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1NC Defense
Food prices dont affect hunger- it only affects the richest members of other countries Paarlberg 8 (Robert, professor of political science at Wellesley College, April 22, pg. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/22/opinion/edpaarlberg.php)
International prices of rice, wheat and corn have risen sharply, setting off violent urban protests in roughly a dozen countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But is this a "world food crisis?" It is certainly a troubling instance of price instability in international commodity markets, leading to social unrest among urban food-buyers. But we must be careful not to equate high crop prices with hunger around the world. Most of the world's hungry people do not use international food markets, and most of those who use these markets are not hungry. International food markets, like international markets for everything else, are used primarily by the prosperous and secure, not the poor and vulnerable. In world
corn markets, the biggest importer by far is Japan. Next comes the European Union. Next comes South Korea. Citizens in these countries are not underfed.

Fears of food prices causing instability is media hype Matthews 8 (Mark, Merril Lynch strategist, May 28, pg. http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/riots/)
Wordage is deep and densely packed. In one article from a respectable newspaper recently, tensions, violence, eruptions, insecurity, desperate, and afraid all managed to be squeezed into nine paragraphs . Food-related riots have been reported in Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam. But when we called our offices and associates in each of those countries, each one told us there had been no riots. Photographs of machine gun-toting guards protecting rice supplies in the Philippines , for example, or crowds of jostling women at rice distribution centers in Indonesia, paint a thousand words. But visitors to the Philippines know that guns are a fairly common sight there. Contrary to press reports, there have been no riots in the Philippines. The Bangladesh Rifles were deployed to markets in that
country. Not because there were riots, but instead to ensure an orderly disbursement of food, so that middlemen could not hoard it in order to push the price up.

Plan wont solve hunger- its inevitable given growing populations Avery 8 (Dennis, sr. fellow @ the Hudson Institute, May 11, pg. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3006)
Even giving up biofuels wont stave off the worlds hunger for long, because well need more than twice as much food and feed per year by 2050. The number of humans is likely to peak at about 8 billion, up from todays 6.4 billion, and at least 7 billion of them are likely to be affluent enough to eat meat and ice cream. Theyll have fewer childrenbut more pets, few of them vegetarian.

The plan wont affectuate change for years Braun 8 (Joachim Von, Director General, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI ), August 6, pg. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?
action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829103) The crisis is not short-term. Some have argued that this crisis will be short-lived. As positive price and policy incentives stimulate food production, they say, prices will fall and the crisis will come to an end. I have two responses: First, IFPRI has modelled scenarios for supply responses to high food prices, and even the optimistic scenarios show prices increasing until 2015 (excluding speculative effects which may change matters in the short run). Second, new research shows that young children often never completely recover from temporary episodes of undernutrition. A 2008 Lancet article shows that boys benefiting from a randomised nutrition intervention at a young age earned wages 50% higher 30 years later than boys who did not benefit from the intervention. If lack of food and poor diets

resulting from high food prices prevent infants and young children from getting the nutrients they need, the health and economic consequences for the individuals and society are not temporary, but lifelong . This means that even if prices begin falling today, the effects of this crisis will be with us for years to come.

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2NC Defense---XT #1: No Impact

food prices dont affect the most impoverished Paarlberg 8 (Robert, professor of political science at Wellesley College, April 22, pg. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/22/opinion/edpaarlberg.php)
Data on the actual incidence of malnutrition reveal that the regions of the world where people are most hungry, in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, are those that depend least on imports from the world market. Hunger is caused in these countries not by high international food prices, but by local conditions, especially rural poverty linked to low productivity in farming . When international prices are go up, the disposable income of some import-dependent urban dwellers is squeezed. But most of the actual hunger takes place in the villages and in the countryside, and it persists even when international prices are low.

and our argument is empirically true Paarlberg 8 (Robert, April 22, pg. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/22/opinion/edpaarlberg.php)
The poor in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are hungry even though their connections to high-priced international food markets are quite weak.

In the poorest developing countries of Asia, where nearly 400 million people are hungry, international grain prices are hardly a factor, since imports supply only 4 percent of total consumption - even when world prices are low. Similarly in sub-Saharan Africa, only about 16 percent
of grain supplies have recently been imported, going mostly into the more prosperous cities rather than the impoverished countryside, with part arriving in the form of donated food aid rather than commercial purchases at world prices.

more evidence Paarlberg 8 (Robert, April 22, pg. http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/22/opinion/edpaarlberg.php)

There is a severe food crisis among the poor in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, but it does not come from high world prices. Even in 2005 in sub-Saharan Africa, a year of low international crop prices, 23 out of 37 countries in the region consumed less than their nutritional requirements.

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2NC Defense---XT #2: Hype

companies have a financial interest in exaggerating food prices Washington Times 8 (April 23, pg. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/apr/23/americans-hoard-food-as-industry-seeks-regs/?page=2) The upswing in prices has been exaggerated by the massive influx of investors and speculators seeking to profit from rising prices for corn, wheat, oil, gold and other commodities. Big Wall Street firms and hedge funds have taken huge positions in futures markets that once were dominated by relatively small operators such as farmers and grain-elevator owners.

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1NC Ag Scenario
High food prices are key to ag investment Kharas 8 (Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute, July 29, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0729_food_prices_kharas.aspx)
The good news is that higher food prices are exactly what is required to restore balance in the market. With rising demand and constrained supply the iron law of economics permits no other response. In a market economy, when demand exceeds supply, prices rise. Higher prices discourage consumption, but they also encourage more investment and enhance production. Anyone who doubts the link between food prices

and agricultural investment should take a close look at the stock price of the worlds largest producer of agricultural equipment, John Deere. While most US shares have taken a beating, John Deeres share price has doubled and has split two-for-one in the last two years. High food prices are encouraging farmers to invest heavily in new equipment. This pattern is being repeated across the world, with investments in equipment, storage and land improvements .

And, its key to production and productivity Kharas 8 (Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute, July 29, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0729_food_prices_kharas.aspx)
More food is already being produced in response to higher prices: forecasts for cereals production in 2008 by the Food and Agriculture Organisation show a significant increase. This should come as no surprise. When prices fell steeply between 1997 and 2002, cereal production declined. Now that prices have risen back to the levels of the mid-1990s, cereal production has resumed its upward trend. Productivity is on the rise.

Food production is key---solves hunger Bruce Campbell 12 Ph.D, Director, CGIAR Research Progamme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security A New Vision for Sustainable
Agriculture for Rio+20 Summit http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-campbell-phd/rio20-summit-sustainable-agriculture_b_1608824.html

To feed a global population of 9 billion people by 2050 will require a 60 to 70% increase in global food production and a 50% rise in investments in food, agriculture and rural development. Unabated climate change could cost the world at least 5% of GDP each year and seriously undermine the ability of small-scale farmers to provide food for their families and national and global markets. We must take
heed of the reminder from Dyborn Chibonga, CEO of the National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi, that "the hand hoe is an instrument of mass urbanization" and step forward to develop and disseminate appropriate technologies for meeting gaps in yields, in livelihoods and in climate resilience.

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2NC Ag Scenario---Productivity UQ
We control uniquenessproductivity is high now Matthew Yglesias 6/8 is Slates business and economics correspondent How To Make U.S. Agriculture Even Stronger 2012
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/future_tense/2012/06/agriculture_industry_needs_more_farmland_and_better_immigration_laws_.html America got its start as an agricultural wonderland , a continent-sized expanse of free land up for grabs for anyone with the gumption to sail across the ocean and steal it from the Indians. The United States great East Coast metropolises arose as export terminals for the agricultural bounty this land bore. Our early infrastructure megaprojects, canals and railroads, served to further expand the scope of agricultural shipping, and their intersections brought us the cities of the Midwest. And though America has industrialized and then unindustrialized, agriculture remains a great constant of our economy. Relatively few Americans farm today, but the much-derided mainstream commercial agriculture sector in the United States

remains a major engine of productivity and could easily be become stronger yet. How productive is Americas farm sector? Viewed in one light, it seems not so impressive: The 2009 output equaled 170 percent of
1948 output , for an average annual rate of 1.63 percentwell below the economy-wide average.

But the agricultural industry was already mature in 1948, so seems unfair to expect its productivity to increase at the same rate as computer production or jet airplane manufacturing. Whats more, productivity derives from multiple sources. A firm, country, or sector can increase output by increasing the volume or quality of inputsmore workers, more machines and capital goods, more land and energyas well as by increasing the efficiency with which these inputs are used. And heres where Americas farms look like champions. Total growth in agricultural inputs was only 0.11 percent during this period, meaning that almost all the growth in agriculture was due to total factor productivity, otherwise known as the secret sauce by which an industry gets more efficient at turning inputs into value. One tangible sign of Americas sustained agricultural productivity is that we are a large net exporter of agricultural goods .
Farming, in other words, stands alongside software, media, financial services, tourism, airplanes, and military equipment as one of the main things we sell to the world in exchange for our imports of oil and consumer goods. The lions share of our exportsabout $50 billion worth last yearwere basic staples: soybeans, corn, wheat, and cotton. The big destinations for American farm goods are our neighbors in Canada and Mexico, plus the hungry mouths of land-scarce AsiaChina, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. And rising living standards in the Pacific Rim promise even more agricultural bounty ahead. As people get richer, they start to want to eat more meat. America exports meat ($12.5 million worth of pork, beef, and chicken in 2011), but, more to the point, our staple grains feed animals. A cow is essentially a low-efficiency, high-status method of transforming grain into food for humans, so steady growth in world demand for meat implies enormous growth in demand for feed crops.

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2NC Ag Scenario---Investment
Investment is key---offsets food prices UN News Center 11 UN food experts call for increased agricultural investment to offset soaring prices, Feb 18 http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?
NewsID=37570&Cr=food+prices&Cr1

Faced with soaring food prices for the second time in three years, senior United Nations experts today called for greater investment in agriculture from both the public and private sectors to increase smallholder productivity . Policy-related solutions are also required to increase the longer-term resilience of global agriculture to allow greater levels of supply to markets as demand grows according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Particular attention is needed to increase smallholder productivity growth and to their increased integration into markets. Support to ensure more farmers are willing and able to generate marketable surpluses will be critical in meeting increased demands in the future. To achieve this increased investment is paramount.
Public sector investment is needed to establish the basic conditions for productivity growth and this will require a reversal of the decline in aid flows to agriculture and increased national budget allocations, but most of the needed investment will have to come from the private sector in national economies. David Nabarro, coordinator of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon s High-Level Task Force on Global Food Security, cited under-

investment among four challenges in the overall food security situation, along with the soaring prices, weather-related disasters such as droughts, floods and fires, and political changes and instability that are disrupting food supply chains. A point that we ve been maintaining now for the last 30 years is that there is systematic and serious under-investment in agriculture and food security and that s a problem now he later told a news conference. low prices discourage ag investment that is the key to overcoming hunger Kharas 8 (Pro Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute, August 1, pg. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?
action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829065) Low international food prices were partly to blame. By the mid-1990s, rice production in Africa was being outstripped by population growth. Africa had to use scarce foreign exchange to import rice and household food consumption did not grow. African conditions were not suitable for high-yielding Asian hybrids and African high-yielding varieties were not developed and distributed. African food production per head has declined by 12% since 1980. Falling production is the inevitable response when private producers are faced with falling prices. But governments also responded by cutting their investments in agriculture. As real food prices fell from 1975 onwards, the growth rate of public investment in agriculture fell in every region in the world. The fall in developed countries was most dramatic: from 1991 to 2000 real growth was negative. In Africa in the 1990s, it averaged just 1% per year. USAID support for agricultural science in Africa has been cut by 75% over the last two decades. In an assessment of declining African food production, Joachim von Brauns own organisation, the International Food Policy Research Institute, singles out poor infrastructure, high transport costs, limited

investment in agriculture, and pricing and marketing policies that penalized farmers. That is code for saying that prices were too low. Low food prices meant that rates of return on proposed projects in roads, irrigation and marketing infrastructure were too low to justify investment. Africas poor farmers simply could not compete when international food was so cheap. investment is vital to overcoming hunger Haen 1 (Hartwig de, November 11, pg. www.wto.org/English/thewto_e/minist_e/min01_e/statements_e/st95.doc) Once again, I wish to emphasize the importance of investment in agriculture to improve food security. Evidence clearly shows that countries which decreased the number of undernourished in the 1990s have substantially increased capital stock is agriculture whereas capital stock declined in those where the number of hungry increased.

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2NC Ag Scenario---Rural Development

High food prices are key to rural development Kharas 8 (Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute , August 6, pg. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?
action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829068)

In the last analysis, almost everyone agrees that we need faster rural development to alleviate poverty and hunger. Higher farmgate prices are a key element for this to happen. One blogger commenting on this debate offered a nice example of this process at work. When Vietnam liberalised and raised rice prices in the 1990s, rural families were able to afford to send their children to school rather than having them work as farm labourers. These educated children are today fuelling Vietnams rapid growth. The country has seen arguably the fastest decline in poverty in history. And it started with a rise in food prices.

This is vital to combatting hunger FAO 2 (Food and Agricultural Organization, March 14, pg. http://www.fao.org/news/2002/020303-e.htm)
"These funds must be mobilized to fight hunger directly," says William Meyers, who directs FAO's analysis of agriculture's role in development. "Rural development is also key to any substantial progress and fighting hunger itself is the key to the Millennium Goals. So we need that twin-track approach -- short-term hunger alleviation and long-term rural development . "You can't improve people's
health if they're hungry. You can't improve education if children are too undernourished to learn. You can't preserve the environment if people are forced to claw every last bit of nutrition from exhausted soil. And you can't persuade farmers to innovate if they are just barely able to survive"

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2NC Ag Scenario---XT More Food Key

That solves hunger Serageldin 96 (Ismail, November 15, pg. http://www.iht.com/articles/1996/11/15/edser.t.php)
The increase in per capita supplies took place despite a doubling of world population to 6 billion . More than 80 percent of people in developing countries now have adequate diets, up from 64 percent in 1970., Now, to feed the world's projected population, agricultural production must increase by at least 2 percent every year to almost double yields on existing land in the next 30 years.

