil war in Liberia prompted widespread international calls for Washington to put U.S. troops on the ground.
Eventually, 200 U.S. soldiers were sent into the Liberian capital, Monrovia, in August 2003 to help facilitate the arrival of a larger West
African peacekeeping force. The United States must also be vigilant for its own security, remaining alert to the rise of African
"enabler" or "slacker" states that might foster global terrorism. Enabler states are countries willing to facilitate
transnational terrorism, share intelligence, or sell weapons or weapons technologies to those who in turn might threaten the United
States. Libya, for example, has a long history of support for terrorist groups in the Middle East and more than 30 terrorist groups
worldwide.8 Slacker states are nations with lax laws or poor law enforcement, which unintentionally allow transnational terrorist
groups to operate within their borders or permit state or non-state groups to obtain weapons or support illicitly from the private
sector. Somalia offers a case in point. With a dysfunctional central government, chronic instability, and porous
borders, it serves as a potential staging ground for international terrorists.9 While poverty and instability alone
do not breed terrorists or weapons proliferators,10 African nations with weak civil societies and poor law enforcement and
judicial systems are vulnerable to penetration and exploitation by transnational terrorist groups.
Enabler and slacker states are potentially important components of the global terrorist threat
because such countries can expand the resource base of lesser states and terrorist groups,
making it possible for them to field more substantial threats than they might represent
otherwise. Transnational terrorism already has a prominent foothold in Africa. It is no coincidence that Osama bin Laden found
safe haven in Sudan in the 1990s.11 The al-Qaeda threat continues to grow in countries such as Kenya and Tanzania. Al-Qaeda cells are
also operating in neighbouring Somalia.
b) al Qaeda links
Lyman et al. 4. (Princeton N., former U.S. Ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria; Ralph Bunche, Senior Fellow and Dir. of Africa
Policy Studies @ Council for Foreign Relations; J. Stephen Morrison, Dir. of Africa Program @ CSIS, “The Terrorist Threat in Africa”, Foreign
Affairs, January-February, pg. 75, lexis)
Outside of Nigeria, therefore, the terrorist threat in West and Central Africa comes less from religion and politics than from lack of
sovereign control and general debility. The Bush administration acknowledged this link in its 2002 National Security Strategy, which
argued that "poverty,
weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to
terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders." Both Central and West Africa are
exceptionally anarchic zones. Interrelated wars have occurred in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote
d'Ivoire, and Guinea. Nine African countries were drawn into the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the late
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Just as the history of Arab States is intimately tied to the discovery of oil in the region, the
discovery of diamonds in
Africa has not only impacted the continent's history, but has been one of the leading causes of conflict. The link
between diamonds and conflict in Africa and the role of international players in the illicit diamond trade were recently discussed at a
seminar in Nairohi, Kenya, on resource-based conflicts organized by the Society for International Development's East Africa Chapter. It
is interesting to note that Africa's
most conflict-ridden countries-Angola, Sierra Leone and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo-are also the most diamond-rich countries on the continent,
as well as the most poor and underdeveloped. Conflict or "blood" diamonds have fuelled wars
and led to the massive displacement of civilian populations in many African nations. While conflict
diamonds represent a small proportion of the overall diamond trade, illicit diamonds constitute as much as 20 per cent of the annual
world production. The level of illegality gives an opportunity and a space for conflict diamonds. The
link between
diamonds, poverty and conflict is evident in countries such as Sierra Leone, where the rich alluvial
diamond fields of the Kono District and Tongo Field were among the most prized targets of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). In
2000, Partnership Africa Canada (PAC) published a report entitled "The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human
Security", which placed much of the blame for the civil war in the country on diamonds, describing them as "small bits of carbon that
have no intrinsic value in themselves, and no value whatsoever to the average Sierra Leonean beyond their attraction to foreigners".
The report recounts the corrupting of Sierra Leone's diamond industry, from peak exports of 2 million carats a year in the 1960s to less
than 50,000 carats by 1998. The country's despotic President during much of this time, Siaka Stevens, had tacitly encouraged illicit
mining by becoming involved in criminal or near-criminal activities himself. When the RUF began waging a war in 1991, Liberian leader
Charles Taylor acted as mentor, trainer, banker and weapons supplier for the movement. The RUF also took on the role of
diamond supplier to the illicit international trade. "It is ironic", says the report, "that enormous
profits have been made from diamonds throughout the conflict, but the only effect on the
citizens of the country where they were mined has been terror, murder, dismemberment and
poverty". The PAC report supports the idea that there was virtually no oversight of the international movement of diamonds. In
later years, civil war often revolved around the control of this illicit trade. In 2002, a UN Expert Panel reported
that the then "interim" leader of the RUF, Issa Sesay, had flown to Abidjan late in 2001 with 8,000 carats of diamonds that he had sold
to two traders of undisclosed identity, who were apparently using a Lebanese businessman to run errands for them between Abidjan
and the Liberian capital, Monrovia. Some reports suggest that the
UN peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone may
have also become involved in the RUF illicit diamond trading. In 2001, shortly after the 11 September attacks
in New York and Washington, D.C., the Washington Post found another link in this most secretive and
highly lucrative trade-that of international terrorists. In an article published on 2 November 2001, war
correspondent Douglas Farah stated that the Al Qaeda network "reaped millions of dollars in the past three
years from the illicit sale of diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone" and that three senior Al Qaeda
operatives had visited Sierra Leone at different times in 1998 and later. He further claimed that the West African Shi'ite Lebanese
community was sympathetic to Hezbollah and often served as a link between the RUF rebels and Al Qaeda.
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d) failed states
VOA 5. (“African Terrorism”, Voice of America, Sept. 8, http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005-09/2005-09-08-
voa46.cfm?textmode=0)
Martha Crenshaw, a professor of government at Wesleyan University and an authority on terrorism, says it is not surprising that some
African countries could be used as launching grounds for terror. "These are areas in which the states
are extremely weak, they often don't like to be called 'failed states,' but they're certainly states in which
there are large, 'lawless zones,' as we call them, where the authority of the central government is
non-existent, and therefore where training, recruitment, conspiratorial plotting can all take place.
Furthermore, these are areas in which there has been conflict and fighting."
Future terrorism in Africa is almost certain. Africa is a soft target, and most African states lack
the security necessary to prevent well- coordinated terrorist attacks. This fact—coupled with the
existence of several failed or weakened states in various parts of the continent with significant Muslim
populations, the rise of conservative Islam in northern Nigeria (the most populous state in Africa and the eighth
largest Muslim state in the world), and the continued growth and spread of Islam through- out much of west,
central, and northeastern Africa—could see Africa emerge in the months and years ahead as a new regional battleground in the war
on terrorism. Conservative and some-
times radical Islamic organizations have been able to make
enormous headway among Muslim populations in some African states affected by poverty,
economic deprivation, and political alienation. This has happened outside of Africa, and it can also happen on the
continent. It is in the interest of both Africa and the United States to prevent this, but it can only be stopped through strong
collaborative efforts, not through unilateral action.
has been a central part of U.S. strategy in the Middle East, but the same has not generally been
true for Africa. In Nigeria, for example, a potent mix of communal tensions, radical Islamism, and
anti-Americanism has produced a fertile breeding ground for militancy and threatens to tear
the country apart. South Africa has seen the emergence of a violent Islamist group. And in West
and Central Africa, criminal networks launder cash from illicit trade in diamonds, joining forces
with corrupt local leaders to form lawless bazaars that are increasingly exploited by al Qaeda to
shelter its assets. As the war on terrorism intensifies in Kenya and elsewhere, radicals might
migrate to more accessible, war-ravaged venues across the continent. The Bush administration must deal
with these threats by adopting a more holistic approach to fighting terrorism in Africa. Rather than concentrate solely on shutting
down existing al Qaeda cells, it must also deal with the continent's fundamental problems --
economic distress, ethnic and
religious fissures, fragile governance, weak democracy, and rampant human rights abuses --
that create an environment in which terrorists thrive. The United States must also eliminate the obstacles to
developing a coherent Africa policy that exist in Washington. Counterterrorism programs for the region are consistently
underfinanced, responsibilities are divided along archaic bureaucratic lines, there is no U.S. diplomatic presence in several strategic
locations, and long-term imperatives are consistently allowed to be eclipsed by short-term humanitarian demands. The war on
terrorism might make officials realize what they should have known earlier: that Africa cannot be kept at the back of
the queue forever if U.S. security interests are to be advanced.
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--Terror O/W
Nuclear deterrence is based upon the threat of retaliation. Since it is not possible to retaliate
against a foe that you cannot locate, the threat of retaliation is not credible under these
circumstances. Further, terrorists are often suicidal (e.g., “suicide bombers”), and are willing to die to inflict
death and suffering on an adversary. For these reasons, nuclear deterrence will be ineffective in preventing
nuclear terrorism. The only way to prevent nuclear terrorism is to prevent the weapons
themselves from falling into the hands of terrorist organizations. This will become increasingly difficult if
nuclear weapons and the nuclear materials to build them proliferate to more and more countries.