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2NC Ag Scenario---AT Low Prices Solve Hunger

we control uniqueness- low prices havent ever alleviated hunger Kharas 8 Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute , August 6, pg. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?
action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829068

To all those who bemoan the hunger and hardship that higher food prices are causing for the poor, I would simply say that a system which failed to produce any marked change in hunger and poverty over a 30-year period of price declines was not working for the poor. Give a different system a chance. If a strategy has not worked for 30 years, surely there is an upside to changing strategies.

30 years of low prices prove they dont solve hunger Kharas 8 (Pro Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute, August 1, pg. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?
action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829065) Government interventions and distortions in food markets have been with us for decades. So have the problems of hunger and malnutrition in the developing world. During a 30-year period of declining food prices from 1973 to 2002, these problems got worse, not better, in many

countries. The prolonged period of low food prices did very little to reduce poverty and hunger, especially in Africa where it is most intransigent. According to the United Nations, more than 20% of children under five were severely or moderately underweight (the UNs indicator of hunger) in 2000-04 in most of sub-Saharan Africa and in several countries in Asia. There has been very little progress in Africa over the last decade.

more ev Kharas 8 (Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute , August 6, pg. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?
action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829068)

Are todays food prices fair to producers and consumers? Yes, because higher food prices will bring about new investments in agriculture and higher global production. This is already happening in Asia and other parts of the world, and will accelerate over time. Yes, because without higher food prices, land use would shift towards corn-for-ethanol and other biofuel crops and we would have less food available. Yes, because a system with food prices in free fall for 30 years did not produce any measurable decline in hunger and poverty. But the last time food prices were as high as they are today we witnessed the Green Revolution and a rapid reduction of rural poverty in one of the largest population centres of the world, South Asia. Yes, because the great urban/rural divide that was cleaving societies across the developing world has now narrowed.

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1NC Poverty Turn

Rising food prices are the best way to reduce poverty- worlds poorest are rural farmers Jonathan Power, Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, November 8, 2007, High food prices could help the
very poor, http://transnational.org/Columns_Power/2007/43.FoodPrices.html Most of the worlds poor live in the rural backwaters of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Most of them are small farmers or landless farm workers. The overwhelming majority of them are starting to benefit from the present rise in global food prices. They would benefit even more if governments would allow markets to do their job. China for example, long ago in Maoist times the friend of the peasant, controls food prices to keep its city people happy. Yet the cacophony of apparently informed opinion now giving vent is loudly moaning about food price rises. There is a sense of panic, says Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the grains trading group at the UNs Food and Agricultural Organisation. The first global food shortage since the 1970s, headlines the Financial Times. In Russia, price controls on basic foodstuffs have been imposed. The European Union has suspended its set-aside rules that ban farmers from planting cereals on 10% of their land. This is economics as paranoia. The truth is this is a long overdue correction in the terms of trade, whereby the urban minority of the world, whether they be shanty town dwellers in Nigerias Lagos or Parisian consumers of Danones yoghurt whose prices have just been raised by 10%, have long been subsidised by the poorest of the poor- those left behind in the remote reaches of the countryside, where there is little investment, few schools or health clinics, and only rutted roads and battered trucks to link their produce to the market place. We should feel a bit less pity for these urban consumers. The majority of slum residents of Lagos, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro or Bombay live longer and in better health than their rural compatriots. Their governments spend far more per head on them than they do on the small farmers and landless. Only 4% of foreign aid, according to the World Banks latest report, goes to the rural poor. Belatedly last month the World Bank has decided that improving economic growth in rural areas is by far the best way of reducing poverty among the worlds poorest people. What fortuitous timing- the market, in pushing up agricultural prices, is doing much of the job for it!

High food prices good African Farmers Hotter 12 (Andrea, Could High Food Prices Be a Blessing in Disguise?, January 27th, http://blogs.wsj.com/davos/2012/01/27/could-high-food-prices-be-a-blessing-in-disguise-for-africanfarmers/) High food prices may sound catastrophic, but they may actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise for African farmers, says the head of the United Nations World Food Programme. You can look at hunger as a Malthusian nightmare, or you can look it as a tremendous opportunity because everyone has to eat, says Josette Sheeran, executive director of the WFP, referring to a a theory that once population growth exceeds agricultural production, people will be forced to return to subsistence-level conditions. If you solve hunger, you create jobs up the entire hunger chain. The world cant feed itself in 2050 without the African farmer having its time in the sun, so I believe the time has come for the African farmer. The worlds agricultural growth potential is in Africa, where yields are one tenth of what they could be with proper investment and conditions. Youre seeing now billions of dollars of investment pouring into Africa; not enough, not across the value chain or food production but I believe the opportunity is there , she says.

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2NC Poverty Turn---XT Link

Higher food prices solve poverty- new investments and rural /urban gap Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, August 6, 2008, The Proposition's closing statement,
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829068 Are todays food prices fair to producers and consumers? Yes, because higher food prices will bring about new investments in agriculture and higher global production. This is already happening in Asia and other parts of the world, and will accelerate over time. Yes, because without higher food prices, land use would shift towards corn-forethanol and other biofuel crops and we would have less food available. Yes, because a system with food prices in free fall for 30 years did not produce any measurable decline in hunger and poverty. But the last time food prices were as high as they are today we witnessed the Green Revolution and a rapid reduction of rural poverty in one of the largest population centres of the world, South Asia.Yes, because the great urban/rural divide that was cleaving societies across the developing world has now narrowed.Some have argued that the proposition is unfairly worded. As there is an upside to most things, surely food prices are no exception. I do not want this debate to be about such sophistry. Instead let us be clear about the real changes in peoples lives that can come about in the long run from higher food prices. Most of the evidence I have seen suggests that when looked at in detail, most poor people will gain from higher food prices.

Commodity boom creates a net gain for developing countries Patrice Hill, The Washington Times, June 2, 2008, High prices not all bad; Developing nations provide materials, LexisNexis
The hardship of high food and fuel prices for the world's most impoverished people has garnered much attention, but economists say the commodities boom is probably helping more poor people than it hurts because developing countries are the primary source of raw materials. Most Middle Eastern nations as well as countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Botswana, Zambia and Congo are major beneficiaries of the sixfold increase in oil prices since 2002 as well as record high prices for corn, rice, wheat, soybeans, copper, gold, diamonds and other basic goods the world needs
for sustenance and growth. While high costs are a burden on millions of people in the developing world - primarily the urban poor not engaged in farming or mining - the world's richer countries are paying the biggest price because they are dependent on developing nations for the raw materials they need to fuel their economies. "High commodity prices are a problem for the industrial countries - almost all of which are commodity

importers, but a boon to the emerging economies, many of which are net exporters of commodities," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's Corp. The hundreds of billions more dollars each year that consumers in the United States, Europe and Japan pay for fuel and other raw materials amounts to a massive transfer of income to the developing world, where the money is fueling rapid growth, raising living standards and feeding the emergence of a middle class. "Latin America and the OPEC countries are the greatest beneficiaries, but sub-Saharan Africa is also a winner, averaging 5.4 percent real growth over the past five years, perhaps the best performance in history," Mr. Wyss said. Africa
holds many of the crucial minerals - copper, nickel, aluminum, uranium - that fast-rising Asian economies like China and India needed to fuel their rapid development. China has cultivated close ties with African nations like Sudan and Angola to ensure it has the raw materials it needs - giving a shot in the arm to some of the weakest economies on the continent. "The strong revenues are even helping the countries where government policies are poor, since a rising tide can lift even a poorly sailed boat," Mr. Wyss said.

Rising food prices cause a net decrease in poverty Sandra Polaski, Senior Associate and Director, Trade, Equity and Development Program, MAY 2008, Rising Food Prices,
Poverty, and the Doha Round, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/polaski__food_prices.pdf Rising food prices can either reduce or increase poverty, depending on how poor households earn their income and how they spend it. For example, households that produce and sell food crops will benefit from an increase in prices, unless they buy more food than they sell. In addition to direct selling and buying of food, the poverty impact will also depend on how price changes are transmitted through labor markets. For example, if rising prices lead farmers to expand production and hire more farm labor, landless farm workers may benefit. Unskilled workers in urban areas may also be affected. If food prices go down, laborers from the countryside may search for work in nearby towns and cities, contributing to the supply of labor and perhaps lowering wages. Rising prices might improve local economies in rural areas in ways
that benefit non-farming households, such as those of small-scale traders and service providers, although their rising costs for food might outweigh the benefits. The factors determining the impact on poverty are complex and the results are likely to vary among countries and for different crops. Because about seventy-five percent of the worlds poor live in rural areas where agriculture is the main economic activity, one might assume that rising food prices would tend to alleviate poverty on average and at the global level. Surprisingly, the conventional view has been the opposite in recent decades. This view held that because more poor households were net food buyers than were net food sellers, lower food prices would alleviate poverty. There were relatively few studies that used actual data on sources of household incomes as well as household food expenditures to explore this question. Now, however, a number of studies using detailed household data have called that generalization into question. A forthcoming study by two

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World Bank researchers finds that in

a sample of nine low income countries, the net food sellers were poorer than net food buyers.5 Rising food prices would tend to transfer income from richer to poorer households, while lower prices do the opposite. Among poor net food buying households, almost half spent less than ten percent of their income on food, meaning that rising prices would have only small impacts on expenditure and might be outweighed by changes in income. The study then explores the links between agricultural prices and the sources of income for net food buying rural households, finding that about
half of their income depends on agriculture, whether directly through farming or pastoral activities or through wage and business income that is linked to agricultural incomes. Two other seminal studies, one for Bangladesh and one for Mexico, developed theoretical models of the role of labor markets, land markets, and spillover effects of agricultural prices in rural economies and tested them with household survey data.6 They demonstrate that secondary effects may outweigh the direct effects of food prices. Findings from all of these studies indicate that a simple focus on net consumption versus net production is likely to be misleading. They also provide important analytical foundations for further work to better understand the relationship of food prices to poverty.

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2NC Poverty Turn---Ag Key

Growth in agriculture key to solving poverty Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, August 6, 2008, The Proposition's closing statement,
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829068 In the last analysis, almost everyone agrees that we need faster rural development to alleviate poverty and hunger. Higher farmgate prices are a key element for this to happen. One blogger commenting on this debate offered a nice example of this process at work. When Vietnam liberalised and raised rice prices in the 1990s, rural families were able to afford to send their children to school rather than having them work as farm labourers. These educated children are today fuelling Vietnams rapid growth. The country has seen arguably the fastest decline in poverty in history. And it started with a rise in food prices.

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2NC Poverty Turn---No Turns

No risk of a turn- low prices have entrenched poverty for 30 years Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, August 6, 2008, The Proposition's closing statement,
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829068 To all those who bemoan the hunger and hardship that higher food prices are causing for the poor, I would simply say that a system which failed to produce any marked change in hunger and poverty over a 30-year period of price declines was not working for the poor. Give a different system a chance. If a strategy has not worked for 30 years, surely there is an upside to changing strategies. Let there be no mistake. Our global food production system was under severe threat in the early years of this century. We needed a change. Could anything have generated a successful change to encourage more production in the absence of higher food prices? I think not.

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2AC Poverty Turn

High food prices halt progress for the poor this directly answers their increased production warrant Cayo 12 (Don, High food prices halt progress for many of the world's poor, April 25th, http://www.vancouversun.com/business/High+food+prices+halt+progress+many+world+poor/6515030/ story.html#ixzz1ykW8aC2R)
The world has attained two important Millennium Development Goals well ahead of the UN's 2015 target, yet higher

and more volatile food prices are undermining overall progress and trapping millions of families in relentless poverty. The best news is that the key goal of reducing by half the number of people who in 1990 lived in abject poverty - on less than $1.25 a day - was reached in 2010, a full five years ahead of schedule, according to the World Bank's latest Global Monitoring Report. So was the goal of halving the proportion of people without safe drinking water. But a 2011 spike in food prices, the second in three years, undermined some of the value of these gains, especially for the urban poor. The first spike, during the global recession of 2008, is estimated to have kept or pushed 105 million people below the poverty line. The second spike in 2010-11 increased that number by more than 10 per cent. The effect of the higher food prices varies from region to region and country to country, the report says, and it is both direct and indirect. Immediate consequences include both the erosion of consumer purchasing power, which can have broad economic effects, and reduced nutritional intake, which can have serious health consequences - especially for young children. Indirect effects include reduced remittances from relatives who find work abroad and a sudden influx into the informal sector of workers who lose their jobs, which reduces income for all. As well, millions of children either have not started or have withdrawn from school because their families can't afford the small cost of attendance , or they're
feature-length report on my Ethiopia visit is to be published in The Sun on May 5.) When

needed to help earn income for the family. The effect is worst in poor countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia or Kenya, where a sizable proportion of the food consumed is imported. Countries such as Ethiopia, which I recently visited to look into food-related issues, produce most of their own food, and are thus cushioned a bit. But in many parts of Ethiopia, as well as in neighbouring countries in the Horn of Africa, drought has sorely reduced local harvests, which makes things worse. (A

prices rise, farmers can be expected to ramp up production as much as they can to take advantage, and this should help ease prices. But it takes time for new crops to grow, and in the meantime people have to eat every day. So the short-term problem can be acute. "Even temporarily high food prices can affect children's long-term development," the report notes. "Early life conditions [from conception to two years of age] provide the foundations for adult human capital . Vicious circles of malnutrition, poor health, and impaired cognitive development set children on lower, often irreversible, development paths. Child malnutrition accounts for more than a third of the under-five mortality - and malnutrition during pregnancy, for more than a fifth of maternal mortality." So this issue, even if it's
short-lived, could have a continuing and serious effect on at least a couple of the other four Millennium Development Goals. Two of these goals, one relating to gender parity in primary schools and one concerning primary school completion rates, are on track or close to it, the report says. But two others, those concerning child and maternal mortality, are seriously lagging. And poor

nutrition can only make them worse.