***Hotspots Impacts***
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African Democracy
1. Continuing the rise of democracy in Africa is key to regional stability and is the root of
all harms
Diamond 98. (Larry, Snr. research fellow @ Hoover Institute, Hoover Digest, http://www.hooverdigest.org /983/diamond.html)
The common root cause of economic decay, state collapse, ethnic violence, civil war, and
humanitarian disaster in Africa is bad, abusive governance. Because most states lack any
semblance of a rule of law and norms of accountability that bind the conduct of those in
government, their societies have fallen prey to massive corruption, nepotism, and the personal
whims of a tiny ruling elite. In such circumstances, every political clique and ethnic group struggles for
control of a stagnant or diminishing stock of wealth. There are no institutions to facilitate trust,
cooperation, or confidence in the future. Every competing faction tries to grab what it can for
the moment while excluding other groups. THE SOLUTION The only real antidote to this decay is a
constitutional framework that facilitates the limitation, separation, devolution, and sharing of
power so that each group can have a stake in the system while checking the ruling elite and one
another. In essence, this means a democratic political system, to one degree or another. Given Africa’s
authoritarian history, many changes in beliefs and institutions will be necessary for democracy to emerge. A growing segment of
African elites and the public realize that every type of dictatorship on the continent has been a disaster. Thus, there
is
increasing hunger for economic and political freedom and the predictability of a democratic
constitution. As Hoover Institution senior fellow Barry Weingast pointed out in the American Political Science Review, ethnic
groups will not trust and tolerate one another and cooperate for a larger national good unless
there are credible limits on the state. Democracy cannot be stable unless rulers see that it is in
their interest to abide by the rules. What makes it in their interest is the overriding
commitment of all major ethnic groups, parties, and interest organizations to a constitution.
This hardly exhausts the list of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia
nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly
powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the
institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear,
chemical. and biological weapons continue to proliferate.
The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of
these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or
absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and
openness.
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--Environment Module
In countries that have managed to embrace democracy, Hutchful said, the odds on reducing
violence are better. In northern Mali, a bitter five-year conflict between the settled population and the nomadic Tuareg ended
in 1995, followed by integration of Tuareg fighters into the regular army. Mali's military dictatorship was ousted and democratic
elections held in 2002. But as a sign of how difficult it is to quell armed conflicts once they have begun, Tuareg attacks on two
northeastern towns have left several people dead, and a group of Tuareg army deserters made off with a cache of government
weapons and ammunition. Nevertheless, says Hutchful, "Mali has had real success in disarmament after its Tuareg conflict, because it
did democratize. It's poor, but in spite of its difficulties it's a transformed society and people have more hope." But Hutchful warns
the failure of democracy in many African countries has also compounded the problem of
violence — and complicates peace efforts in hotspots like Darfur in Sudan. "You need regional
co-operation if you're going to stop the flow of arms. That means transparency and
accountability. "But there's no real trust in regional relationships where you have rogue
governments existing side by side with more democratic ones. When trouble ignites, it also migrates — just as
weapons do."
2. Small Arms outweigh Nuclear Weapons -- certainty of use & systemic impacts make
them a higher priority.
Wood ‘94 (DAVID WOOD; NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE -- Plain Dealer – March 20th – lexis)
From Somalia to Sarajevo and in dozens of lesser-known conflicts, a relentless proliferation of
small arms is fueling a global wave of mayhem, and is beyond the ability of authorities to control or even monitor.
A flood of excess Cold War weapons, together with a recent boom in exports from new arms factories around the
world, has combined to lethal effect with a virulent new form of conflict ideally suited to small
arms: ethnic and religious terrorism and violence, spurred by economic and environmental deterioration and
overpopulation. "A fully loaded fighter plane is obviously more deadly than a rifle, but there are a lot
more rifles in the world and they are used with much less discretion," said Aaron Karp, a political scientist
at Old Dominion University in Virginia and one of a handful of arms analysts who are beginning to study the problem. In the Persian
Gulf war of 1991, 5,000 to 10,000 Iraqis are believed to have been killed, mostly by American bombers, guided missiles and long-range
artillery. By contrast, Karp said, a dozen "minor" conflicts around the world at the same time - in Angola and Cambodia, for instance –
While the world's
each produced more than 10,000 deaths, most of them the result of rifles, hand grenades and mines.
arsenals of missiles, long-range bombers and nuclear weapons bear watching, Karp said, "the greater danger
certainly comes from the weapons used in ethnic conflict."
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African economic growth is critical to prevent war, AIDS, deforestation, global warming,
ozone depletion, pandemics, and world economic collapse
Stetter, 9 (Ernst, Secretary General of Federation for European Progressive Studies, “Why Africa matters! – The economic crisis and
Africa,” Contribution to the Shadow GN 2009, February 4 and 5, http://www.feps-
europe.eu/fileadmin/downloads/globalisation/090204_Stetter_Africa.pdf)
If there is no doubt that Africa is endowed with abundant natural resources, it is also true that Africa
is still struggling to
address the multiple challenges facing the continent, this includes poverty, under-development, protracted
conflicts, environmental degradation, HIV/AIDS pandemic, tuberculosis and malaria. It has been
suggested that all over Africa, poverty is a common denominator and it is not surprising that people’s immune
systems have been damaged. Reports on Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic have all come to the conclusion that HIV/AIDS on the continent is
closely associated to poverty. It is clear that the absence of technological investment and the contemning human resource capacity has
the new
prevented Africa from making optimal use of its abundant resources for the benefit of its people. Nevertheless,
scramble for natural resources in the continent is likely to create a new awareness of the
geopolitical importance of the African region. Therefore, Africa remains a critical partner for the
world’s economic viability. However, for Africa to benefit more from its vast natural resources it must be finally enabled to
add value to these products rather than export them raw to Europe and elsewhere in the developed world. Africa needs to be helped
in manufacturing value-added products that yield higher profit and income to African economies. In addition, there are, at least, five
significant factors that provide a plausible explanation as to why Africa matters, especially concerning Europe: Firstly, it is the history of
Africa and its relationship with Europe. The
history of Africa has been a history of integration into the
European economy and markets. Therefore, Africa has historically held a significant place in the
European economy, trade and investments. If Africa matters to Europe it matters also to the
globalised world. Secondly, there is also the inherent link between environment and sustainable development. While the
history of Africa and its integration into the European economy is clearly defined by historical circumstances, the environmental
aspects are not clearly discernible. Environmentally, Africa matters to the world because it provides the
largest capacity in the world necessary for maintaining equilibrium in the biosphere and avoid
further depletion of the ozone layer. At the same time the raid of depletion of Africa’s
biodiversity including its tropical forests, medicinal plants remain threatened by the levels of
poverty on the continent. Africa’s most prevailing source of energy is biomass which means depletion and an exponential
raid of its forestation. If this is left to continue, the World will suffer serious climate change which is likely
to erode its socio-economic prosperity and a consequent negative impact to its population. This is an area which needs a strong
partnership with the rest of the world, to protect its environment and avoid further depletion of the ozone layer. Thirdly, Africa
matters because it still provides easy market access to Europe, the US and China and can give, in
some cases, extraordinary investment opportunities with high rates of return. With the changing political
climate in the continent towards democracy, respect for the rule of law and protection of human and people’s rights the investment
climate in Africa could rapidly change. The historical and cultural links, geographical proximity, and deep knowledge and understanding
of the continent gives international European investors a comparative advantage over Northern America and Asia, including China.
With these investments the average rate of growth in Africa has been increasing most significantly in
most African countries ranging from 3% to 7% in many countries during recent years. The income disparities in the continent
have been narrowing and the purchasing power parity increasing. This, coupled with the population of the
continent, provides a market with huge potential especially for European goods. Indeed, any visitor to Africa would
quickly realize that there is still a very significant quantity of European products traded in the continent. However, if you are in Europe
you can hardly see the presence of African products on the market. This is mainly because Africa cannot compete in the European
market either because of European subsidies or other protectionist measures that stifle Africa’s competitiveness and ability to sell in
the European market. This problem needs to be addressed to ensure the sustainability of African-European partnership. Fourthly,
Africa matters because of its abundance nature of human resources which provided the back-bone of industrialisation in Europe.
Africa is a rich continent and not as poor as it is depicted elsewhere in the world. Africa is richly endowed with mineral
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reserves. The continent ranks first in terms of the amount of global reserves of bauxite,
chromites, cobalt, diamond and gold. It also ranks first in terms of palladium, phosphates,
platinum group metals, titanium minerals, vanadium and zircon. Africa was, and still is, among the
world’s largest exporters. An ecological survey realised by the mineral industries of Africa has estimated that production in
Africa alone accounts as much as 80 % of the world’s platinum group metals, 55% of chromites, 49 % of the palladium, 45% of the
vanadium and up to 55 % of the world’s gold and diamond. Moreover, Africa has emerged as a critical exporter of cheap and skilled
labor that has been instrumental in moving Europe’s economy forward.
The Rabid Tiger Project believes that a nuclear war is most likely to start in Africa. Civil wars in the Congo (the
country formerly known as Zaire), Rwanda, Somalia and Sierra Leone, and domestic instability in Zimbabwe, Sudan and other
countries, as well as occasional brushfire and other wars (thanks in part to "national" borders that cut across tribal ones) turn into a
really nasty stew. We've got all too many rabid tigers and potential rabid tigers, who are willing to push the button rather than risk
being seen as wishy-washy in the face of a mortal threat and overthrown. Geopolitically speaking, Africa is open range. Very few
countries in Africa are beholden to any particular power. South Africa is a major exception in this respect - not
to mention in that she also probably already has the Bomb. Thus, outside powers can more easily find client
states there than, say, in Europe where the political lines have long since been drawn, or Asia where many of the
countries (China, India, Japan) are powers unto themselves and don't need any "help," thank you. Thus, an African war can
attract outside involvement very quickly. Of course, a proxy war alone may not induce the Great Powers to fight each
other. But an African nuclear strike can ignite a much broader conflagration, if the other powers
are interested in a fight. Certainly, such a strike would in the first place have been facilitated by outside help - financial,
scientific, engineering, etc. Africa is an ocean of troubled waters, and some people love to go fishing.
The executive director of UNAIDS, Peter Piot, estimated that Africa would annually need between $ 1 billion to $ 3 billion to combat
the disease, but currently receives only $ 160 million a year in official assistance. World Bank President James Wolfensohn lamented
that Africa was losing teachers faster than they could be replaced, and that AIDS was now more effective than war in destabilizing
Statistics show that AIDS is the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing
African countries.
people killed in warfare. In 1998, 200,000 people died from armed conflicts compared to 2.2
million from AIDS. Some 33.6 million people have HIV around the world, 70 percent of them in
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Africa, thereby robbing countries of their most productive members and decimating entire
villages. About 13 million of the 16 million people who have died of AIDS are in Africa, according to the UN. What barometer is used
to proclaim a holocaust if this number is not a sure measure? There is no doubt that AIDS is the most serious
threat to humankind, more serious than hurricanes, earthquakes, economic crises, capital
crashes or floods. It has no cure yet. We are watching a whole continent degenerate into ghostly
skeletons that finally succumb to a most excruciating, dehumanizing death. Gore said that his new
initiative, if approved by the U.S. Congress, would bring U.S. contributions to fighting AIDS and other infectious diseases to $ 325
million. Does this mean that the UN Security Council and the U.S. in particular have at last decided to remember Africa? Suddenly, AIDS
was seen as threat to world peace, and Gore would ask the congress to set up millions of dollars on this case. The hope is that Gore
does not intend to make political capital out of this by painting the usually disagreeable Republican-controlled Congress as the bad guy
and hope the buck stops on the whole of current and future U.S. governments' conscience. Maybe there is nothing left to salvage in
Africa after all and this talk is about the African-American vote in November's U.S. presidential vote. Although the UN and the Security
Council cannot solve all African problems, the AIDS challenge is a fundamental one in that it threatens to wipe out man. The
challenge is not one of a single continent alone because Africa cannot be quarantined. The trouble is
that AIDS has no cure -- and thus even the West has stakes in the AIDS challenge. Once sub-Saharan Africa is wiped out,
it shall not be long before another continent is on the brink of extinction. Sure as death, Africa's
time has run out, signaling the beginning of the end of the black race and maybe the human race.
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Independently, South African decline alone triggers escalating conflict and economic
collapse that goes global
Chase ‘96 (Robert S., PhD Candidate – Economics Yale U., Et Al., Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb, Lexis)
There are indications, however, that South Africa could succumb to political instability, ethnic strife, and economic
stagnation. Power-sharing at the cabinet level belies deep ethnic divisions. Any one of several fissures could
collapse this collaboration, plunging the country into civil war. Afrikaner militias may grow
increasingly intransigent, traditional tribal leaders could raise arms against their diminished influence, and when Mandela no
longer leads the African National Congress, the party may abandon its commitment to ethnic reconciliation. As
Mandela's government struggles to improve black living standards and soothe ethnic tensions, the legacy of apartheid creates a
peculiar dilemma. It will be hard to meet understandable black expectations of equity in wages, education, and health, given the
country's budget deficits and unstable tax base. As racial inequalities persist, blacks are likely to grow impatient. Yet if whites feel they
are paying a disproportionate share for improved services for blacks, they might flee the country, taking with them the prospects for
increased foreign direct investment. While the primary threats to South Africa's stability are internal, its effectiveness in
containing them will have repercussions beyond its borders. Even before apartheid ended, South Africa had
enormous influence over the region's political and economic development, from supporting insurgencies
throughout the "front-line states" to providing mining jobs for migrant workers from those same countries. If South Africa
achieves the economic and political potential within its grasp, it will be a wellspring of regional
political stability and economic growth. If it prospers, it can demonstrate to other ethnically tortured
regions a path to stability through democratization, reconciliation, and steadily increasing living standards.
Alternatively, if it fails to handle its many challenges, it will suck its neighbors into a whirlpool of self-
defeating conflict. Although controlling the sea-lanes around the Cape of Good Hope would be important, especially if
widespread trouble were to erupt in the Middle East, American strategic interests are not otherwise endangered in southern Africa.
Yet because South Africa is the U nited S tates' largest trading partner in Africa and possesses vast
economic potential, its fate would affect American trading and financial interests that have invested
there. It would also destabilize key commodity prices, especially in the gold, diamond, and ore markets. More
generally, instability in South Africa, as in Brazil and Indonesia, would cast a large shadow over confidence
in emerging markets.
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--Democracy Module
There is need for a new paradigm. One that reflects a fairer and just global trading regime, one where the African political elite is
accountable to their populations and commits to playing its role on development within a pro-poor, pro-democracy and pro-enterprise
framework. Withnot much of an economic interest to protect and with little in the way of
meaningful economic clout, the African private sector has a minimal influence on the political
direction of their nations. The private sector in Africa, as it has been elsewhere, is the engine for
growth and must be empowered. Democracy without the development of a vibrant economic
base is like building a sand castle and hoping to live in it - an exercise in futility.
This hardly exhausts the list of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the former Yugoslavia
nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies through increasingly
powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have utterly corrupted the
institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear,
chemical. and biological weapons continue to proliferate.
The very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of
these new and unconventional threats to security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or
absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability, popular sovereignty, and
openness.
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--Disease Module
I believe the central pillar of development is increased economic growth. The focus on growth
should not be interpreted as a dismissal of the importance of investment in education, health, or
other worthy efforts. Investment in those areas, in a manner appropriate to the individual situations, is prudent. But the bottom
line is that without economic growth, governments and the private sector would soon lack the
resources to support those efforts.
The executive director of UNAIDS, Peter Piot, estimated that Africa would annually need between $ 1 billion to $ 3 billion to combat
the disease, but currently receives only $ 160 million a year in official assistance. World Bank President James Wolfensohn lamented
that Africa was losing teachers faster than they could be replaced, and that AIDS was now more effective than war in destabilizing
African countries. Statistics show that AIDS is the leading killer in sub-Saharan Africa, surpassing
people killed in warfare. In 1998, 200,000 people died from armed conflicts compared to 2.2
million from AIDS. Some 33.6 million people have HIV around the world, 70 percent of them in
Africa, thereby robbing countries of their most productive members and decimating entire
villages. About 13 million of the 16 million people who have died of AIDS are in Africa, according to the UN. What barometer is used
to proclaim a holocaust if this number is not a sure measure? There is no doubt that AIDS is the most serious
threat to humankind, more serious than hurricanes, earthquakes, economic crises, capital
crashes or floods. It has no cure yet. We are watching a whole continent degenerate into ghostly
skeletons that finally succumb to a most excruciating, dehumanizing death. Gore said that his new
initiative, if approved by the U.S. Congress, would bring U.S. contributions to fighting AIDS and other infectious diseases to $ 325
million. Does this mean that the UN Security Council and the U.S. in particular have at last decided to remember Africa? Suddenly, AIDS
was seen as threat to world peace, and Gore would ask the congress to set up millions of dollars on this case. The hope is that Gore
does not intend to make political capital out of this by painting the usually disagreeable Republican-controlled Congress as the bad guy
and hope the buck stops on the whole of current and future U.S. governments' conscience. Maybe there is nothing left to salvage in
Africa after all and this talk is about the African-American vote in November's U.S. presidential vote. Although the UN and the Security
Council cannot solve all African problems, the AIDS challenge is a fundamental one in that it threatens to wipe out man. The
challenge is not one of a single continent alone because Africa cannot be quarantined. The trouble is
that AIDS has no cure -- and thus even the West has stakes in the AIDS challenge. Once sub-Saharan Africa is wiped out,
it shall not be long before another continent is on the brink of extinction. Sure as death, Africa's
time has run out, signaling the beginning of the end of the black race and maybe the human race.
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--Econ Module
Africa’s current debt problem is inextricably connected to severe setbacks in other economic
sectors. Surely the most painful has occurred in agriculture, the traditional backbone of Africa’s
predominantly rural societies. Among the mineral-rich countries, the decline is mainly attributable to government policies that
neglected agricultural productivity in the vain hope that rising revenues from mineral exports, particularly oil, would assure ample
income for consumer purchases abroad. State control of agriculture in most African nations undermined productivity by fixing farm
wages so low that peasant farmers frequently abandoned the countryside, leaving cultivable land fallow and farm marketing in
decline. The
result was a sharp drop in Africa’s share of world trade, even in the commodities in
which the continent had a comparative advantage—coffee, tea, groundnuts, sugar, sisal, cocoa and cotton. After
the 1960s, when most of Africa acquired political independence, agricultural output grew by more than three percent annually in only
six countries (Ivory Coast, Kenya, Cameroon, Malawi, Swaziland and Rwanda), and it had begun to decline in some of these by the early
1980s. To escape the debt burden, several countries have raised the possibility of forming a
debtors’ cartel. Some African countries, such as Algeria and Nigeria, are among the biggest debtors in
the Third World; four other countries (Zambia, Ghana, Malawi and Sudan) were among the 11 largest recipients of International
Monetary Fund (IMF) loans as of March 1985. Deliberate default by a group of debtors would inflict visible
damage on the financial institutions of major Western creditors. On the other hand, the chances for a
cartel’s success are lessened by the official nature of the African debt, which denies these countries the collective influence they would
have if their debts were concentrated among private banks. To formulate a common platform for negotiating loans and repayment of
their foreign debts, the OAU states have scheduled a special summit meeting in Addis Ababa during July 1985.
African states should default on a collective foreign debt of $150 billion to make the West take notice of their
economic misery, Tanzanian president and new OAU chairman Julius Nyerere said today. ''We have this debt power and we simply do
not use it,'' said Nyerere, who also is president of Tanzania. ''I believe now the poor countries of the world have this power and, oh
boy, if my country owed $100 billion we would simply refuse to pay it back.'' Nyerere, elected chairman of the Organization of African
Unity at the organization's 20th summit this week, told his first formal news conference the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries ''had power and they just squandered it.'' ''If we sit there and say we are just not going to pay, Europe will take note. We
have that power. Just imagine if we used it,'' he said. Diplomats
said worldwide economic chaos would result if
Africa defaulted on its debt. ''We are talking about the collapse of the world economy,'' said
one Western diplomat. Most of Africa's foreign debt is owed to Western countries and banks.