Food price hikes wreck the poor IFAD 12 (Higher and volatile food prices and poor rural people, June 12th, http://www.ifad.org/operations/food/) Food price trends have a major impact on food security, at both household and country levels. Many of the worlds poorest people spend more than half their income on food. Price hikes for cereals and other staples can force them to cut back on the quantity or quality of their food. This may result in food insecurity and malnutrition, with tragic implications in both the short and long term. Undernourishment increases disease and mortality, lowers productivity and can have severe lifelong effects, particularly for children. Price spikes can also limit the ability of poor households to meet important non-food expenses, such as education and health care. When they occur globally, price hikes can affect low-income, food importing countries, putting pressure on their limited financial resources. Higher food prices have a particularly negative impact on food security when prices spike suddenly or reach extremely high levels. And Farmers dont produce enough food to benefit from high prices

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WFP 11 (World Food Programme, High Food Prices: 10 Questions Answered, October 10, http://www.wfp.org/stories/rising-food-prices-10-questions-answered) Arent high food prices good for poor farmers? High food prices could represent an opportunity for people who make a living from agriculture. The trouble is that many of these people dont produce enough food even for themselves, let alone to sell any. Many do not have access to the markets where prices are higher nor the resources they need for inputs like fertilizer to increase their yields.

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1NC Opium Turn

Opium production declining now Jim Michaels 6/12 Afghan poppy crops down 40% since '08 as key towns secured, 2012 http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-06-12/poppyafghanistan-opium/55655966/1

Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan's key opium producing region has declined 40% over the past four years as coalition and government forces have secured key towns and villages and the Afghan government has ramped up eradication . This year farmers grew poppy on about 143,000 acres in Helmand province, down from its peak of nearly 256,000 acres in 2008, according to
Regional Command Southwest. "In all countries we see links between cultivation and security," said Angela Me, an analyst at the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. "The areas that are more secure are where we had less opium."

Higher food prices cause afghan farmers to transition away from growing opium Shah 8 (Ajay, May 24, pg. http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/may/24food.htm)
The simple fact is the average global yields are far, far below what is possible with contemporary science. Vast tracts of land in the world -- e.g. in India -- have extremely poor yields. High prices generate the incentives for increasing yield. This process, of prices sending out signals and yields then going up, has been going on for centuries. The socialist vision sees humans as inflexible and slightly stupid, who then need to be told what to do by the government. The single great idea of

economics is that people respond to incentives. When prices change, far-reaching changes take place in response . There are reports that in Afghanistan, farmers have switched from growing opium to wheat owing to higher wheat prices!

Opium trade threatens instability in the Balkans Duncan 7 (Thomas A., pg. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA470654&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf)
There are many other guerrilla-terrorist organizations that benefit from the Afghan drug trade.
The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia facilitate opium smuggling and use the trade as a source of revenue to achieve their local aims, many of which counter US national interest. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is an ally of the Taliban and al-Qaeda49 and also benefits from the opium trade. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is seeking to overthrow the government of Uzbekistan to establish an Islamic regime across central Asia. They have also targeted US forces in Afghanistan as well as US diplomatic facilities in central Asia in recent years.50 That Albanian Islamists and the KLA in Kosovo have used $4 million in profits from Afghan heroin, which they sold in European cities, to purchase weapons, including SA18 and SA 7 surface-to-air missiles.51 There is no doubt that the heroin from Afghanistan continues to flow through the Balkans .52 Any illicit trade that strengthens local

criminals or the potential resurgence of any armed group could provide the spark that reignites a Balkan conflict. The Opium trade through the Balkans clearly undermines NATO efforts to maintain long term peace in the region.

The Balkans are the most likely scenario for global war Brzezinski 3 (a professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, Brzezinski, Zbigniew. "Hegemonic quicksand." The National Interest 74 (Winter 2003): 5(12). Expanded Academic ASAP)

FOR THE next several decades, the most volatile and dangerous region of the world--with the explosive potential to plunge the world into chaos--will be the crucial swathe of Eurasia between Europe and the Far East. Heavily inhabited by Muslims, we might term this crucial subregion of Eurasia the new "Global Balkans." (1) It is here that America could slide into a collision with the world of Islam while American-European policy differences could even cause the Atlantic Alliance to come unhinged. The two eventualities together could
then put the prevailing American global hegemony at risk.

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2NC Opium Turn---UQ

Opium production low Jim Michaels 6/12 Afghan poppy crops down 40% since '08 as key towns secured, 2012 http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012-06-12/poppyafghanistan-opium/55655966/1 Afghanistan is the source of more than 90% of the world's heroin poppies, and most of the crop comes from Helmand. The coalition command in Helmand expects to see a 6% to 7% decline in cultivation this year over last. The United Nations said it expects to report that cultivation will be little changed this year. Poppy farmers were slammed with uncooperative weather this year, which hurt yields, said Wes Harris, the agricultural adviser for the regional command. It was the second time in the past three years that yields were hurt by weather. "Life has not been good for them this year," Harris said of narcotics traffickers.

The overall reduction in cultivation is due to increased security, Afghan government eradication and programs designed to encourage farmers to shift to legal crops, U.N. and military officials said.
Much of the initial surge of U.S. forces ordered by the White House two years ago was concentrated in Helmand and the province's sprawling farming region of Marjah, a key poppy growing area largely controlled by insurgents. Only about 5% of Marjah's farmland is growing poppy today, down from about 60% to 70% before the offensive, the regional command said.

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2NC Opium Turn---XT Link

high wheat prices causing a shift away from opium The Independent 8 (pg. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-big-question-why-is-opium-production-rising-in-afghanistan-and-can-it-bestopped-960276.html 10/14)

There was a 19 per cent drop in cultivation from 2007 to 2008, but bumper yields meant opium production only fell by 6 per cent. Crucially, the drop was down to farmers deciding not to plant poppies, and that was largely a result of a successful pre-planting campaign, led by strong provincial governors, in parts of the country that are relatively safe. Only 3.5 per cent of the country's poppy fields were eradicated in 2008. High wheat prices and low opium prices are also a factor in persuading some farmers to switch to licit crops.

and we have reverse casual evidence- low food prices cause resurgence in opium Irin News 8 (pg. http://www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain.aspx?InDepthId=21&ReportId=63020)
The key attraction , however, is the price. As wheat prices tumble in markets overflowing with the crop, nothing compares with the price of opium. A major survey of farmers' intentions conducted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in late 2003 found that 61 percent of farmers interviewed cited poverty and the high prices of opium as the primary motivation for poppy cultivation.

high wheat prices key to checking opium UNODC 8 (UN Office on Drugs and Crime, pg. http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/ExSum25August-standard.pdf)
Second, drought contributed to crop failure, particularly in the north and north-west where most cultivation is rain-fed. The same drastic weather conditions also hurt other crops, like wheat, increasing significantly its domestic price. This, combined with the global impact of rising food prices, is creating a food crisis. Yet, higher farm-gate wheat prices (because of shortages), and lower farm-gate opium prices (because of excess supply) have significantly improved the terms

of trade of food: this may provide further incentive to shift crops away from drugs.

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2NC Opium Turn---Terrorism Impact

opium financing causes global terrorism Duncan 7 (Thomas A., pg. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA470654&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf)
The US and her allies appear to have had success cutting into funding to terror organizations. Ehrenfeld (2003) states With many channels of funding cut off or curtailed since 11 September 2001, western authorities claim many of the Islamic groups affiliated with al Qaeda in Europe and Southeast Asia have turned to financing themselves and that dealing in narcotics has become one of their mainstays.43 It has also been reported by DEA sources following the 2001 war in Afghanistan that al-Qaeda gave large sums of money to Afghan farmers to increase opium production.44 It appears the US and their allies have had some success reducing the amount of financial support available to international terror organizations in recent years, but they will continue to look for new

sources of funding, and they cannot stop identifying these new sources and reducing or stopping them. The opium trade appears to be growing in importance to terror organizations . To understand how money is made by many terror guerilla and criminal organizations on the trade route, the US military have to examine the connections between the international terror organizations, trade routes, and local insurgent-guerrillas. Major opium trade routes leave Afghanistan in all directions to the international consumer markets. Opium drug trade moves to Europe through Pakistan, Turkey, the Central Asian Republics, Russia, or the Balkans, to the US through Pakistan, to Moscow Central Asia, and Chechnya.45 Most of Afghanistans poppy products end up in Europe. According to British Lieutenant Colonel Rochelle, the United Kingdom is in Afghanistan as
part of international community effort to stabilize the country and also because 90 percent of the heroin in the United Kingdom (UK) originates in Afghanistan.46 Understanding the opium trade routes enables us to understand how terror, guerilla-insurgent, and criminal groups are benefiting from the trade at every stop along the route. Al-Qaeda, Hizbollah, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) all have benefited from

their role in the Afghani opium trade.

Terrorism Leads to Extinction Alexander 3 (Yonah, Washington Times, August 28, LN)
Last week's brutal suicide bombings in Baghdad and Jerusalem have once again illustrated dramatically that the international community failed, thus far at least, to understand the magnitude and implications of the terrorist threats to the very survival of civilization itself.
Even the United States and Israel have for decades tended to regard terrorism as a mere tactical nuisance or irritant rather than a critical strategic challenge to their national security concerns. It is not surprising, therefore, that on September 11, 2001, Americans were stunned by the unprecedented tragedy of 19 al Qaeda terrorists striking a devastating blow at the center of the nation's commercial and military powers. Likewise, Israel and its citizens, despite the collapse of the Oslo Agreements of 1993 and numerous acts of terrorism triggered by the second intifada that began almost three years ago, are still "shocked" by each suicide attack at a time of intensive diplomatic efforts to revive the moribund peace process through the now revoked cease-fire arrangements [hudna]. Why are the United States and Israel, as well as scores of other countries affected by the universal nightmare of modern terrorism surprised by new terrorist "surprises"? There are many reasons, including misunderstanding of the manifold specific factors that contribute to terrorism's expansion, such as lack of a universal definition of terrorism, the religionization of politics, double standards of morality, weak punishment of terrorists, and the exploitation of the media by terrorist propaganda and psychological warfare. Unlike their historical counterparts, contemporary terrorists have introduced a new scale of violence in terms of conventional and unconventional threats and impact. The

internationalization and brutalization of current and future terrorism make it clear we have entered an Age of Super Terrorism [e.g. biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear and cyber] with its serious implications concerning national, regional and global security
concerns.

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2AC Opium Turn

Non-unique---opium production high now UPI 5/27 Growth in Afghan poppy crops expected 2012 http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/05/27/Growth-in-Afghan-poppy-cropsexpected/UPI-16031338132834/ KABUL, Afghanistan, May 27 (UPI) -- The withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan will likely result in a new surge in the production of opium poppies, counter-narcotics experts predicted. The United States has been leading a long battle to snuff out the Afghan opium industry, though with the Americans shipping out by 2014 and Afghanistan's economy still weak, many impoverished farmers will likely turn to opium as a cash crop. "Some money is available through the licit economy, but less than in the past as Western contracts dry up, and so the importance of the illicit, informal economy will increase," Jean-Luc Lemahieu, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan, told The New York Times. "The prognosis post-2014 is not a positive one." Some Afghan farmers said they indeed had little choice but to turn to the profitable poppy. "I don't have any cash now to start another business, and if I grow any other crops, I cannot make a profit," Mohammed Amin, a poppy grower in Oruzgan province, said. The Times said the current poppy crop in southern Afghanistan is expected

to be lower this year due to bad weather and blight. But the consequence will likely be that poppies from other parts of the country will fetch a much higher price for the struggling farmers. "The poppy is always good, you can sell it at any time," another grower told the Times. "It is like gold, you can sell it whenever and get cash." Afghanistan has pledged to continue its efforts to eradicate poppy crops and steer farmers into legitimate crops. Still, officials concede the economics of the situation and the likelihood of corruption among local police make the task difficult.