Could the current economic crisis affecting this country and the world lead to another world
war? The answer may be found by looking back in history. One of the causes of World War I was the economic
rivalry that existed between the nations of Europe. In the 19th century France and Great Britain became wealthy through
colonialism and the control of foreign resources. This forced other up-and-coming nations (such as Germany) to be more competitive
in world trade which led to rivalries and ultimately, to war. After the Great Depression ruined the economies of
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Europe in the 1930s, fascist movements arose to seek economic and social control. From there fanatics like
Hitler and Mussolini took over Germany and Italy and led them both into World War II. With most of North America and Western
Europe currently experiencing a recession, will
competition for resources and economic rivalries with the
Middle East, Asia, or South American cause another world war? Add in nuclear weapons and
Islamic fundamentalism and things look even worse. Hopefully the economy gets better before
it gets worse and the terrifying possibility of World War III is averted. However sometimes
history repeats itself.
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--Terror Module
What would be the consequences of a nuclear attack by terrorists? Even if it fails, it would
further exacerbate the negative features of the new and frightening world in which we are now living.
Societies would close in on themselves, police measures would be stepped up at the expense of human rights, tensions
between civilisations and religions would rise and ethnic conflicts would proliferate. It would
also speed up the arms race and develop the awareness that a different type of world order is imperative if humankind is to
survive. But the still more critical scenario is if the attack succeeds. This could lead to a third world war, from
which no one will emerge victorious. Unlike a conventional war which ends when one side triumphs over another, this
war will be without winners and losers. When nuclear pollution infects the whole planet, we will all be
losers.
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2. Disad turns the case –African forests provide key herbs for disease treatment
Business Day 7. (“Pax Herbals calls for the conservation of forest resources”, http://www.businessdayonline.com/?c=55&a=14080)
Adodo noted that the African forests house 95 percent of herbs and roots used for the
production of herbal medicine, which is gaining both national and international acceptance
because of its proven efficacy for treatment of various ailments. He decried the high rate of
deforestation and environmental pollution which are detrimental to the forest and its natural
resources.
** Adodo is the director of the Pax Herbals workshop on the Principles of African Medicine
supply came from just 14 mammal and bird species. There had been a substantial reduction in
crop genetic diversity in the field and many livestock breeds were threatened with extinction.
Individuals and institutions alike must pay greater attention to biodiversity as a key theme in efforts to
fight the twin scourges of hunger and poverty.
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Ethnic/micro nationalism is also a potent force to reckon with in the crisis of instability in Africa.
In this regard, Nigeria is, in recent years, becoming volatile, a kind of powder keg, on account of frequent
nasty inter-ethnic and religious riots, fuelled by years of bubbling communal discontent and
frustration across the country. In Western Sahara, Sudan (in the South), Senegal (in Casamance), Angola (in Cabinda),
Ethiopia (in Oromoland, Ogaden and Haud), Comoros (in Anjou an), Niger (in Agadez) and Mali (in Alawak), disaffected ethnic
nationalities have been waging armed separatist struggles for autonomy or outright
independence. In recent years, Namibia and Cameroun have increasingly become volatile since the
beginning of the agitation for national self-determination by San people of the Caprivi Strip and English-
speaking Camerounians respectively. Inter-state conflicts have added to the sources of violence and
instability in Africa. Such conflicts include the long time standoff between Nigeria and Cameroun over the oil-rich Bakassi
Peninsula and the continued tension between Ethiopia and Eritrea over the Badme territory. Such conflict has often had
the ominous implication of undermining African unity.
This paper has argued that self-determination conflicts have direct adverse consequences on
international security. As they begin to tear nuclear states apart, the likelihood of nuclear
weapons falling into the hands of individuals or groups willing to use them, or to trade them to
others, will reach frightening levels. This likelihood increases if a conflict over self-
determination escalates into a war between two nuclear states. The Russian Federation and
Ukraine may fight over the Crimea and the Donbass area; and India and Pakistan may fight over
Kashmir. Ethnic conflicts may also spread both within a state and from one state to the next.
This can happen in countries where more than one ethnic self-determination conflict is
brewing: Russia, India and Ethiopia, for example. The conflict may also spread by contagion
from one country to another if the state is weak politically and militarily and cannot contain the
conflict on its doorstep. Lastly, there is a real danger that regional conflicts will erupt over
national minorities and borders.
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1. African famine places 40 million people at risk and makes entire countries extinct
Morris 3. (James T., Executive Director of the World Food Programme at UN, “Testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee”, FDCH Political Transcripts, February 23, lexis)
Ten years ago, the World Food Programme had a huge focus on development -- 80 percent in development. Today, it is 80 percent in
responding to emergencies. These emergencies are all around the globe, but the issues in Africa are
particularly difficult. I have the responsibility of serving as Kofi Annan's special envoy for southern Africa -- the
countries of Mozambique and Malawi and Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland. I have spent a lot of time in this part of the
world and I report to you that there are more than 15 million people at risk of starvation. Half of the people
live in Zimbabwe. This is caused by very difficult weather patterns, complicated in ways that you could hardly find words to describe by
the HIV-AIDS issue and then further complicated by very tough issues of governance and poor choices of macroeconomic policy. The
world has responded generously in this part of southern Africa and we have been able to get food with the help of some remarkable
NGOs. Some of them are in the room this morning. We have been able to get food positioned throughout the region so that people
have not died. But we are faced with a comparable year again this year. Hopefully then we will be on top of the food issue, that the
HIV-AIDS issue will change this part of the world forever. I've met with presidents
and prime ministers in this part of
the world frequently and they talk about their countries being at risk of extinction. They talk about the
future of their countries in the most desperate, dramatic terms possible. The impact of these issues on women and children and
the elderly is almost beyond comprehension. Unfortunately, we have a comparable situation of different dimension, of
different causes in the Horn of Africa again, but we now have 13.2 million people at risk of starvation in
Ethiopia and Eritrea, two countries that depend on rain- fed agriculture had no rain last year and in part because of not very good
efforts at prevention and development, they find themselves in tough circumstances. The issues in
West Africa, you understand
the problems in Liberia and Guinea and Sierra Leone -- huge numbers of internally displaced people floating
about. Maybe the number could approach 5 million. The issues in the western Sahel, once again, a drought in Mauritania, Mali, Cape
Verde, Senegal. This issues in Angola, in the Sudan, in the Congo and northern Uganda simply say that there are
nearly 40 million people at risk of starvation, of terrible food deficits in Africa.
The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields would cause some powerful
countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands -- if only because their armies,
unpaid and lacking food, would go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-
organized countries would attempt to use their armies, before they fell apart entirely, to take
over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if
not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This would be a
worldwide problem -- and could lead to a Third World War -- but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to
analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has
more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming
from the North Atlantic.
4. Food shortages turn the case – starvation weakens the body, allowing viruses to spread
Lewis 03. (Stephen, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, “PanAfrica”, Africa News, May 28, lexis)
When the body has no food to consume, the virus consumes the body. That's the essential meaning of the
New Variant Famine. For millions of Africans already infected by HIV, the onset of full-blown AIDS, and the rapid descent to
death is the inescapable finale of a shortage of food. And the shortage of food, in its turn, opens
up new pathways for the virus to spread.
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--War Module
--Econ Module
Global demand for food will grow an estimated 60 percent by 2030 and, unless urgent action is taken,
the crisis in the farming sector will push the world economy to the edge, warned experts from
60 countries gathered in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey. According to United Nations projections, there will be
some 78 million people added to the global population each year. ''It is not a trivial issue. We are
talking about adding an equivalent of 2.5 Canadas each year. How will we possibly feed them?'' asks Lester
Brown, a U.S. activist and one of the standout voices in the global environmental debate. ''The current world grain stocks
are the lowest in 30 years. Continued expansion of food production faces two big threats:
falling water tables and rising temperatures,'' said Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute and the Worldwatch
Institute, two major environmental think-tanks in the United States. Within the next few years, said the expert, rising
food prices may be the first global economic indicator to signal serious trouble in the
relationship between the world's 6.3 billion people and the Earth's natural systems and resources on
which we depend. The author of ''Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilisation in Trouble'', participated Nov. 15-16 in
Monterrey in the eighth High-Level Seminar on Sustainable Consumption and Production, organised by the United Nations
Environment Program (UNEP).
ability to support the earth's 6 to 8 billion people. This would be the worst-case scenario for the collapse of global
civilization.
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It has been called a genocide in slow motion, its gruesome details unfolding while the world looks the other way. And it
is spreading. There are pictures, there are witness accounts, there are the Western visitors who go home with harrowing tales of rape,
scorched earth and horseback attacks on helpless villagers. Yet, three years after the beginning of the Sudanese
government crackdown against black African rebels, killing more than 70,000 people and displacing two million
others through its allied Arab militias, the world is still wringing its hands while Sudan's western region
burns. A UN force for Darfur is still in the planning stages, an attempt to punish Sudanese leaders with sanctions has been blocked,
and relief agencies have been denied access to 300,000 people desperately in need of emergency supplies. "It's a big failure for the
international community," said the UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres. But the
poison from Darfur
threatens to engulf the entire central African region. Chadian rebel attempts to overthrow
President Idriss Déby in lightning strikes launched from across the border in Darfur last week have brought
accusations that the Sudanese government was behind the insurgency. Chinese-made equipment - China is a major oil client of
Khartoum and its diplomatic ally - seized by the Chadian army fuelled the charges which Khartoum has denied. According to Mr
Guterres, the
Chad fighting, which also involved the Central African Republic, means that "Darfur
is the epicentre of what could be potentially a very damaging earthquake in the whole
region." A total 200,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to camps in Chad. Rebels of the Lord's
Resistance Army, based in northern Uganda, send fighters into Central African Republic, and
into Democratic Republic of Congo and are complicating efforts to return refugees into
southern Sudan, according to Mr Guterres. The regional crisis could further worsen if Ethiopia and Eritrea
rekindle their border war. "I do believe this has the potential to become the most dramatic humanitarian
catastrophe in the world," Mr Guterres told The Independent. The chief UN humanitarian co-ordinator, Jan Egeland, was
expected to inform the UN Security Council yesterday that the Darfur crisis had reached a turning point. While a few months ago the
violence had seemed to be abating as the Sudanese responded to international pressure, the tide is now turning again with
atrocities on the rise, people being forced from their villages by marauding militias and relief
workers given ever shrinking access to the local people. Since last summer, Mr Guterres said, "the international
community was not active enough, and the African Union was left a bit alone, and now the situation has become unbearable". In the
past few months, Sudan has played for time while it drove a wedge between the veto-holding powers on the UN Security Council, and
while under-resourced African Union "ceasefire monitors" struggled to carry out their mandate in Darfur. On Monday, Russia and
China, which both have economic interests in Sudan, blocked the imposition of a US and UK-backed travel ban and assets-freeze against
four Sudanese leaders. Their veto prompted the US to force a public vote on the issue later. The two countries argued that sanctions
would send the wrong message at a time when a new deadline of 30 April has been set by UN envoy Salim Ahmed Salim for securing a
comprehensive ceasefire between the Sudanese government and Darfur rebel groups. Sudanese government leaders used the same
argument to bar a UN team from travelling to Darfur this week in order to assess prospects to transfer peace-keeping in the region from
the African Union to the UN later this year. Sudan says that UN peacekeepers should only move in to monitor a peace settlement. But
analysts argue that external pressure on the Sudanese government had to be an essential part of the UN arsenal. "This is
a vicious
regime. Without external pressure, nothing will happen," said one African analyst. "We're not talking about a
nice government, one that cares about its people." A former member of the African Union mediating team, a South African, Laurie
Nathan, believes that the repeated deadlines set by the international community, which systematically slide, are pointless. "This deadline
diplomacy adds an element of farce to the deadly conflict raging in Darfur. It is intended to constitute pressure on the belligerent parties
and convey the international community's seriousness about resolving the conflict," he said. "But since the deadlines come and go
without any negative repercussions for the parties, they are not an effective form of pressure and they undermine the seriousness of the
international community." Mr Nathan believes that for both the government and the rebel groups, whose factions are now fighting each
other in Darfur, "the battlefield remains the strategic area of struggle." Although the mediator, Mr Salim, was reported to be upbeat
earlier in the week when he briefed the Security Council on his efforts, he has told colleagues he has never come across parties so
unwilling to negotiate with each other as in the Darfur negotiations. With theDarfur conflict now pushing into Chad -
raising fears that the chronically unstable country might go the same way as Somali a - prospects for
UN action have been further complicated. "It's very worrying," said one UN diplomat. The spreading ethnic conflict that,
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broadly speaking, pits black Africans against Arab fighters - has also raised fears of a broader war
in an oil-rich region that could mirror the civil war in Democratic Republic of Congo where big powers
were in the background on opposing sides. In the case of Darfur, the lines are now drawn with China and Russia
firmly on the side of Khartoum.
The cessation of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s changed the mix, and there was again a
resurgence of hope. Marxism-Leninism instantly lost its attraction and outside support; and there was a radical
redirection toward free-market reforms and democratization. Or at least those were the aspirations of the international donor
community, the International Monetary Fund, and the western democracies. The results were disappointingly
cosmetic. “A new breed of dictators emerged, adept at maintaining a façade of democracy
sufficient for them to be able to obtain foreign aid.” The effect was that “democratic change
brought no amelioration to the economic crisis that virtually all African states faced.” Wars and
genocides spread like cancers. “In 2000 there were more than ten major conflicts
underway in Africa.” And now, as the denouement of it all, Meredith says, “In reality, fifty years after the
beginning of the independence era, Africa’s prospects are bleaker than ever before” (emphasis added).
Except that there can really be no denouement as such; the play cannot simply come to an end, with the actors and audience packing
up and leaving. The wretched millions will continue to eke out their lives, while continuing to multiply, and the outside world at least
in part recoils, not without reason, with “aid fatigue.”
A picture of deep concern regarding the situation in Darfur has been presented by Juan Mendez, Kofi Annan’s Special Advisor on
Genocide Prevention. Current policies of developed nations toward the crisis in Western Sudan appear to rely on there being a status
quo in Darfur while a settlement between the Government of Sudan and the African Darfur rebels is reached through political
mediation. This dynamic must radically change, or Darfur will spiral into an even greater tragedy whilst we
tinker on the sidelines. First of all, nations must accept that the status quo, if there is one, is unacceptable. The
genocidal actions to get rid of African tribes from the Land of the Fur is almost complete. Let us be
reminded that around a quarter of a million people were killed in the violence of the past two years there. A further two million
people have been displaced from their villages and are corralled in camps. They are vulnerable
to attack by Arab militia at night, are ridden with disease and rape is rife. Aegis stated in clear terms
during the past year that the protection strategy in Darfur must be more robust. Recalling the lessons from Bosnia and from Rwanda
that half-baked protection mandates and half-strength protection forces lead to failed protection missions, the Protect Darfur
campaign was launched. This was not a criticism of the African Union. They have taken an appropriate and rightful lead as a regional
organisation to respond rapidly to the crisis. There is no doubt they have saved lives by their presence. But they have not been given
all the support they need by major donors. Last month they ran out of cash for fuel and salaries. To the shame of wealthy western
governments who spoke piously about assistance to Africa this summer in Edinburgh, independent grassroots organisations are trying
to raise money to help the African Union mission in Sudan. A quarter of a million dollars has been raised by the student movement
Genocide Intervention Fund in the US, to pay for Rwandan policewomen to go to Darfur. If the Security Council of the UN constrains
the African Union protection force with its current mandate and current strength, it will be tantamount to maintaining a situation that
the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic defined as ethnic cleansing. In Kosovo we reversed it, but in Darfur we maintain it. In our
briefings in June this year, Aegis warned that the apparent improvement in security was due to the near-completion of the operation
of the Janjaweed and Government of Sudan and that the situation would not remain stable. It was predictable that factions of the
rebel groups would seek to aggravate the conflict, as they will not tolerate such a status quo: "Reduction
of direct violence
during May 2005 is misleading the international community into believing there is improvement in
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The harder the international community make it for refugees to return and the more
security. […]
marginalized we allow the African population to become, the greater the risk that rebel groups
will convert this largely one-sided genocidal crisis into another protracted African civil war.
Without increased protection then, the less likely it will be to find a political solution to the crisis." Aegis Briefing 15 June 2005 “The
frustration of keeping the status quo in Darfur is likely to lead to greater attacks from the rebel groups, who have a rich source of
young recruits from the IDP camps. There is a
high probability that the genocidal conflict organized by the
Arab militia and the GOS in the past three years may convert into a prolonged civil war that the small AU
force would not be able to contain.” Aegis Briefing, 30 June 2005 Indeed, the rebels are now their own worst enemies, attacking not
only Janjaweed Arab militia and Government of Sudan positions, but detaining African Union mission workers. Three African Union
personnel have been killed in the past week. Darfur is spiralling into further tragedy that may engulf the
entire country. Millions have already perished in Sudan’s multiple genocidal wars over the past two decades and there are
warnings that this vast country could soon fragment further. In addition to deterioration of the Darfur crisis in the West, other
regions of Sudan have growing tensions. In the East of Sudan, marginalised African tribes are also
reaching tipping point with the Government of Sudan. Sheikh Ali, a senior member of one political party in the East, the Beja
Congress, referring to the lessons of Darfur last week said “the Government only listens to people who carry guns.” I heard exactly
the same comments from Darfur rebel commanders when I was in Chad and Darfur 16 months ago, referring to the lessons from the
South of Sudan. Then, prospect for peace in the South looked hopeful, but the recent death of John Garang, the Southern leader, is
another wound to the peace efforts in Sudan. The
scene is being set for millions more to face death,
destruction and unimaginable suffering.
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--Disease Module
Genocide turns the case – causes refugee flows which spread diseases
Mageria 1 (David-Reuters author, writes lots of articles about Africa such as Poor Africans hit hard by rising world oil prices. AIDS Orphans
Confront 'Silent Genocide' in Rwanda. November 29. http://www.aegis.com/news/re/2001/RE011147.html)
Scores of young Rwandan boys and girls crowd into a dimly lit classroom and painstakingly put the finishing touches to paintings
daubed on worn-out pieces of brown paper. Many are AIDS orphans, learning the skills to cope with the legacy of an epidemic made
harsher by the devastating impact of the country's 1994 genocide. "The AIDS problem is big in Rwanda, call it a
silent genocide," said Robert Limlim, the United Nations Children's Fund's HIV/AIDS programme officer in Kigali. For thousands of
children forced to survive in the streets after AIDS or the killings claimed their parents, centres operated by churches or civic groups
and supported by aid agencies such as UNICEF teach carpentry and painting and offer education on the AIDS pandemic. "HIV is a big
problem by now, because among our beneficiaries, we have around 20% who are orphans due to the HIV problem," said Epimaque
Kanamugire, the coordinator of the Tabakunde Centre in Kigali, which cares for 169 children. The centres offer the only hope for a
better life in a country where the epidemic ravaging Africa has an even more sinister twist, with the
effects of the genocide speeding the spread of infection. Roughly one in nine Rwandans have HIV/AIDS, or about
11% of the population of 8 million. The prevalence was put at 1.6% in 1987. During 100 days of killing, millions of
people were displaced as they crossed the tiny country's green hillsides to escape bands of murderous militiamen. Children
lost parents and health services were shattered, making access to information on AIDS difficult. "With the war and genocide
people were forced to live in refugee camps. There was a lot of uncontrolled sex and that
increases the chances of infection," David Awasum, the resident representative for the Johns Hopkins University centre
for communication programmes in Kigali, told Reuters. Hutu extremists who massacred up to 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and Hutu
moderates used mass rape as a weapon. Young girls looking for protection sometimes paid with
sexual favours. "Most of those who were raped have now been found to be HIV-positive and
many people are dying every day," Limlim said.