Alt causes a. Financial support from radical groups Chossudovsky 99 Michel., Professor or Economics at the University of Ottawa. The KLA: Gangsters, Terrorists and the CIA. Online
Bonn and Washington's "hidden agenda" consisted in triggering nationalist liberation movements in Bosnia and Kosovo with the ultimate purpose of destabilising Yugoslavia. The latter objective was also carried out "by turning a blind eye" to the influx of mercenaries and financial

support from Islamic fundamentalist organisations.[14] Mercenaries financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait had been fighting in Bosnia.[15] And the Bosnian pattern was replicated in Kosovo: Mujahadeen mercenaries from various Islamic countries are reported to be fighting alongside the KLA in Kosovo. German, Turkish and Afghan instructors were reported to be training the KLA in guerrilla and diversion tactics.[16] According to a Deutsche Press-Agentur report, financial support from Islamic countries to the KLA had been channelled through the former Albanian chief of the National Information Service (NIS), Bashkim Gazidede.[17] "Gazidede, reportedly a devout Moslem who fled Albania in March of last year [1997], is presently [1998] being investigated for his contacts with Islamic terrorist organizations ."[18]

b. 75% percent of the drug money is from Turkey Chossudovsky 99 Michel., Professor or Economics at the University of Ottawa. The KLA: Gangsters, Terrorists and the CIA. Online
The supply route for arming KLA "freedom fighters" are the rugged mountainous borders of Albania with Kosovo and Macedonia. Albania is also a key point of transit of the Balkans drug route which supplies Western Europe with grade four heroin. Seventy-five percent of the heroin entering Western Europe is from Turkey. And a large part of drug shipments originating in Turkey transits through the Balkans . According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), "it is estimated that 4-6 metric tons of heroin leave each month from Turkey having [through the Balkans] as destination Western Europe."[19] A recent
intelligence report by Germany's Federal Criminal Agency suggests that: "Ethnic Albanians are now the most prominent group in the distribution of heroin in Western consumer countries."[20]

c. economic collapse Chossudovsky 99 Michel., Professor or Economics at the University of Ottawa. The KLA: Gangsters, Terrorists and the CIA. Online
Industry and agriculture in Kosovo were spearheaded into bankruptcy following the IMF's lethal "economic medicine " imposed on Belgrade in 1990. The embargo was imposed on Yugoslavia. Ethnic Albanians and Serbs were driven into abysmal poverty. Economic collapse created an environment which fostered the progress of illicit trade. In Kosovo, the rate of unemployment increased to a staggering 70 percent (according to Western sources). Poverty and economic collapse served to exacerbate simmering ethnic tensions. Thousands of unemployed youths "barely out of their teens" from an impoverished population, were drafted into the ranks of the KLA ...[22]

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1AR Opium Turn---XT UQ

Opium production has actually increased Williams 12 (David, Afghan drug war debacle: Blair said smashing opium trade was a major reason to invade but 10 years on heroin production is up from 185 tons a year to 5,800, February 17th, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102158/Heroin-production-Afghanistan-RISEN-61.html) The West is losing the heroin war in Afghanistan ten years after Tony Blair pledged that wiping out the drug was one of the main reasons for invading the country. Despite spending 18billion and a conflict which has so far cost the lives of almost 400 British troops, production of the class-A drug by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons. It increased by 61 per cent last year alone. Such has been the failure to combat the problem that more than 90 per cent of the heroin sold on Britains streets is still made using opium from Afghanistan. The United Nations yesterday warned that the situation was out of control. Declaring that the West had lost its war against the drug, a glum UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon added: Time is not on our side. The UN figures make grim
reading for those who backed the invasion. Cutting the supply of heroin was one of the prime reasons given by then-prime minister Tony Blair in 2001 for sending in British troops. Three weeks after the attack on Americas Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Mr Blair said: The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. This is another part of their regime we should seek to destroy. But ten years later, the UN figures reveal how the outcome has been so dramatically different. Some 15

per cent of Afghanistans Gross National Product now comes from drug-related exports a business worth up to 1.6billion each year, it was claimed. Officials say there is clear

evidence that the opium trade is being orchestrated by the Taliban, with vast profits used to buy weapons and fuel the insurgency. The warning came at a meeting in Austria of more than 50 countries. Britain alone has spent an estimated 18billion a further 4billion is said to have been earmarked for this year in Afghanistan, where 398 of its troops have died and thousands have been injured. The most recent was Senior Aircraftman Ryan Tomlin, from 2 Squadron RAF Regiment, who was fatally wounded by small arms fire during an insurgent attack on Monday in Helmand Province the heart of the opium industry. Ironically, the Taliban had overseen a significant fall in heroin production in the months before the invasion. Their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar collaborating with the UN had decreed that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the worlds most successful anti-drug campaigns. As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation was reduced by 91 per cent from the previous years estimate of 82,172 hectares. The ban was so effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this production, recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season. However, with

the overthrow of the Taliban opium fields returned, despite the destruction of crops by coalition forces and initiatives to persuade farmers to switch to other produce. There was some success but, commanders said, the reality was that forces were too thinly stretched to focus on crop destruction a move that, anyway, turned farmers against the troops. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that
the 2006 harvest was around 6,100 tons, 33 times its level in 2001, a 3,200 per cent increase in five years. Cultivation in 2006 reached a record 165,000 hectares compared with 104,000 in 2005 and 7,606 in 2001 under the Taliban. This fell in figures for 2010 because of crop disease, but the UN figures show that it increased sharply again last year when 131,000 hectares were under cultivation, producing some 5,800 tons of opium. The

rise came even though the Afghan government and Nato have boosted crop eradication measures by 65 per cent and made significant seizures in recent months. The UN says there are now 17 provinces in Afghanistan affected by poppy cultivation, up from 14 a year ago. Experts say the Talibans involvement in the drugs trade ranges from direct assistance such as providing farmers with seed, fertiliser and cash advances to distribution and protection. In his opening
address to the Vienna conference, the UN Secretary General warned that the problem extends beyond those who abuse drugs and is threatening Afghanistan itself. Drug

trafficking and transnational organized crime undermine the health of fragile states, (and) weaken the rule of law, he said, Above all, the Afghan government must prioritise the issue of narcotics. A report by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime said revenue from opium production in Afghanistan soared by 133 per cent last year to about 900million after the crop recovered from a 2010 blight and approached previous levels. Ban Kimoon, in his opening comments, cited a 2011 UN survey saying that poppy cultivation has increased by 7 per cent and opium production by 61 per cent in the past year. Zarar Ahmed Moqbel Osmani, the Afghan minister, said his country understood
international concerns but noted that 95 per cent of poppy cultivation takes place in nine insecure provinces. He urged the international community to work hard in preventing the components needed to turn opium into heroin from entering Afghanistan from neighbouring countries.

Afghani Opium production is rising

BBC 11(BBC, Afghan opium production rises by 61% compared with 2010, 10/11/11, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-southasia-15254788)

Opium production in Afghanistan rose by an estimated 61% this year compared with 2010, according to a UN report. The increase has been attributed to rising opium prices that have driven farmers to expand cultivation of the illicit opium poppy by 7% in 2011. Last year opium production halved largely due to a plant infection which drastically reduced yields. Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's opium - 5,800 tonnes this year - the main ingredient of heroin. Analysts say that revenue from the drug has helped fund the Taliban

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insurgency. Farmers who responded to the survey described economic hardship and lucrative prices as the main reasons for the increase. Nearly 80% of the opium grown in Afghanistan is being produced in
provinces in the south, including Helmand and Kandahar, which are among the most volatile in the country. The UN says this demonstrates that there is a clear link between insecurity and opium cultivation.

Opium production has continued to rise throughout the decade

Williams 12 (David, journalist, Afghan drug war debacle: Blair said smashing opium trade was a major reason to invade but
10 years on heroin production is up from 185 tons a year to 5,800, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102158/Heroinproduction-Afghanistan-RISEN-61.html#ixzz1ykokVMTF, 2/17/12,

The West is losing the heroin war in Afghanistan ten years after Tony Blair pledged that wiping out the drug
almost 400 British troops,

was one of the main reasons for invading the country. Despite spending 18billion and a conflict which has so far cost the lives of

production of the class-A drug by Afghan farmers rose between 2001 and 2011 from just 185 tons to a staggering 5,800 tons. It increased by 61 per cent last year alone. The United Nations yesterday warned that the situation was out of control. Declaring that the West had lost its war against the drug, a glum UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon added: Time is not on our side. The UN figures make grim

reading for those who backed the invasion. Cutting the supply of heroin was one of the prime reasons given by then-prime minister Tony Blair in 2001 for sending in British troops. Three weeks after the attack on Americas Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Mr Blair said: The arms the Taliban are buying today are paid for by the lives of young British people buying their drugs on British streets. This is another part of their regime we should seek to destroy. Warning: UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon has said the drug problem in Afghanistan threatens the entire country with organised crime and trafficking But ten years later, the UN figures reveal how the outcome has been so dramatically different. Some 15 per cent of Afghanistans Gross National Product now comes from drug-related exports a business worth up to 1.6billion each year, it was claimed. Officials say there is clear evidence that the opium trade is being orchestrated by the Taliban, with vast profits used to buy weapons and fuel the insurgency. The warning came at a meeting in Austria of more than 50 countries. Britain alone has spent an estimated 18billion a further 4billion is said to have been earmarked for this year in Afghanistan, where 398 of its troops have died and thousands have been injured. The most recent was Senior Aircraftman Ryan Tomlin, from 2 Squadron RAF Regiment, who was fatally wounded by small arms fire during an insurgent attack on Monday in Helmand Province the heart of the opium industry.

With troops leaving Afghanistan, The opium trade will explode

Farmer, 11
(Ben, Afghani correspondent for The Telegraph, Afghan opium production to explode as foreign troops withdraw, 11-25-11, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8915644/Afghan-opium-production-toexplode-as-foreign-troops-withdraw.html) Taliban insurgents and farmers will take advantage of the withdrawal to increase poppy production, said General Khodaidad.

Afghanistan already produces more than 90 per cent of the world's opium and more than 95 per cent of the heroin on Britain's streets, but he predicted the trade would soon be "completely out of control". Britain has spent tens of millions of pounds on counter narcotics schemes in the
past six years in Helmand. The province remains the world centre of opium production. Gen Khodaidad, who was minister for counter narcotics for four years, said the industry was thriving on Afghan insecurity, corruption and weak government. He said: "The Taliban is stronger than this present government and that directly affects poppy cultivation." "The Taliban explains to the farmer that the foreign troops are leaving and if you grow poppy, I am still here." The Taliban are estimated to raise

annually between 60 and 250 million a year through the trade. High opium prices meant production rose nearly seven percent this year according to the latest United Nations estimates

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1NC Warming Turn

High food prices solve global warming Brasher 8 (Philip, 9/14, pg. http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080914/BUSINESS03/809140321/-1/NEWS04)
So, it would seem to follow that if food prices go up because commodity prices are rising, well, that's only fair. Americans spend on average 10 cents of every dollar of their income on food. But what if Americans respond to inflation by eating less? Some environmentalists and experts in nutrition consider that a good idea. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the United Nations' panel on climate change, recently called for

people to consider eating less meat as a way of controlling global warming. Livestock production accounts for an estimated 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That estimate accounts for everything from the fuel used to produce feed and livestock to the impact of
clearing forests for growing feed crops. He told the BBC that "among options for mitigating climate change, changing diets is one thing we should consider." Soaring food prices could be one way to do that. Keith-Thomas Ayoob, a pediatric nutritionist who teaches at New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said at a recent food policy conference that rising prices can be a way to get people to prepare more healthful foods and eat out less.

Global warming is real and happening now---the impact is extinction Kaku 11 Michio Kaku is the Professor Theoretical Physics at City College of New York, Theoretical Physicists, Co-Founder of String Theory, Physics of the
Future By midcentury, the full impact of a fossil fuel economy should be in full swing: global warming. It

is now indisputable that the earth is heating up. Within the last century, the earths temperature rose 1.3 F, and the pace is accelerating. The signs are unmistakable everywhere we look:
The thickness of Arctic ice has decreased by an astonishing 50 percent in just the past fifty years. Much of this Arctic ice is just below the freezing point, floating on water. Hence, it is acutely sensitive to small temperature variations of the oceans, acting as a canary in a mineshaft, an early warning system. Today, parts of the northern polar ice caps disappear during the summer months, and may disappear entirely during summer as early as 2015. The polar ice cap may vanish permanently by the end of the century, disrupting the worlds weather by altering the flow of ocean and air currents around the planet. Greenlands ice shelves shrank by twenty-four square miles in 2007. This figure jumped to seventy-one square miles in 2008. (If all the Greenland ice were somehow to melt, sea levels would rise about twenty feet around the world.) Large chunks of Antarcticas ice, which have been stable for tens of thousands of years, are gradually breaking off. In 2000, a piece the size of Connecticut broke off, containing 4,200 square miles of ice. In 2002, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island broke off the Thwaites Glacier. (If all Antarcticas ice were to melt, sea levels would rise about 180 feet around the world.) For every vertical foot that the ocean rises, the horizontal spread of the ocean is about 100 feet. Already, sea levels have risen 8 inches in the past century , mainly caused by the expansion of seawater as it heats up. According to the United Nations , sea levels could rise by 7 to 23 inches by 2100. Some scientists have said that the UN report was too cautious in interpreting the data. According to scientists at the University of Colorados Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, by 2100 sea levels could rise by 3 to 6 feet. So gradually the map of the earths coastlines will change. Temperatures started to be reliably recorded in the late 1700s; 1995, 2005, and 2010 ranked among the hottest years ever recorded; 2000 to 2009 was the hottest decade. Likewise, levels of carbon dioxide are rising dramatically. They are at the highest levels in 100,000 years. As the earth heats up, tropical diseases are gradually migrating northward. The recent spread of the West Nile virus carried by mosquitoes may be a harbinger of things to come. UN officials are especially concerned about the spread of malaria northward. Usually, the eggs of many harmful insects die every winter when the soil freezes. But with the shortening of the winter season, it means the inexorable spread of dangerous insects northward . CARBONDIOXIDE GREENHOUSEGAS According to the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists have concluded with 90 percent confidence that global warming is driven by human activity, especially the production of carbon dioxide via the burning of oil and coal. Sunlight easily passes through carbon dioxide. But as sunlight heats up the earth, it creates infrared radiation, which does not pass back through carbon dioxide so easily. The energy from sunlight cannot escape back into space and is trapped. We also see a somewhat similar effect in greenhouses or cars. The sunlight warms the air, which is prevented from escaping by the glass. Ominously, the amount of carbon dioxide generated has grown explosively, especially in the last century. Before the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide content of the air was 270 parts per million (ppm). Today, it has soared to 387 ppm. (In 1900, the world consumed 150 million barrels of oil. In 2000, it jumped to 28 billion barrels, a 185-fold jump. In 2008, 9.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide were sent into the air from fossil fuel burning and also deforestation, but only 5 billion tons were recycled into the oceans, soil, and vegetation. The remainder will stay in the air for decades to come, heating up the earth.) VISIT TO ICELAND The rise in temperature is not a fluke, as we can see by analyzing ice cores. By drilling deep into the ancient ice of the Arctic, scientists have been able to extract air bubbles that are thousands of years old. By chemically analyzing the air in these bubbles, scientists can reconstruct the temperature and carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere going back more than 600,000 years. Soon, they will be able to determine the weather conditions going back a million years. I had a chance to see this firsthand. I once gave a lecture in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, and had the privilege of visiting the University of Iceland, where ice cores are being analyzed. When your airplane lands in Reykjavik, at first all you see is snow and jagged rock, resembling the bleak landscape of the moon. Although barren and forbidding, the terrain makes the Arctic an ideal place to analyze the climate of the earth hundreds of thousands of years ago. When I visited their laboratory, which is kept at freezing temperatures, I had to pass through thick refrigerator doors. Once inside, I could see racks and racks containing long metal tubes, each about an inch and a half in diameter and about ten feet long. Each hollow tube had been drilled deep into the ice of a glacier. As the tube penetrated the ice, it captured samples from snows that had fallen thousands of years ago. When the tubes were removed, I could carefully examine the icy contents of each. At first, all I could see was a long column of white ice. But upon closer examination, I could see that the ice had stripes made of tiny bands of different colors. Scientists have to use a variety of techniques to date them. Some of the ice layers contain markers indicating important events, such as the soot emitted from a volcanic eruption. Since the dates of these eruptions are known to great accuracy, one can use them to determine how old that layer is. These ice cores were then cut in various slices so they could be examined. When I peered into one slice under a microscope, I saw tiny, microscopic bubbles. I shuddered to realize that I was seeing air bubbles that were deposited tens of thousands of years ago, even before the rise of human civilization. The carbon dioxide content within each air bubble is easily measured. But calculating the temperature of the air when the ice was first deposited is more difficult. (To do this, scientists analyze the water in

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the bubble. Water molecules can contain different isotopes. As the temperature falls, heavier water isotopes condense faster than ordinary water molecules. Hence, by measuring the amount of the heavier isotopes, one can calculate the temperature at which the water molecule condensed.) Finally, after painfully analyzing the contents of thousands of ice cores, these scientists have come to some important conclusions . They found that temperature and carbon dioxide levels have oscillated in parallel, like two roller coasters moving together, in synchronization over many thousands of years. When one curve rises or falls, so does the other. Most important, they found a sudden spike in temperature and carbon dioxide content happening just within the last century. This is highly unusual, since most fluctuations occur slowly over millennia. This unusual spike is not part of this natural heating process, scientists claim, but is a direct indicator of human activity. There are other ways to show that this sudden spike is caused by human activity, and not natural cycles. Computer simulations are now so advanced that we can simulate the temperature of the earth with and without the presence of human activity. Without civilization producing carbon dioxide, we find a relatively flat temperature curve. But with the addition of human activity, we can show that there should be a sudden spike in both temperature and carbon dioxide. The predicted spike fits the actual spike perfectly. Lastly, one can measure the amount of sunlight that lands on every square foot of the earths surface. Scientists can also calculate the amount of heat that is reflected into outer space from the earth. Normally, we expect these two amounts to be equal, with input equaling output. But in reality, we find the net amount of energy that is currently heating the earth. Then if we calculate the amount of energy being produced by human activity, we find a perfect match. Hence, human activity is causing the current heating of the earth. Unfortunately, even if we were to suddenly stop producing any carbon dioxide, the gas that has already been released into the atmosphere is enough to continue global warming for decades to come. As a result, by midcentury, the situation could be dire. Scientists have created pictures of what our coastal cities will look like at midcentury and beyond if sea levels continue to rise. Coastal cities may disappear. Large parts of Manhattan may have to be evacuated, with Wall Street underwater . Governments will have to decide which of their great cities and capitals are worth saving and which are beyond hope. Some cities may be saved via a combination of sophisticated dikes and water gates. Other cities may be deemed hopeless and allowed to vanish under the ocean, creating

mass migrations of people. Since most of the commercial and population centers of the world are next to the ocean, this could have a disastrous effect on the world economy. Even if some cities can be salvaged, there is still the danger that large storms can send surges of
water into a city, paralyzing its infrastructure. For example, in 1992 a huge storm surge flooded Manhattan, paralyzing the subway system and trains to New Jersey. With transportation flooded, the economy grinds to a halt. FLOODING BANGLADESH AND VIETNAM A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change isolated three hot spots for potential disaster: Bangladesh, the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, and the Nile Delta in Egypt. The worst situation is that of Bangladesh, a country regularly flooded by storms even without global warming. Most of the country is flat and at sea level. Although it has made significant gains in the last few decades, it is still one of the poorest nations on earth, with one of the highest population densities. (It has a population of 161 million, comparable to that of Russia, but with 1/120 of the land area.) About 50 percent of the land area will be permanently flooded if sea levels rise by three feet. Natural calamities occur there almost every year, but in September 1998, the world witnessed in horror a preview of what may become commonplace. Massive flooding submerged two-thirds of the nation, leaving 30 million people homeless almost overnight; 1,000 were killed, and 6,000 miles of roads were destroyed. This was one of the worst natural disasters in modern history. Another country that would be devastated by a rise in sea level is Vietnam, where the Mekong Delta is particularly vulnerable. By midcentury, this country of 87 million people could face a collapse of its main food-growing area. Half the rice in Vietnam is grown in the Mekong Delta, home to 17 million people, and much of it will be flooded permanently by rising sea levels. According to the World Bank, 11 percent of the entire population would be displaced if sea levels rise by three feet by midcentury. The Mekong Delta will also be flooded with salt water, permanently destroying the fertile soil of the area. If millions are flooded out of their homes in Vietnam, many will flock to Ho Chi Minh City seeking refuge. But one-fourth of the city will also be underwater. In 2003 the Pentagon commissioned a study, done by the Global Business Network, that showed that, in a worst-case scenario, chaos could spread around the world due to global warming. As millions of refugees cross national borders, governments could lose all authority and collapse, so countries could descend into the nightmare of looting, rioting, and chaos. In this desperate situation, nations, when faced with the prospect of the influx of millions of desperate people, may resort to

nuclear weapons. Envision Pakistan, India, and Chinaall armed with nuclear weaponsskirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared rivers, and arable land, the report said. Peter Schwartz, founder of the Global Business Network and a principal author of the Pentagon study, confided to me the details of this scenario. He told me that the biggest hot spot would be the border
between India and Bangladesh. In a major crisis in Bangladesh, up to 160 million people could be driven out of their homes, sparking one of the greatest migrations in human history. Tensions could rapidly rise as borders collapse, local governments are paralyzed, and mass rioting breaks out. Schwartz sees that nations may use nuclear weapons as a last resort. In a worst-case scenario, we could have a greenhouse effect that feeds on itself. For example, the melting of the tundra in the Arctic regions may release millions of tons of methane gas from rotting vegetation. Tundra covers nearly 9 million square miles of land in the Northern Hemisphere, containing vegetation frozen since the last Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago. This tundra contains more carbon dioxide and methane than the atmosphere, and this poses an enormous threat to the worlds weather. Methane gas, moreover, is a much deadlier greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It does not stay in the atmosphere as long, but it causes much more damage than carbon dioxide. The

release of so much methane gas from the melting tundra could cause temperatures to rapidly rise, which will cause even more methane gas to be released, causing a runaway cycle of global warming.

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2NC Warming Turn---I/L

Livestock is the largest contributor to warming- (its key to methane that contributes more to warming and which is easier solved, and livestock will soon be the biggest contributors to warming) Knickerbocker 7 Brad, Christian Science Monitor, February 20, Lexis
Altogether, that's more than the emissions caused by transportation. The latter two gases are particularly troubling - even though they represent far smaller concentrations in atmosphere than CO2, which remains the main global warming culprit. But methane has 23 times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2 and nitrous oxide has 296 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.Methane could become a greater problem if the permafrost in northern latitudes thaws with increasing temperatures, releasing the gas now trapped below decaying vegetation. What's more certain is that emissions of these gases can spike as humans consume more livestock products.As prosperity increased around the world in recent decades, the number of people eating meat (and the amount one eats every year) has risen steadily. Between 1970 and 2002, annual per capita meat consumption in developing countries rose from 11 kilograms (24 lbs.) to 29 kilograms (64 lbs.), according to the FAO. (In developed countries, the comparable figures were 65 kilos and 80 kilos.) As population increased, total meat consumption in the developing world grew nearly five-fold over that period.Beyond that, annual global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tons at the beginning of the decade to 465 million tons in 2050. This makes livestock the fastest growing sector of global agriculture.Animal-rights activists and those advocating vegetarianism have been quick to pick up on the implications of the FAO report."Arguably the best way to reduce global warming in our lifetimes is to reduce or eliminate our consumption of animal products," writes Noam Mohr in a report for EarthSave International.Changing one's diet can lower greenhouse gas emissions quicker than shifts away from fossil fuel burning technologies, Mr. Mohr writes, because the turnover rate for farm animals is shorter than that for cars and power plants."Even if cheap, zero-emission fuel sources were available today, they would take many years to build and slowly replace the massive infrastructure our economy depends upon today," he writes. "Similarly, unlike carbon dioxide which can remain in the air for more than a century, methane cycles out of the atmosphere in just eight years, so that lower methane emissions quickly translate to cooling of the earth."Researchers at the University of Chicago compared the global warming impact of meat eaters with that of vegetarians and found that the average American diet - including all food processing steps results in the annual production of an extra 1.5 tons of CO2-equivalent (in the form of all greenhouse gases) compared to a no-meat diet. Researchers Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin concluded that dietary changes could make more difference than trading in a standard sedan for a more efficient hybrid car, which reduces annual CO2 emissions by roughly one ton a year."It doesn't have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan," says Dr. Eshel, whose family raised beef cattle in Israel. "If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you've already made a substantial difference."

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1NC Environment Turn

1. High food prices spark new research into crops which require less pesticides and fertilizers Declan Butler, agriculture expert, 1 May 2008, Nature Magazine, A research menu,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/full/453001b.html This was not a sudden crisis. It may be only this spring that food prices have started sparking riots on the streets of Haiti and Egypt, not to mention rice rationing at Wal-Mart's cash-and-carry stores, but food prices have been rising since 2000. The rises accelerated in 2006, when global cereal stocks dropped to levels not seen since the early 1980s. And although the factors driving them are many and various, a good few of them look likely to persist for years to come. Nor is the crisis unremittingly heinous. Higher food prices, other things being equal, mean higher farm incomes, and there are a lot of poor farmers in
the world who could do with such a boost. But although this may suggest benefits for some in the future, the net effect so far has been negative. An interim report released by the World Bank in April says that seven years' poverty reduction has been undone by the past two years of high staple-food prices. The causes of these shortages are not easily undone, and some of them are things no one should want to undo. In China and India there is ever more and utterly reasonable demand for a third meal in the day and more meat in the diet. In Australia prolonged drought has had a severe effect on wheat production. High energy prices mean costly fertilizers and insecticides, not to mention making farm machinery more expensive to run. In the United States, more and more corn (maize) goes to making ethanol, raising the price of both corn and other cereals that can substitute for it. There are various ways

in which the fruits of scientific research might have helped ease the suffering that comes from this confluence of factors. But here, too, the harvest is not what it might have been. Public spending on basic agricultural research fell during the 1980s and 1990s in rich countries (see page 8). The proportion of US aid ploughed into agriculture wilted from 25% to 1% ,
bilateral farming aid from Europe dropped by two-thirds and World Bank lending in the sector slipped from 30% to 8% . The reasons for this included the perceived success of Green Revolution technologies in Asia, and, indeed, some backlash against intensified farming among green groups. The downslide was most pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa, where the cutbacks were still severe even though there had been no Green Revolution comparable to that in Asia. A contributing factor to this decline from the 1990s on was Europe's attitude to genetically modified crops, which both chilled research in the area and reduced incentives for such technologies to be fielded in countries looking to European export markets. One might assume that such cutbacks in research reflected poor results. Not so; the pay-offs to agricultural research are massive. The World Bank's World Development

Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (http://tinyurl.com/2ngyqd) the first of the annual reports to focus on agriculture for a quarter of a century, the bank noted with self-reproach cites 700 published estimates of rates of return on investment in agricultural research, development and extension services in developing countries. It reports an average annual return of 43% . Agriculture has poverty-busting powers beyond straightforward revenue increases. One reason for this is that
poor people in poor countries who earn a little extra cash will spend it on basic local goods and services agricultural growth spurs economic growth from the bottom up. A study of 42 developing countries covering the period from 1981 to 2003 found that growth in gross domestic product (GDP) that originated in agriculture increased spending by the poor two-and-a-half times more than does GDP growth in other sectors. The past weeks have brought

signs that global institutions and donors are beginning to bow, belatedly, to this logic. On 2 April the World Bank announced its intention to double agricultural lending to sub-Saharan Africa over the next year, and bank administrators say that a portion of the new money will go towards basic research. Britain, the International Monetary Fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are also opening their coffers. In the case of the Gates's money, much will be channelled through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa led by Kofi Annan. There are many useful directions for such development; higher yields, drought resistance and reduced requirements for inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides are all promising. But the more pressing problem for poor farmers is not the development of new technologies but
access to those already there. Plenty of good agricultural science such as locally adapted seed varieties and soil surveys sits unused because it has not been delivered in a form adequately tailored to the end users and their limited means. Resources need to go towards coordinating and strengthening local agricultural extension services as an integral part of revamping and reintegrating the research infrastructure. Agricultural research systems in sub-Saharan Africa are fragmented into almost 400 distinct agencies, eight times the number in the United States and four times the number in India.