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Landmines are a major threat to public health – they jeopardize entire societies in Africa
Taylor 2. (Sarah B., December, “Upsetting Lives: The Public Health Impact of Landmines in Africa,”
http://maic.jmu.edu/journal/6.3/focus/taylor/taylor.htm)
Landmines are an immense problem throughout the continent of Africa, specifically in the way
they affect public health; the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) and Red Crescent Societies (RCS) estimate that as
many as 140 million Africans live in countries where the threat of injury or death due to landmines
is high or very high. These menaces are found in villages, towns, and fields, and around roads, wells, schools, and health clinics.
Both directly and indirectly, landmines have many adverse effects on the public health of the people of Africa. It is not only the
physical injuries that affect the inhabitants of these nations; even the threat of landmines slows development. In Angola, studies
illustrate that more individuals have died from poor water and sanitation, disease and malnutrition than direct injuries. By
affecting water safety, agricultural development, public health campaigns and the socio-
economic and emotional state of many inhabitants, landmines certainly hinder the well-being
of entire African societies, while also killing, injuring and disabling over 12,000 African people per year.
Landmines jack food production and the local economy – Angola proves
Ukabiala 99. (Jullyette, “Impetus towards a mine-free world,”
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol12no4/mines.htm)
In conflicts, APMs are mostly deployed by being buried in the ground, and are detonated when stepped upon or moved in any way.
They are designed to kill or disable their victims permanently, often by shattering one or both limbs beyond repair. The
International Committee of the Red Cross states that there are some 250,000 land mine
amputees in the world, comprising mostly civilians, including children. The most severe impact
in Africa has been on Angola, which has about 23,000 amputees (one out of every 470 people)
and Mozambique, where land mines have claimed over 10,000 lives. Casualties are still mounting, mainly
because many mined areas are unmarked and the mines remain active for many decades. The economic impact is such
that food production in affected Angolan cities has been reduced by more than 25 per cent, yet
Angola has had to keep a relatively low profile regarding the Convention, says Mr. Arcanjo Maria Do
Nascimento, an Angolan diplomat at the United Nations. "Mozambique has peace and can concentrate on the issue more actively.
Right now, we have war going on," he notes. Mr. Do Nascimento points out that Angola
has done a lot of mine
clearing, working with UN teams and concerned non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
"Following renewed fighting, however, the process is now hampered," he told Africa Recovery. He said his
country would be sending a "high-powered" delegation to the Maputo meeting, to explore how participants could increase support for
land mine victims, in such areas as rehabilitation, medical supplies and special education.
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Small arms accesses all your impacts – it causes war, jacks the economy, and increases
disease spread
Ward 6. (Olivia, Foreign Affairs correspondent, “Fuelling Africa’s Turmoil”, Toronto Star, May 27,
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/smallarms/2006/0527toronto.htm)
Arms dealers are Africa's birds of prey, picking the bones of countries already destitute from
years of murderous violence. But an African security expert says the burgeoning trade in small
arms — those which can be carried by individuals — has also created a dangerous new scenario in which
battle-hardened young gunmen [gunholders] infiltrate borders across the continent, providing
ready firepower for conflicts that migrate to new territory even as peace deals are signed. The
career fighters, he says, are part of a broad-based gun culture that makes the demand for
weapons a steadily increasing factor in Africa's destructive arms trade — and decreases the
hope for peace in such conflict-ridden areas as Darfur. "Youth unemployment is horrific in most of Africa," said Eboe
Hutchful, chair of the African Security Sector Network, an umbrella group of politicians, security experts and academics working for
security sector reform. "There are many young men who see no alternative to offering their services to whoever wants to hire them to
fight. They may not start conflicts, but they're available to anyone who is ready for a war." The "hired guns" take their weapons with
them, but sometimes barter them for cash along the way, said Hutchful. In Africa's huge arms bazaar, there are many opportunities to
rearm. "(Demobilized fighters) may be offered $300 in Liberia, but $900 in Ivory Coast. They'll take the money and move on
somewhere else," Hutchful said. According to the London-based International Action Network on Small Arms, there are 8 million
firearms in the West Africa alone, and millions of people have been killed by them in Central and East Africa, in spite of regional
accords meant to halt the flow of weapons. Hutchful, a Ghanaian political scientist and University of Toronto grad, heads the Ghana-
based African Security Dialogue and Research, and is professor of African Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. In Africa, he
says, demand is catching up with supply as a fundamental factor in the floodtide of arms sweeping the continent. "Eradicating the
demand may be even more difficult than getting rid of the supply," Hutchful said in a telephone interview during a recent visit to
Ottawa. "In some African countries guns are now part of the culture. You have to have a personal weapon," he said. Once
acquired, small arms — defined as deadly weapons that can be carried by individual
combatants — flow easily across Africa's porous borders, Hutchful said. "Many African countries aren't in a
good position to address the problem. There are initiatives, but they're difficult to enforce. Small arms are simply out of
control." The multi-million-dollar international arms trade is responsible for many of the weapons
that plague Africa today, despite tracking efforts and arms embargoes. Reports show that guns are
invading territory where they were once almost unknown, such as western Kenya, where an influx of automatic weapons has turned
cattle theft among the impoverished Pokot tribe into civil war. However, Hutchful says, foreign-made arms are only part of the
problem. Africa's black market weapons manufacturers are now taking a cue from importers. "In West Africa, there are a number of
producers of small arms. But there's a sense of denial about locally manufactured weapons — (governments) don't want to admit that
they themselves might be proliferators." Many of the producers, Hutchful says, are ordinary blacksmiths looking to boost their small
incomes: "They produce routine agricultural implements and guns for hunting. But the guns end up in the hands of criminals. In Ghana
and Nigeria there is a lot of armed robbery done with locally made weapons." Some local producers are trying to "go legitimate" by
declaring their businesses and operating under government rules. But Hutchful says, "there are huge amounts of dirt-cheap arms
As long as arms are cheap and available, experts say, there is
already circulating. It may not be worth their while."
scant hope of solving the deep and deadly problems that beset Africa, from the brain drain of its
most capable people to the huge death toll from HIV-AIDS, which is at its worst in conflict zones.
International organizations and aid agencies stress development can only go hand in hand with
disarmament, Hutchful says. But without investment that creates jobs for millions of armed and
hungry young men [people], countries recovering from wars can too easily slip back into conflict.
* this evidence has been edited for gendered language
2. It goes nuclear
Weiner 90. (Jonathan, Prof at Princeton U, The Next 100 Years. p.270)
If we do not destroy ourselves with the A-bomb and the H-bomb, then we may destroy ourselves with the C-bomb, the Change Bomb.
And in a world as interlinked as ours, one explosion may lead to the other. Already in the Middle East,
tram North Africa to the Persian Gulf and from the Nile to the Euphrates, tensions over dwindling water supplies and rising
populations are reaching what many experts describe as a flashpoint A climate shift in that single battle-scarred nexus
might trigger international tensions that will unleash some at the 60.000 nuclear warheads the world has
stockpiled since Trinity.
3. Prefer our impact – water wars are the most probable threat in Africa
Smith 99. (Russell, Africa’s Potential Water Wars, November 15, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/454926.stm)
The main conflicts in Africa during the next 25 years could be over that most precious of commodities - water, as countries fight for
access to scarce resources.
Potential 'water wars' are likely in areas where rivers and lakes are shared
by more than one country, according to a UN Development Programme (UNDP) report. The possible flashpoints
are the Nile, Niger, Volta and Zambezi basins. The influential head of environmental research
institute Worldwatch, Lester Brown, believes that water scarcity is now "the single biggest threat to
global food security".
4. We control the vital internal link to your impacts -- water scarcity causes conflict,
pollution, poverty, food shortages and deforestation
NYT 6. (“Need for Water Could Double in 50 Years, UN Study Finds”, New York Times, August 22)
More than two billion people already live in regions facing a scarcity of water, and unless the world
changes its ways over the next 50 years, the amount of water needed for a rapidly growing population will
double, scientists warned in a study released yesterday. At the worst, a deepening water crisis would fuel violent conflicts,
dry up rivers and increase groundwater pollution, their report says. It would also force the rural poor to clear ever more grasslands and
forests to grow food and leave many more people hungry.
While water stress occurs throughout the world, no region has been more afflicted than sub-
Saharan Africa. The crisis in Darfur stems in part from disputes over water: The conflict that led
to the crisis arose from tensions between nomadic farming groups who were competing for
water and grazing land — both increasingly scarce due to the expanding Sahara Desert. As Mark Giordano of the International Water
Management Institute in Colombo Sri Lanka says, “Most water extracted for development in sub-Saharan
Africa — drinking water, livestock watering, irrigation — is at least in some sense
‘transboundary.’” Because water sources are often cross-border, conflict emerges.