2. Pesticides kill earthworms causes extinction. Microsoil, January 20, 2004, http://www.microsoil.com/earthworm.htm
Only where you find earthworms will you find rich, healthy soil with high amounts of organic matter and vice versa. Earthworms simply cannot proliferate and flourish in areas where chemical fertilizers and pesticides are paramount. Earthworms, actually, act as a barometer for soil health. Many agriculture oriented people still do not understand or appreciate the tremendous enriching value that earthworms have on our soils. It took a French scientist and ecologist, Andr Voisin, author of the insightful Soil, Grass and Cancer, to point out that the earthworm, and in particular the slippery lumbricid, most common in the United States and Europe, is not only essential to good agriculture but is the very foundation of all civilization. In Better Grassland Sward, Voisin traces man's civilizations in relation to the distribution of active earthworms, of which he lists some three thousand species. Among the most ancient of terrestrial animal groups, several hundred million years old, they come in various colors and sizes: brown, purple, red, pink, blue, green and light tan, the smallest barely an inch long, the largest a ten-foot giant in Australia, though South African newspapers reported a boa-constrictor-sized monster twenty feet long, a yard wide through the middle. The most common European and American earthworm, Lumbricus terrestris, grows barely longer than six inches. Ten thousand years ago, immediately after the last ice age, the lumbricid earthworms were to be found only in certain restricted areas of the planet, such as in the valleys of three great civilizations - the Indus, the

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Euphrates, and the Nile - where crops grew almost without cultivation in a soil of immensely fruitful richness. As Jerry Minnich points out in The Earthworm Book, other areas of the earth offered ideal climates and rich soils, but produced, with the exception of China, no such civilizations. The Egyptian experience alone, says Minnich, is strong indication that a complex civilization cannot develop until the basic agricultural

needs of its people are met, and that requires the earthworm. Not that the point was entirely overlooked by the USDA. An agricultural report on investigations carried out in the valley of the Nile in 1949, before the folly of the Aswan Dam, indicated that the great fertility of the soil was due in large part the work of earthworms. It was estimated that during
the six months of active growing season each year the castings of earthworms on these soils amounted to a stunning 120 tons per acre, and in each handful of that soil are more microorganisms than there are humans on the planet. Thirty years before the birth of Darwin, as the American colonists were breaking away from the mother country, an English naturalist, Gilbert White, was writing: Worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, perforating and loosening the soil, rendering it pervious to rains and the fibers of plants by drawing straws and stalks of leaves and twigs into it; and, most of all, by throwing up such infinite numbers of lumps of earth called worm-casts, which being their excrement, is a fine manure for grain and grass. . . . The earth

without worms would soon become cold, hard-bound, and void of fermentation, and consequently sterile. That the phenomenon
was understood before the time of Christ is clear from Cleopatra's decree that the earthworm be revered and protected by all her subjects as a sacred animal. Egyptians were forbidden to remove it from the land, and farmers were not to trouble the worms for fear of stunting the renowned fertility of the Nilotic valley's soil. In the northern part of North America the last ice age so stripped the country bare of earthworms that in very few areas of what is now the United States were agricultural lands rich enough to support even moderately large populations of native American Indians. As Minnich says: "Before European contact, the only lumbricids native to the United States were some lacy species of Bismatus and Eisenia, essentially worthless as soil builders." But wedged in the shoes of the colonists' horses were tiny lumbricid egg capsules, and in the root balls of European plants immigrant earthworms arrived to remedy the situation. In no time a rich but dormant soil was transformed into one of high fertility. The lush meadows of New England, the vast farmlands of the upper Midwest, the great wheat fields of Canada are all attributed to the introduction of the earthworm. By the early part of the twentieth century, says Minnich, New Zealand soil scientists observed that European lumbricids were making vigorous inroads into the island's previously wormless soils. Hill pastures that could barely support a stand of grass were gradually becoming lush and green even though no fertilizer was applied. Counts of earthworms ran as high as over four million per acre, more than three times the maximum populations of the same species in their Old World habitats. The source of all this fertility was what the worms excreted in the form of castings, compost of the highest grade, containing mineral and organic matter in a soluble form, excellent as both a fertilizer and as a soil conditioner. Earthworms can produce more compost, in a shorter time, with less effort, than any other method. As they burrow, they are constantly bathed in mucus, which helps them through the roughest ground. Continually rubbed off, this mucus helps cement the walls of their tunnels. And, while it helps a worm worm its way out of a predator's grasp, it also helps hold the soil firm, retaining moisture as it hardens. In classical Greek times, Aristotle called the earthworm "the guts of the soil" because it produces particles that are smaller than when they enter, held together by the intestinal fluid that makes for a finer-structured earth. An omnivorous and unfinicky eater, the eyeless earthworm ingests whatever appears before it in morsels fit for its toothless gums. Muscularly pumping through the soil, it ingests not only organic matter but the raw earth itself, using sand and other mineral particles as grinding stones in its gizzard. Mixed in the crop with digestive chemicals and disintegrator bacteria, the elements come out in different combinations, more easily taken up by plants. Worm castings, neutralized by constant additions of carbonate of lime from three pairs of calciferous glands near the worm's gizzard, and finely ground prior to digestion, are five times as rich in available nitrogen, seven times as rich in available phosphates, and eleven times as rich in available potash as anything else in the upper six inches of the soil, producing a nutrient in just the right condition for the plant to absorb. Real organic NPK! What's more, the castings are always more acidically neutral than the soil from which they were formed, naturally improving the local pH factor as armies of earthworms work to keep the soil in balance, neither too acid nor too alkaline for the growth of plants. PESTICIDES IMPACT- EARTHWORMS Could it be that these great sinusoid fertilizers actually transmute elements, as the French savant Louis Karvran would have it, or are they merely collecting, distilling, and rearranging them to fertilize the soil? The former would appear to be more likely. Castings, usually deposited in old burrows, or by night crawlers on the surface when they come up to mate or draw leaves into their burrows, consist of about one-third of the contents of the worm's intestines, in pelletlike form, and have a third more bacteria than the surrounding soil. Even when ample organic matter is available, earthworms consume large amounts of soil, and by mixing the two produce a rich humus, perfect in texture, with more plant nutrients than in the material from which it was derived. Castings contain a higher percentage of aggregates than is found in the surrounding soil - aggregates being the formations of individual particles of sand, clay, and silt, grouped into larger units, which help make a crumblike structure of the soil. An earthworm is said to produce its own weight in castings each day it is on the prowl. Henry Hopp of the USDA estimates that one acre of good agricultural land can produce well over five tons of castings in a year, or more than 5 percent of the total soil volume to plow depth. In the process of producing its castings, on even an ordinary agricultural soil, earthworms are credited with turning more than fifty tons of soil per acre, and in the Nile Valley as many as two hundred tons, into a fructifying base. Earthworms are prodigious diggers and earth movers, capable of burrowing down as deep as fifteen feet. They can squeeze between and push apart the soil crumbs, and one worm alone can move a stone fifty times its own weight. As

Tunnels held together by their mucus afford planted roots quicker avenues into the soil. And the mucus, forming humus, prevents erosion. Henry Hopp says these materials, once dried, do not dissolve again in water. Yet, while the soil thus treated holds the required moisture, the
they burrow, earthworms mix and sift the soils, breaking up clods and burying stones. Some carry down leaves and other organic matter; others bring nutrients and humus to the top.

burrows drain superfluous water. Experiments have shown that soils with earthworms drain from four to ten times faster than those without. Conversely, in light sandy soils, where water tends to run straight through to the subsoil, the aggregates produced by earthworm castings act to improve the retention of water. By digging into the subsoil, loosening it, and threading it with tunnels, earthworms gradually deepen the topsoil

layer.
By ripping up fine mineral particles and depositing them as castings on or near the surface of the soil, they constantly adding nutrients to the zone in which plant roots feed, delivering mineral substances that would otherwise remain largely unavailable to most plants. With their mixing, digging, burrowing, fertilizing, and humus-making activities, the worms have an immense impact on the soil, its texture, its fertility, and its ability to support everything that lives in or on it, especially plants that form the basis of our food supply. But the worms must be fed, proliferating in direct proportion to the amount of organic matter incorporated into the soil, a supply which must be kept up so long as one wishes to retain the earthworms. Eisenia foetida, a red manure worm that inhabits compost heaps, turning animal manure into sweet-smelling humus, grows to five inches, but cannot live without copious amounts of decaying organic matter. Night crawlers, so named because they creep about at night on the surface of the earth, feed on leaves, which they drag down into their burrows, and even with their pinhead brains they have the wit to pull them by the narrow end - which shows more wit than the leaf-gathering suburbanite who regularly spends a fortune to deprive the earthworm of his autumnal fare. In an orchard, during the three months of autumn, earthworms can dispose of 90 percent of the fallen leaves, dissolving even tough material such as stems and roots. Darwin, who reported seeing burrows plugged with twigs, bits of paper, feathers, tufts of wool, or horsehair, claims that worms, though congenital scatophages, showed a predilection for celery, carrot leaves, wild cherry leaves, and especially raw meat, including fat. Minnich reports that one Wisconsin commercial raiser of earthworms even chose to feed his charges ice cream as a treat on Saturday nights. More surprising still is his report that a German researcher, C. Merker, writing in the 1940's, astounded fellow scientists by asserting that earthworms have voices, and can actually sing, their faint sound being "rarely in a solo number, but generally in series marked by a definity and changing rhythm." Dr. Merker claimed to be able to hear the sounds when within twelve feet of the worms, sounds produced not by chance but by the deliberate opening and closing of the earthworms' mouths. How this could be, when earthworms have no lungs - breathing through the whole surface of their skin, moistened to dissolve oxygen, which is pumped through the bloodstream by five sets of double hearts in rings or segments close to the head - is all the more amazing. A cleric contemporary of Darwin complained that earthworms are also "much addicted to venery." In suitable weather, night crawlers can spend a goodly portion of their nocturnal activities in the pursuit of sex, even an entire night coupled to a willing hermaphroditic mate, each possessing both male and female organs. With the undersides of their bodies held firmly together by tiny bristles, or setae, they lie with their heads pointing in opposite directions, touching in the region of the spermathecal openings, where the clitter - a white band a third of the way down their bodies touches the surface of its mate. They Copulate by exchanging sperm cells stored in cuplike hollows in the ninth and tenth segments, excluding a special mucus from the sexual region to protect the spermatozoa being mutually exchanged. More mucus secreted by the clitellum forms a jellylike ring, which picks up the worm eggs from ovaries and sperm cells from testes, slipping the ring off the body, to form a tiny yellow cocoon. Greatly enlarged, it looks like a lemon and contains scores of fertilized eggs, which can be found in the soil during the warmer months of winter. Under good conditions, an average red worm can produce from 150 to more than 200 young ones annually. One of the principal functions of the earthworm is to consume

available mineral nutrients, and, by actions of enzymes in their digestive tract, render them water soluble, easily

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absorbable by the root hairs of plants, to be made available in turn to the cells of plants, animals, and man. As Voisin points out, without earthworms there would be no civilization. But Minnich complains that with the single exception of Dr. Henry
Hopp, the attitude of USDA scientists, along with that of many of their associated colleagues in subsidized state universities, has traditionally been negative toward the earthworm.

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2NC Environment Turn---Honeybees Scenario

1. Pesticides are key cause of honeybee deaths Consumer Affairs, June 29, 2007, http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2007/06/honey_bees.html
While a number of theories have been advanced for the recent disappearance of millions of honey bees, U.S. researchers say the reason is most likely overexposure to pesticides. Walter Sheppard and other researchers at Washington State University say that rather than being driven off by cell phone frequencies as some have suggested its more likely that the bees have simply been poisoned. The research team has been looking into what has become known as colony collapse disorder, when honey bees leave the hive and dont return. I dont think we really know what were up against with colony collapse disorder, said Sheppard. But the search for a cause is definitely narrowing . For the past decade, beekeepers have treated their hives with pesticides to combat two kinds of mites that parasitize the bees. To keep bees, especially on a commercial level, beekeepers have needed to use some sort of chemical control of these mites, said Sheppard. Normally, Varroa mites will kill a colony within two years, if theyre not treated and the use of these pesticides brings with them a risk of accumulation in the wax. Honey bees rear their young in waxy honeycomb which is re-used for several years. If pesticides used to control mites build up in the wax, over time they could reach a concentration at which they harm the bees as well. Sheppard is testing whether something in the honeycomb of a failed colony will carry over and affect the health of a new brood of honey bees. Weve gotten some combs that were from colonies that suffered from colony collapse disorder, and well be doing some experiments to compare them with combs from healthy colonies. Well have our [healthy] queens laying eggs on both the collapsed colony combs and the control combs at the same time. Sheppard said the study should yield information about the potential role of pesticides in causing colony collapse by the end of the year. Sheppard said honey bees could also be exposed to pesticides during their foraging flights, if they visit fields and gardens that were recently treated with the chemicals. That source of exposure has been a concern for beekeepers since pesticides came into wide use in the 1950s, he said.

2. Honeybee extinction causes human extinction. The Olive Press, Forget Climate Change: The Bees are Buzzing Off, August 14, 2008,
http://www.theolivepress.es/2008/08/14/forget-climate-change-the-bees-are-buzzing-off/ If bees became extinct today, mankind would follow suit in 2012. Albert Einstein proclaimed this insect the most important factor in our
food chain. As their numbers dwindle, BOB MADDOX believes we must refocus our attentions and save the humble bumble bee GOOD morning class.

Today were are going to be looking at what may possibly prove to be the greatest threat facing humanity today. According to a small group of experts to whom nobody is listening, it could be just around the corner. Any guesses as to what it might be? Now hands down all those who think it is climate change. Hmm, more than three-quarters. Now all those who go for bird flu.
OK, that has thinned things out a little. Aids? Hands down. Hmm, not too many left now. Ebola? An uprising of the undead? George W Bush? Nuclear War? Osama Bin Laden? No more hands left up I see. Well, it looks like I am going to have to tell you. It is hold on. Is that one last little hand I see still up over there in the corner? And what is your name then? Albert Einstein sir. OK Albert. And what do you think it might be then? Bees

sir. Go on Albert. Tell us how bees could possibly bring down the human race. If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then Man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more life. outburst of sniggering Quiet! The rest of you can all stop laughing, because Albert is absolutely right! Well done
boy. Keep this up and you could make a bit of a name for yourself in biology. Whats that you say Albert? Physics? No, stick to what you are good at, that is my advice. Well, it appears that Einsteins (possibly apocryphal) quote may shortly be put to the test. For out there, as the Worlds media focuses on spiralling food and energy prices, shrinking ice-caps and burning forests; a quieter and much deeper threat to our future may be taking shape. Few people have heard of it, still less appear to care and it is largely ignored by environmental organisations and governments worldwide. While we panic over oil prices, weep over polar bears and waste our time nit-picking over the details of scientific evidence for global warming, countless millions of our little friends the honeybees are simply vanishing across the world in an epidemic known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - an affliction which leaves no hives full of sick or dying bees; no piles of little furry black and yellow bodies to mourn over. The bees are simple disappearing. Increasingly large numbers of those busy aerial pollinators are leaving for a day in the fields and simply failing to return home from work, leaving hives reminiscent of the Marie Celeste. The United States, which is where CCD was first recognised and is assumed to have originated, has now lost at least a quarter of its estimated 2.6 million honeybee colonies. Today, CCD appears to be going pandemic, with serious outbreaks reported in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland , the United Kingdom and here in Spain. And no one knows how or why. More alarmingly, environmental organisations and governments appear not to care particularly either. So why are honey bees so important? And why do we take them so much for granted that we appear to be largely ignoring a real threat to their survival as a species? Ignored threat The answer to the

Honeybees form a critical part of the human food chain. With honeybees responsible for pollinating 80 per cent of our flowering crops, more than one-third of everything you and I consume has reached our tables courtesy of a pollinating honeybee. Lose the Honeybee - lose the food chain. And lest, from the cloistered security of our overstocked Saturday supermarket shopping trips, we should be in any doubt as to the potential consequences of this, we have only to look to the horrors of Ethiopia to see what can happen when a food chain collapses.
first question is simple and direct.

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2NC Environment Turn---XT Link

Higher food prices spur investment and research in agriculture Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, August 6, 2008, The Proposition's closing statement,
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829068 Are todays food prices fair to producers and consumers? Yes, because higher food prices will bring about new investments in agriculture and higher global production. This is already happening in Asia and other parts of the world, and will accelerate over time. Yes, because without higher food prices, land use would shift towards corn-forethanol and other biofuel crops and we would have less food available. Yes, because a system with food prices in free fall for 30 years did not produce any measurable decline in hunger and poverty. But the last time food prices were as high as they are today we witnessed the Green Revolution and a rapid reduction of rural poverty in one of the largest population centres of the world, South Asia.

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1NC India Turn

1. High food prices decrease rural-urban income gap in India The Economist, Dec 6th 2007, Cheap no more, http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10250420
If you took your cue from governments, you would conclude that dearer food was unequivocally a bad thing. About a score of countries have imposed food-price controls of some sort. Argentina, Morocco, Egypt, Mexico and China have put restraints on domestic prices. A dozen countries, including India, Vietnam, Serbia and Ukraine, have imposed export taxes or limited exports. Argentina and Russia have done both. In all these places governments are seeking to shelter their people from food-price rises by price controls. But dearer food is not a pure curse: it produces winners as well as losers. Obviously, farmers benefitif governments allow them to keep the gains. In America, the world's biggest agricultural exporter, net farm income this year will be $87 billion, 50% more than the average of the past ten years. The prairie farmers of the Midwest are looking forward to their Caribbean cruises. Other beneficiaries are in poor countries. Food exporters such as India, South Africa and Swaziland will gain from increased export earnings. Countries such as Malawi and Zimbabwe, which used to export food but no longer do so, also stand to gain if they can boost their harvests. Given that commodity prices have been falling for so long in real terms, this would be an enormous relief to places that have suffered from a relentless decline in their terms of trade. In emerging markets an income gap has opened up between cities and countryside over the past few years. As countries have diversified away from agriculture into industry and services, urban wages have outstripped rural ones. Income inequality is conventionally measured using a scale running from zero to one called the Gini coefficient. A score of 0.5 is the mark of a highly unequal society. The Asian Development Bank reckons that China's Gini coefficient rose from 0.41 in 1993 to 0.47 in 2004. If farm incomes in poor countries are pushed up by higher food prices, that could mitigate the growing gap between city and countryside. But will it?

2. Income inequality causes social unrest, which sparks nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan ANWAR IQBAL, United Press International, January 22, 2001, CIA warns of nuclear war, instability in south Asia,
LexisNexis The CIA has warned in a new report that economic disparities and political instability could cause another war between India and Pakistan, exposing southern Asia to the threat of a nuclear conflict. India and Pakistan are the world's two
newest states which openly possess nuclear weapons. Both countries tested atomic devices in May 1998, beginning a new stage of their nuclear race in one of the world's most-populated regions. In its Global Trends 2015 report, the Central Intelligence Agency says that "India most likely will expand the size of its nuclear-capable force. And a noticeable increase in the size of India's arsenal would prompt Pakistan to further increase the size of its own arsenal." Since 1998, India and Pakistan have also tested several types of ballistic missiles in their quest to acquire a dependable weapons delivery system. The CIA believes that "India will be the unrivalled regional power with a large military, including naval and nuclear capabilities and a dynamic and growing economy. The widening India-Pakistan gap, destabilizing in its own right, will be accompanied by deep political, economic and social disparities within both states." The agency also states that, being wary of China, "India will look increasingly to the West, but its need for oil and desire to balance Arab ties to Pakistan will lead to strengthened ties to Persian Gulf states as well." Giving its projections on Pakistan's economic woes, the report said: "Pakistan will not recover easily from decades of political and economic mismanagement, divisive politics, lawlessness, corruption and ethnic friction. Nascent democratic reforms will produce little change in the face of opposition from an entrenched political elite and radical Islamic parties. "Further domestic decline would benefit Islamic political activists, who may significantly increase their role in national politics and alter the makeup and cohesion of the military, once Pakistan's most capable institution. In a climate of continuing domestic turmoil, the central government's control will probably be reduced to the Punjab heartland and the economic hub of Karachi." Pakistan will be more fractious, isolated and dependent on international financial assistance, the report said. In assessing the security situation in the region, the CIA said that "continued turmoil in Afghanistan and Pakistan will spill over into Kashmir and other areas of the subcontinent, prompting Indian leaders to take more aggressive preemptive and retaliatory actions. India's conventional military advantage over Pakistan will widen as a result of New Delhi's superior economic position. "India will also continue to build up its ocean-going navy to dominate the Indian Ocean transit routes used for delivery of Persian Gulf oil to Asia. The decisive shift in conventional military power in India's favor over the coming years potentially will make the region more volatile and unstable," the report said. "Both

India and Pakistan will see weapons of mass destruction as a strategic imperative and will continue to amass nuclear warheads and build a variety of missile delivery systems. The changing dynamics of state power will combine with other factors to affect
the risk of conflict in various regions. Changing military capabilities will be prominent among the factors that determine the risk of war. "In South Asia, for example, that risk will remain fairly high over the next 15 years. India and Pakistan are both prone to miscalculation. Both will continue to build up their nuclear and missile forces," it said. The report adds that, "although population growth rates in South Asia will decline, population still will grow by nearly 30 percent by 2015. India's population alone will grow to more than 1.2 billion. "Pakistan's projected growth from 140 million to about 195 million in 2015 will put a major strain on an economy already unable to meet the basic needs of the current population. The percentage of urban dwellers will climb steadily from the current 25-30 percent of the population to between 40-50 percent, leading to continued deterioration in the overall quality of urban life.

Differential population growth patterns will exacerbate inequalities in wealth. Ties between provincial and central governments throughout the region will be strained." "Water will remain South Asia's most vital and most contested natural resource. Continued population and economic growth and expansion of irrigated agriculture over the next 15 years will increasingly stress water resources, and pollution of surface and groundwater will be a serious challenge, the report

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said. "In India, per capita water availability is likely to drop by 50-75 percent. Because many of the region's waterways are interstate, water could become a source of renewed friction. Deforestation in India and Nepal will exacerbate pollution, flooding, and land degradation in Bangladesh."

3. Indo-Pak war is worse than nuclear winter- destroys the ozone and ends all life on earth Fox, Reuters News, 8 (Maggie, April 8, India-Pakistan Nuclear War Would Cause Ozone Hole
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/47829/story.htm) WASHINGTON - Nuclear war between India and Pakistan would cause more than slaughter and destruction -- it would knock a big hole in the ozone layer, affecting crops, animals and people worldwide, US researchers said on Monday. Fires from burning cities would send 5 million metric tonnes of soot or more into the lowest part of Earth's atmosphere known as the troposphere, and heat from the sun would carry these blackened particles into the stratosphere, the team at the University of Colorado reported. "The sunlight really heats it up and sends it up to the top of the stratosphere," said Michael Mills of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, who chose India and Pakistan as one of several possible examples. Up there, the soot would absorb radiation from the sun and heat surrounding gases, causing chemical reactions that break down ozone. "We find column ozone losses in excess of 20 percent globally, 25 percent to 45 percent at midlatitudes, and 50 percent to 70 percent at northern high latitudes persisting for five years, with substantial losses continuing for five additional years," Mills' team wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This would let in enough ultraviolet radiation to cause cancer, damage eyes and skin, damage crops and other plants and injure animals. Mills and colleagues based their computer model on other research on how much fire would be produced by a regional nuclear conflict. "Certainly there is a growing number of large nuclear-armed states that have a growing number of weapons. This could be typical of what you might see," Mills said in a telephone interview. SMOKE IS KEY Eight nations are known to have nuclear weapons, and Pakistan and India are believed to have at least 50 weapons apiece, each with the power of the weapon the United States used to destroy Hiroshima in 1945. Mills said the study added a new factor to the worries about what might damage the world's ozone layer, as well as to research about the effects of even a limited nuclear exchange. "The smoke is the key and it is coming from these firestorms that build up actually several hours after the explosions," he said. "We are talking about modern megacities that have a lot of material in them that would burn. We saw these kinds of megafires in World War Two in Dresden and Tokyo. The difference is we are talking about a large number of cities that would be bombed within a few days." Nothing natural could create this much black smoke in the same way, Mill noted. Volcanic ash, dust and smoke is of a different nature, for example, and forest fires are not big or hot enough. The University of Colorado's Brian Toon, who also worked on the study, said the damage to the ozone layer would be worse than what has been predicted by "nuclear winter" and "ultraviolet spring" scenarios. "The big surprise is that this study demonstrates that a small-scale, regional nuclear conflict is capable of triggering ozone losses even larger than losses that were predicted following a full-scale nuclear war," Toon said in a statement.

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2NC India Turn---Econ Scenario

Indias economy is on the rise and the income gap is declining Peter Sutherland 6/22 is the Vice-Chairman of the Canada-India Business Council and Senior Business Advisor, Asia, Aird & Berlis LLP. He was
previously Canada's High Commissioner to India as well as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, India's slowing growth not a worry in the long run, 2012, http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/88678--india-s-slowing-growth-not-a-worry-in-the-long-run

Clearly the bloom is off the rose. During the first three months of this year Indias economy grew 5.3 per cent, the slowest rate in almost a decade and sharply down from 9 per cent last year. Both the agriculture and manufacturing sectors have been hit by slowdowns
while industrial output actually contracted. Inflation hovers over 7 per cent and the rupee has sunk to record lows against the dollar. Foreigners continue to invest in India, but net financial flows have slowed and will likley decline further if the economy continues to struggle. Foreign and domestic investors alike are deterred by proposed tax changes, regulatory uncertainty and increasing tension between corporate India and the government. The resulting fall-off in business investment is a major contributor to the current malaise. India suffers from three deficits: fiscal, current account and governance. The budget deficit has widened, bloated by costly subsidies and generous welfare schemes while proposed tax reforms that would raise revenues are stalled. Standard & Poor has warned that India could lose its investment grade rating and be downgraded to junk category if the situation doesnt improve. The current account is also worsening. Although exports have grown this past year, it has not been enough to offset costly imports of energy and other commodities. A weaker rupee may help exports, but the eurozone crisis will not. A large trade deficit combined with slowing capital inflows is expected to push the current account deficit above 4 per cent of GDP this year. The biggest worry is a deficit in governance. Within the Congress Party-led coalition there are divisions inside the Party itself and between coalition members. The reformist instincts of Prime Minister Singh have been thwarted by the populist leanings of Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi and by regional partners such as Mamata Bannerjee in West Bengal. Weakness at the centre has emboldened other states to flaunt their powers in areas affecting their interests. A series of high-profile scandals has implicated several ministers and further debilitated the government. Decision-making has ground to a halt as ministers look over their shoulders, fearful of intense public scrutiny and a zealous media. For the same reason large corporate groups, even those with reputedly close links to government, have been unable to secure approvals for major investment projects. On the rare occasion that a new policy is announced, it is often quickly reversed in the face of heated opposition. A prominent and potentially damaging example is the retroactive tax on foreign investors introduced ostensibly to nullify the impact of a Supreme Court judgement in favour of Vodafone. Such flip flops and the absence of needed reforms undermine business confidence, discourage investment and constrain growth. Has Indias bubble burst? Hopefully yes in the positive sense that inflated projections of future growth will be replaced by more realistic expectations. Very few major economies have enjoyed continuous, straight-line growth. This is especially true for democracies whose leaders are subject to re-election and usually eschew unpalatable economic reforms. India is the worlds largest democracy and arguably the most rambunctious.