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DRC – Proliferates
On March 6, 2007, Kinshasa authorities arrested two senior nuclear officials of the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC) for their joint involvement in illicit uranium exports. [1] According to press accounts, the
accusations levied against Fortunat Lumu, the Commissioner General for Atomic Energy, and Bere Bemba Paulin, the Head of
the Center for Nuclear Studies, involve each official in two different episodes: the disappearance of
unspecified quantities of low-enriched uranium fuel from the Regional Center for Nuclear Studies in Kinshasa;
and an illegal operation to export uranium ore from the country’s uranium mines. [2] While the two suspects were
released four days after their arrests, they remain under investigation by DRC authorities, and the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) has also expressed interest in examining the situation. [3] The
allegations of uranium smuggling are only the latest
reminder of long-standing international concerns regarding the poor physical protection and
accounting measures in the DRC’s nuclear sector. While these episodes may ultimately prove to be false alarms,
the continued vulnerability of nuclear material in the DRC poses a significant risk of exploitation
by states seeking a clandestine source of uranium for weapons or by terrorists seeking material
for a radiological dispersal device (“dirty bomb”). Alleged Missing Uranium Fuel from the Kinshasa Research Reactor
Initial, unconfirmed, reports from the DRC newspaper Le Phare indicated that the arrests were in response to the
disappearance in recent years of “more than 100 bars of uranium” and an additional unknown quantity of uranium
contained in 25 helmet-shaped casings from the Regional Center for Nuclear Studies in Kinshasa (CREN/K).
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Nigeria Impact
Nigerian dissolution would be devastating – it would trigger massive oil shocks and the U.S.
would intervene in an attempt to protect oil supplies
Gardner, 6 Dan Gardner, “Western world ignoring demise of Nigeria”, The Ottawa Citizen, 3/23/06, lexis
Imagine a country that is one of the world's largest exporters of oil. Imagine a country in which ethnic and
sectarian violence has killed thousands and driven millions from their homes, a country so fragile that a recent report commissioned by
the CIA concluded there is a good chance it will collapse. Imagine a country that Osama bin Laden has declared to be "ripe for
This country is not in the Middle East. It's also not on the minds of western media or politicians, despite the
liberation."
almost unimaginable havoc that would be unleashed if the feared collapse comes. It is Nigeria. A British invention, Nigeria is a
country made up of some 250 ethnic groups and countless tribal subdivisions sharing only a weak national identity. It is
also a country of intense and growing religious passions whose 132 million people are divided almost equally between Christians and
Muslims. Violent earthquakes can erupt along any of these fault lines. In February, Muslims in the north murdered 50 Christians.
Christians in the south retaliated by murdering Muslims. Thousands fled in terror. These latest clashes started with protests against
the Danish cartoons, but most have less exotic origins. People fight for land or God. They fight to control local governments. They fight
to avenge insults. In the Niger Delta, they fight for control of oil. Dozens die in one clash. Hundreds in another. It's low-grade warfare
but the toll steadily climbs. By one estimate, 20,000 Nigerians have been killed in fighting since 1999, when democracy was restored
after 16 years of military rule. And for every corpse, more than a hundred people have been driven from their homes. "The
magnitude, scope, character and dimension of internally displaced persons in Nigeria is frightening," declared a report released last
week by Nigeria's National Commission for Refugees. Since 1999, the commission says, three million people have fled. Their plight
represents one of the gravest humanitarian crises in the world. It is also one of the most unrecognized. The bloody clashes in Nigeria
almost never rate a mention in the western media and western politicians pay even less attention to the country than they do to other
African hot spots. As a result, very few people in Canada realize how dangerous the situation has become. "While currently Nigeria's
leaders are locked in a bad marriage that all dislike but dare not leave," states a 2005 report commissioned by the CIA, an event such
as acoup attempt could spark open warfare and "outright collapse." AN OIL SHOCK The
consequences would be immense. "If Nigeria were to become a failed state," the report concluded, "it
could drag down a large part of the West African region." Millions would flee. There's also the matter
of oil. Even now, world oil prices jump every time a bullet is fired in the Niger Delta. If Nigeria were to collapse, there
could be an oil shock the like of which we haven't seen since the Iranian Revolution. And since the long-
term energy strategy of the United States assumes rising African oil production, chaos in the
Niger Delta would almost certainly bring in the Marines.
Analysts should be keeping a closer eye on the developments in the Gulf of Guinea, West Africa. A possible doomsday
scenario
could be the disintegration of Nigeria, which is currently battling growing instability and militancy in the Niger Delta.
Not only are militants in the Niger Delta a source of concern, growing ethnic and religious tension throughout the
country could lead to a total stand-still. The Nigerian government has already put into place several military
contingency plans to counter a possible military confrontation with the different militant groups in the Delta region. Reports have also
been published indicating that the latter militant groups have changed overall tactics the last days. International operators in Nigeria
have stated that the militants have increased their operations against offshore deepwater projects. If
targeted, this could result in a total standstill of the Nigerian oil and gas production , which would take
around 2.5-2.8 million bpd out of the constellation. The fact that Nigeria has become one of the main oil exporters
to the U.S. and several European markets could be a main issue of concern. To counter a potential gap in
supply of 2.5 million bpd in a market of constraint would be impossible. No other third party
supply will be able to counter this, resulting in exponentially high crude oil price increases.
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--Spills Over
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is also the most important state in U.S.- Africa relations today.
Nigeria is America’s major trading partner in Africa. It plays the largest role of any country in peacekeeping
efforts on the continent. Nigeria’s attempt to build democracy from the ashes of authoritarian rule will arguably
have even more consequential effects for the continent than South Africa’s victory over
apartheid in 1994. Although it is oil that attracts Washington’s attention the most, the ramifications of Nigeria’s success or failure
will extend far beyond the energy sector. In past centuries, Nigeria’s territory was home to a series of powerful and technically
advanced societies, renowned for their artistic, commercial and political achievements. It was also a pioneer in the movement for
African independence. But since independence its growth has been stunted by internal conflict and military misrule. Yet today, Nigeria
is again one of Africa’s most influential countries. Its
unique human resources and vast oil reserves create the
capacity for enormous prosperity and regional leadership. In 2002, Nigeria was the fifth-largest supplier of oil to
the U.S., ranking behind only Canada, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Venezuela. Along with Royal Dutch Shell, a British-Dutch firm, U.S. oil
supermajors ChevronTexaco and Exxon Mobil Corp. dominate oil production in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Since emerging from military
dictatorship in 1999, its nascent democratic institutions have survived huge challenges but have performed disappointingly in the eyes
of tens of millions of Nigerians. Their capacity to deliver the peace and prosperity Nigerians want is still unproved. The
fate of
Nigeria has profound implications for the entire continent: both the potential and the obstacles are on
the giant scale of the country itself.
The topic, “Peacekeeping for Decision Makers,” could not be more important given Nigeria’s positive, indeed essential, role
in promoting stability, democracy and good governance in this region, and throughout the world. Ethnic and religious conflict
continues to result in humanitarian suffering of great magnitude throughout the world, as well in Africa. And, the decisions leaders
make about Peacekeeping Operations often determine the success or failure of efforts to stem the suffering and displacement of
millions of refugees. So, the topic of this seminar could not be more timely. And my
government is proud to be
associated with Nigeria’s leadership role in peacekeeping. To cite only a few examples: Nigeria is playing
an exemplary role in the efforts of the African Union and the international community to end the strife and
bloodshed in Darfur. The Nigerian Armed Forces played a critical role in Peacekeeping Operations
and the introduction of democracy in Liberia. Indeed, the Nigerian Military’s superb efforts in maintaining
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peace and stability in Sierra Leone set the standard for Peacekeeping in the region. Nigerian troops
have distinguished themselves by providing Peacekeeping support to Operations in Lebanon, Yugoslavia,
Kuwait, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Rwanda, and presently Sudan. And, no doubt, Nigeria will respond positively to
future requests from the international community. This distinguished audience has gathered here this week to discuss such
Peacekeeping topics such as: The Use of Force, Rules of Engagement, Use of Non-Lethal Weapons, Coordination with Non-
Governmental Organizations, and Human Rights. Through open and honest dialogue, we hope to share key ideas, and our experience,
that will enable leaders in this audience to make the decisions that will be critical to the success of future Peacekeeping missions.
Nigerian ability to solve social problems sets a model for the rest of Africa
Booker, 3 Salih Booker, executive director at Africa Action and William Minter, senior research fellow at Africa Action, 2003, The U.S. and
Nigeria: thinking beyond oil, accessed via ciaonet.org
Nigeria, whose almost 130 million people make up nearly one sixth of Africa’s population, reflects virtually all the major
problems confronting the continent. Its success or failure will resonate far beyond its
immediate neighbors in West Africa. The HIV/AIDS pandemic, the crippling debt burden, protection of
the environment against corporate greed, the need to break out of dependence on raw-
material exports, the establishment of peaceful Muslim- Christian and ethnoregional relations
and balancing national and local government accountability are all cases in point.
Esimai, 6 Chinwe Esimai, an attorney in New York, former editor with the Harvard Human Rights Journal, May 2006, Current History
The recent violence is cause for concern because a
stable Nigeria is essential to the peace and security of the
entire African continent. The Nigerian army has led peacekeeping efforts in Liberia, Sierra
Leone, and the Darfur region in Sudan. The nation also provides leadership in regional bodies such as
the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States, which has provided peacekeeping forces in West Africa
through its armed monitoring group, ECOMOG. Beyond the confines of the continent, Nigeria's importance as a dependable oil
producer is growing in the face of turmoil in the Middle East. With a prominent position in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer, the world's eleventh-largest producer, and the fifth-largest supplier of America's
crude oil imports. A stable and democratic Nigeria would serve a great many interests-including, obviously, those of most Nigerians.
But unless the country succeeds in mending its religious and ethnic divides, preventing a resurgence of secessionist
movements, and blocking a rumored bid by President Olusegun Obasanjo to stay in power, the likelihood of major turmoil
and civil conflict will inexorably increase.
Nigerian stability is key for African democracy—it’s a stronger model than South Africa
Unegbu, 3 Carl Unegbu, Nigerian-born American lawyer and journalist, Spring 2003, World Policy Journal
But unlike its sub-Saharan neighbors, Nigeria is not your typical African country. Before the advent in 1994 of majority rule in South
Africa under Nelson Mandela, Nigeria was unrivaled as the dominant regional power, with respectable credentials in its decolonization
efforts in the 1970s, and then in peacekeeping operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s. Today, even
with South
Africa as a partner in continental affairs, Nigeria provides the more credible litmus of democracy's
future in sub-Saharan Africa. Not only does Nigeria have a longer history of acceptable
involvement in African affairs, but its economic and social conditions are more representative
of the deplorable situation in other African countries than those in South Africa. Indigenous black Africans have
dominated Nigeria's social, political, and economic affairs since independence. By contrast, despite the recent political dominance of
black South Africans, their country's social and economic sectors continue to be dominated by whites. Thus by strengthening
its own fledgling democracy, Nigeria can take the first step to fortifying the same impulse
elsewhere. Yet success in Nigeria this fourth time around hinges critically on how well the country and its political class address
the familiar demons that have wrecked democracy three times previously. It was the failure of past civilian administrations to organize
credible elections that provided the proximate trigger for the abolition of democracy by the Nigerian military in 1966 and 1983.
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Somalia Impact
The border conflict also exacerbates a rapidly escalating domestic political crisis in Somalia.
Ethiopia has supported the TFG and has sent its military into Somalia to defend its regional ally.
Consistent with a deeply ingrained pattern of supporting the enemy of one’s enemy, Eritrea has
provided arms to a wide range of anti-Ethiopian forces operating from Somalia, hoping to tie
Ethiopian forces down in the Ogaden, a region of Ethiopia predominatly inhabited by ethnic
Somalis and Muslims. Ethiopia may be provoked into a much larger intervention in Somalia, a
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move that in turn would tempt Eritrea to press its border claims with Ethiopia through military
means. The deteriorating situation in Somalia is already derailing U.S. counterterrorism efforts
by the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), scuttling early hopes that regional
cooperation would be possible. In this way, the Ethiopian-Eritrean proxy conflict increases the
opportunities for terrorist infiltration of the Horn and East Africa and for ignition of a larger
regional conflict.
Ongoing Eritrea-Ethiopia conflict will spill over to Somalia, causing a wide regional
conflict.
The Hague 6 (November 29, Eritrea and Ethiopia Given One Year to End Border Stalemate, Agence France-Presse,
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/STED-6VZLY3?OpenDocument)
Eritrea and Ethiopia both last week rejected plans by the panel, the Eritrea Ethiopia Boundary Commission, to demarcate their
contentious frontier on paper. The stalemate has left the status of the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) border
unclear six years after a peace deal and raised tensions, heightened by UN reports that both
nations are militarily active in Somalia. Continued… The commission's warning comes amid growing tension
between the two countries that many fear could lead to a renewal of their war and spill over into
Somalia, threatening a wider regional conflict.
Regional conflict will arise from the Somalia proxy war fought by Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Baldauf 6 (Scott, December 12, staff writer of the Christan Science Monitor, Global Jihad’s New Front in Africa, The Christian Science
Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1212/p01s02-woaf.html)
As a country with no central government for more than 15 years, Somalia has become a dangerous playground for other people's
Eritrea and Ethiopia, use Somalia as a proxy war to fight each other,
wars. Neighboring countries, such as
placing their own troops in Somalia supporting opposing sides of the internal civil war.
Ethiopian separatist groups such as the Ogaden National Liberation Front and the Oromo
Liberation Front use Somalia as a base to fight for independence from Ethiopia. Most
worrisome to the Western world, however, is that the lack of central control has allowed
extremist groups to bring their pro-Al Qaeda agenda into Africa. But the increasingly open movements of
Ethiopian troops in Somalia are fast becoming an emotional unifying force for the Islamists, who are calling on Somalis to defend their
national sovereignty. Continued… But more troublesome is that foreign troops will play into the hands of the Islamists. In any case,
many Ethiopian officials
and experts say that they have no choice but to fight. The looming war in
Somalia is part of the unfinished business of Ethiopia's two-year border war with Eritrea, which
ended in exhaustion rather than a negotiated peace treaty. Ethiopian officials allege that the rise of Somalia's Islamists was made
possible by Eritrean logistical support, and a UN Monitoring Group report has charged that Eritrea, Egypt, Djibouti, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Yemen, Libya, and Sudan have all contributed funds, arms, and technical support to help Somalia's Islamists take control. Continued…
Abdikarim Farah, ambassador of the Somali transitional government, welcomed last week's UN resolution to arm his government and
provide peacekeepers. "Whether
this is a proxy war or not, it will happen, and if the Islamists succeed,
it is going to be a regional conflict," he says.
Regional conflict spillover will be the effect of the looming Ethiopian-Eritrean war.
Terfa 7 (Solomon, June 24, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Mississipi State University, Only a
Legitimate Government Should Commit Ethiopians to War, Ethiomedia, http://www.ethiomedia.com/atop/zenawi_and_badme.html)
Head of the Mission Joseph Legwaila said: “The stalemate could lead to the conflagration of
another war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and could obviously spill over to other parts of the
region. Lately, troops and instruments of war that include tanks and missiles are being
deployed. The Eritrean government has not only imposed a helicopter ban but also restricted the movement of the 2,800
peacekeeping troops that are stationed to patrol the Temporary Security Zone (TZS)”.
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Even if South Africa does not have nuclear weapons, it is capable of turning it’s newly
enriched uranium into weapons quickly, even without the threat from North Korea or help
from Abdul Khan.
New York Times,6. (“A 'race' to head off nuclear disaster.” By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger The New York Times.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/15/news/arms.php. Published: October 15, 2006)
The declaration by North Korea that it has conducted a successful atomic test brought to nine the number of nations believed to have
nuclear arms. But atomic officials estimate that as many as 40 more countries have the technical skill, and in some cases the required
material, to build a bomb. That
ability, coupled with new nuclear threats in Asia and the Middle East, risks a
second nuclear age, officials and arms control specialists say, in which nations are more likely to abandon
the old restraints against atomic weapons. The spread of nuclear technology is expected to
accelerate as nations redouble their reliance on atomic power. That will give more countries the
ability to make reactor fuel, or, with the same equipment and a little more effort, bomb fuel - the hardest part of the
arms equation. Signs of activity abound. Hundreds of companies are prospecting for uranium where
dozens did a few years ago. Argentina, Australia and South Africa are drawing up plans to begin
enriching uranium, and other countries are considering doing the same. Egypt is reviving its program to
develop nuclear power. Concern led the International Atomic Energy Agency to summon government officials and experts from
around the world to Vienna in September to discuss tightening curbs on who can produce nuclear fuel. "These dangers are urgent,"
Sam Nunn, a U.S. expert on the politics of nuclear proliferation, told the group. "We are in a race between cooperation and
catastrophe and, at this moment, the outcome is unclear." The International Atomic Energy Agency itself exemplifies some of the
underlying tensions inherent in the development of nuclear energy. It is the primary United Nations agency charged with detecting
proliferation, but it has another mandate as well: to promote safe nuclear power. For decades, it has done so by running technical aid
programs with roughly a hundred states. Some of that knowledge could be useful in a weapons program, though the aid is meant
exclusively for civilian use. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the agency, has estimated that as many as 49 nations now
know how to make nuclear arms, and he has warned that global tensions could push some over the line. "We are relying," he said,
"primarily on the continued good intentions of these countries - intentions which are in turn based on their sense of security or
insecurity, and could therefore be subject to rapid change." In the United States, Democrats and Republicans spent the past week
arguing over who lost control of North Korea: Bill Clinton or George W. Bush. But seeds of the problem were planted by President
Dwight Eisenhower, just months after the armistice ended the fighting on the Korean Peninsula in 1953. His program was called
Atoms for Peace, and it soon involved dozens of nations, all seeking to unlock the magic of nuclear power. Almost from the start,
evidence accumulated that countries were using civil alliances and reactor technologies to make bombs. By 1960, France had joined
the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union as a nuclear weapons state. China held its first test in 1964. Israel had the bomb by
1967 (though it still does not admit to it), India by 1974, South Africa by 1982 (it has since given up its weapons) and Pakistan by 1998.
Six of those countries built their weapons by exploiting at least some technologies that were ostensibly civilian, nuclear analysts say.
They enriched uranium beyond the low level needed for power reactors. Or they mined the spent fuel of civil reactors for plutonium -
the path that North Korea started taking in the late 1980s or early 1990s, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The International
Atomic Energy Agency has worked hard to fight this kind of cheating while also helping with the basic technology. In the 1980s, it aided
The hardest
Iran's hunt for uranium. Even now, Iranian technicians fly to Vienna and agency experts go to Iran to lend a hand.
part, experts agree, is not acquiring the weapons blueprints but obtaining the fuel. Abdul Qadeer
Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arms program, who went on to establish the world's largest atomic black
market, sold the secrets of how to make centrifuges for enriching uranium to Libya, Iran and North Korea. Investigators are still
trying to learn where else Khan may have planted his nuclear seeds. They discovered outposts of his network in
Dubai, Malaysia and South Africa and found that before his fall in 2004 he had visited at least 18 countries, including Egypt,
Niger, Nigeria, Sudan, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
South Africa is a threat to re- proliferate – has the scientists and uranium reserves
Malone, 7 Paul Malone, Canberra Times, May 2, 2007, staff writer
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South Africa, which abandoned its nuclear weapons program, was listed as a country of concern because of its
uranium reserves and the ability of its former regime to get round safeguards. South Africa also
had scientists who had previously been involved in its nuclear weapons programs and now had
the potential to pose a risk of nuclear proliferation.