Yet, despite the economic malaise and current political paralysis, Indias long term prospects are undiminished. The fundamentals that have underpinned over 7 percent average growth during the past decade are still intact. For an economy roughly the size of Canadas, 6.5 percent growth expected this year isnt shabby . Democracy is one of Indias greatest strengths. For a country of Indias size and diversity, it is the only feasible system of government. Indian democracy is slow moving and uneven, but it expresses the popular will and therefore mitigates political risk. To paraphrase Churchill, it may not be perfect, but it is the best system available. India is also the worlds largest federation. Its 29 states have considerable autonomy in economic matters which explains why some are more business friendly, and consequently faster growing, than others. This disparity together with an increasing
willingness to vote across caste and religious lines has resulted in the ouster of some non-performing state administrations and improved the performance of others. Formerly backward states such as Bihar and Orissa now exceed the national growth rate. India is the second most populous country in the world with a median age of 26. Its young, ambitious and enterprising workforce has the potential to generate enough savings and investment to propel the country to among the top three global economies by 2030, but only if a new wave of reforms provides them with the necessary skills and opportunities. By 2025, another 130 million Indians will migrate to the cities. This will generate a surge in infrastructure building ($1 trillion over the next five years); boost productivity as workers leave the less productive rural sector; and foster social integration in urban melting pots. Within the next decade, Indias rapidly growing middle class will exceed 500 million people . The resulting jump in discretionary

spending, along with changing tastes and consumption patterns, will drive the economy and buffer it from the external shocks to which most other emerging markets are prone. By some estimates, India will account for the largest share of global consumption by 2030. The bottom of the pyramid will not be left behind. The rural-urban income gap continues to decline. Rural India now accounts for close to half of GDP and will continues to spur innovative, low-income products such as the Tata Nano city car, that can be sold in large volume locally and later adapted for sale globally. For these reasons projections that India will rank among the top three global economies are still credible. It may take longer than some people predicted, but it will happen. India should not be measured merely in terms of short-term growth. It is a long-term value investment , subject to ups and downs, but ultimately rewarding for committed
and patient investors.

High food prices reduce Indian poverty- a reduction now would hurt the Indian economy Sandra Polaski, Senior Associate and Director, Trade, Equity and Development Program, MAY 2008, Rising Food Prices,
Poverty, and the Doha Round, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/polaski__food_prices.pdf Overall, fifty-four percent of the worlds poor live in India and China and thus the response of poverty in these two countries is an important component in assessing how changes in food prices will affect global poverty. A recent study by the Carnegie Endowment probed the effect of food price changes in India, the country with the largest number of poor in the world, where over eighty percent of the population live on less than $2 per day. 7 Using a general equilibrium

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model to simulate the impact of different prices, we found that an increase in the price of rice would benefit most poor households (Figure 4). The detailed household data we used included information on vulnerable social groups (defined in the Indian constitution as scheduled tribes, scheduled castes, and other backward classes). The poorest households and the most disadvantaged groups saw the largest gains (up to six percent increase in income from a fifty percent increase in the price of rice). Only the richest ten percent of rural households would lose from a price increase. We found that labor markets played a largely positive role in transmitting price effects. Income increased for rural workers at all education levels and for both men and women; the largest gainers were illiterate workers and disadvantaged groups. The impact on urban households was more varied, with some poor households gaining slightly and others losing slightly. Illiterate urban workers from all disadvantaged groups would see their incomes rise, while the results for other urban workers showed a mix of small gains and small losses with no consistent pattern. Declines in the world price of rice would have negative effects on all major components of the Indian economy, including private consumption, government spending, investment, exports, imports, and total domestic production (Table 1). Seventy-eight percent of households would experience real income losses and the distributional impact would be regressive. Real income would fall for all rural households except the richest ten percent, with the poorest households and disadvantaged groups in rural areas losing the most (Figure 5). Most urban households would feel little impact from the price declines. The lowest income brackets of disadvantaged groups experience small income losses. The drop in rice prices would reduce demand for unskilled labor in rice production sharply, by almost twelve percent in the case of a fifty percent decline, and reduce overall demand for labor in the agricultural sector. Displaced rural laborfers would spill over into urban unskilled labor markets, either driving down wages or increasing unemployment. Our study demonstrates that the inclusion of linkages between rural and urban labor markets is necessary to understand the impact of agricultural prices on the poor. We conducted a similar exercise for increases and decreases in wheat prices. The results showed similar patterns but with more muted effects. The overall effect of a decline in wheat prices could be to increase poverty, as 92 million rural households in the bottom six deciles of income would experience some real income loss, while only 32 million urban households in the same deciles would experience income gains.

INDIAN GROWTH KEY TO PREVENT MULTIPLE SCENARIOS FOR REGIONAL ESCALATION NATO Parliamentary Assembly 8
The Rise of the Indian Economy: Transatlantic and Global Implications, http://www.nato-pa.int/Default.asp?SHORTCUT=1472 44. A changing global order and rapid Indian growth have fostered conditions for India to redefine its place in the region and in the world. No longer mired in economic stasis, India comes to the diplomatic table buoyed by its ever more formidable economic presence. This alone endows it with a kind of weight that demands other great powers pay it close attention. That this wealth is being generated in the world economy is consequential. India now holds a greater stake in the global trading and financial systems. India's foreign policy has undergone a profound transformation since 1991 that has more or less paralleled its economic transition. India's relations with the United States and Europe were not well developed in the post-war period, partly due to its inward looking development strategy, its socialist economic organization, its special relationship with Russia and its role in the non-aligned movement. India's relations with China and Pakistan were also tense and, at times, overtly hostile. 45. Indian relations with the United States, Pakistan, China and Russia have evolved substantially over the last decade. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of Cold War rivalry, and the apparent failure of Soviet-style economic planning all compelled Indian leaders to revamp the country's international posture. India began to buy into the economic principles for which the West stood, and this, almost by default, pointed a way toward improved relations with the United States in particular, but also with Europe. India clearly has welcomed the international community's efforts to help ease tensions in its immediate neighbourhood. Pakistan's domestic turmoil and its historic rivalry with India, particularly over Kashmir, the rise of religious extremism in the region, Afghanistan's ongoing crisis, civil war in Sri Lanka, and tensions in Nepal are all flash points with varying implications for Indian security. Yet, India is increasingly making use of a plethora of bilateral and multilateral channels to ease tension and is far better positioned than it was during the Cold War to work towards this end with other great powers including the United States and China.

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2NC India Turn---XT Impact

Indo-Pak war escalates to nuclear conflict Washington Times 2001
Ghulam Nabi Fai, executive director of the Kashmiri American Council, July 8, 2001, The Washington Times, p. B4 The foreign policy of the United States in South Asia should move from the lackadaisical and distant (with India crowned with a unilateral veto power) to aggressive involvement at the vortex. The most dangerous place on the planet is Kashmir, a disputed territory convulsed and illegally occupied for more than 53 years and sandwiched between nuclear-capable India and Pakistan. It has ignited two wars between the estranged South Asian rivals in 1948 and 1965, and a third could trigger nuclear volleys and a nuclear winter threatening the entire globe. The United States would enjoy no sanctuary. This apocalyptic vision is no idiosyncratic view. The director of central intelligence, the Defense Department, and world experts generally place Kashmir at the peak of their nuclear worries. Both India and Pakistan are racing like thoroughbreds to bolster their nuclear arsenals and advanced delivery vehicles. Their defense budgets are climbing despite widespread misery amongst their populations. Neither country has initialed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or indicated an inclination to ratify an impending Fissile Material/Cut-off Convention.

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2NC India Turn---XT Link

Higher food prices decrease rural poverty in India Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, research fellow at the Cato Institute, Aug 24, 2008, Can high food prices win votes? The
Times of India, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Columnists/Can_high_food_prices_win_votes/articleshow/3397897.cms However, Cristina Savescu of World Bank provides another viewpoint. She has used an econometric model to estimate the impact of high wheat and rice prices on poverty. High prices benefit farmers but hit consumers, especially landless labourers. The net outcome - surprise, surprise - is a decline in the poverty ratio by 0.8 percentage points, according to her projections. In urban areas, high food prices will increase poverty by 1.6 percentage points. But in rural areas, poverty will fall 1.5 percentage points. Since 70% of the country is rural, the national impact turns out to be poverty reduction of 0.8 percentage points. Rural areas will have losers as well as winners. Costlier foodgrains will tend to worsen the poverty of rural consumers by 2.9 percentage points. But they will also cut poverty by 4.6 percentage points among farmers. On balance, rural poverty will decline, and so will national poverty.

High food prices prompt the Indian government to reform ag policy, solving rural poverty and income gap Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, July 29, 2008, The Proposition's opening statement
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829062 The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has just completed a study including the three countries with the largest rural populations in the world: India, China and Indonesia. Consider India, which has a long history of subsidising agricultural input and output prices. According to the ADB, this has led to a system which is unproductive, financially unsustainable, and environmentally destructive; (it) also accentuates inequality among rural Indian states. Higher world food prices might be just the push needed by India, along with many other countries, to persuade it to reform its agricultural pricing system and provide new opportunities for its desperate farmers.

High food prices boost rural farmers incomes in India Heidi Fritschel, International Food Policy Research Institute, March 2008, What Goes Down Must Come Up: Global Food
Prices Reach New Heights, http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/newsletters/ifpriforum/if200803.asp High food prices should present a golden opportunity for poor farmers to ramp up production and increase their profits. The FAO's Daniel Gustafson sees evidence that certain countries will significantly raise agricultural production. South Africa is expected to increase its planted area by 8 percent, he says, and farmers in Malawi and Zambia are likely to increase their production owing to subsidized input programs in those countries. A number of countries, especially in Asia, have been producing record harvests in recent years anyway, so future large harvests may not represent large increases over past production. "We could see some significant increases in Indian cereal production," says Gustafson. "The price rise really is quite dramatic, and there are many parts of India where even if the local rise in prices doesn't match international ones, there could still be a big jump. There are other areas where people have left the farm, or some members of the family have left the farm, leaving land fallow, so if high prices prevail, which they probably will, we could see some of these people returning to what now may be a better option." Still, national agricultural pricing policies and the remoteness of some rural areas often prevent world prices from reaching domestic markets, and thus farmers may not have as much incentive to boost production as world price increases may imply. But some countries behave differently. India, for instance, has increased its investment in agriculture in its 2008-09 budget and has raised prices for farmers, while protecting its consumers from high price increases.

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2NC India Turn---XT I/L

Indian income gap creates social unrest Jeremy Page, The Times (London), May 26, 2007, Stop showing off wealth, tycoons are told, LexisNexis
Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, has stunned business leaders by telling them to pay themselves less, limit their profits, eschew lavish weddings and shun "wasteful" Western lifestyles. Mr Singh warned an audience including some of India's richest tycoons that they could face severe social unrest if they did not curb their spending and do more to bridge the country's yawning income gap. "In a country with extreme poverty, industry needs to be moderate in the emolument levels its adopts," he told the opening of the annual conference of the Confederation of Indian Industry on Thursday. "Rising income and wealth inequalities, if not matched by a corresponding rise of incomes across the nation, can lead to social unrest." Mr Singh, who unleashed India's current economic boom when he introduced market reforms as Finance Minister in 1991, has long been calling for more inclusive economic growth. But this time he went farther than ever in dressing down India's business elite, striking a distinctly Gandhian -if not overtly socialist tone.

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2NC India Turn---AT Poverty Turn

High prices have only caused poverty during bad harvests Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar, research fellow at the Cato Institute, Aug 24, 2008, Can high food prices win votes? The
Times of India, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Columnists/Can_high_food_prices_win_votes/articleshow/3397897.cms Critics will ask, if rising food prices can cut poverty today, why did they cause such savage impoverishment in past inflations? The answer is that 2008 is truly different. Through history, high food prices in India were caused by droughts. Production fell sharply, and the resulting scarcity raised prices. Droughts greatly reduced employment. A smaller crop meant less labour was used for harvesting and post-harvest operations. Falling farm incomes translated into falling demand for other kinds of labour. So, labourers were hit twice over, by rising prices and falling employment. Farmers suffered too. A few lucky farmers benefiting from decent rain gained from high prices, but drought wiped out millions of others. So, distress was acute among farmers no less than labourers. This was a recipe for impoverishment. What's new about 2007-08 is that this is the first time that food prices have shot up despite a record harvest. Foodgrain production is a record 230.7 million tonnes, up from 217.3 million tonnes and 208.6 million tonnes respectively in the previous two years. Wheat production has risen from 69.4 million tonnes to 79 million tonnes over the last two years, even as the procurement price has risen almost 50%. So, farmers have reaped a double bonanza, from higher production and higher prices. Labourers have gained too, from high employment. Bumper crops increase the demand for labour in harvesting and post-harvest operations, and the increased farmer spending produces a second round of increased demand for labour. We won't get official wage data for a long time. But news reports highlight labour scarcity and rising wages in Punjab-Haryana. The employment guarantee scheme has provided a separate boost to wages.

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2AC India Turn

Income inequality high now BBC News 11 India income inequality doubles in 20 years, says OECD http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16064321
Inequality in earnings has doubled in India over the past two decades, a new report says, making it one of the worst performers among emerging economies . The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says the top 10% of wage-earners make 12 times more than the bottom 10%, compared to six times 20 years ago. The OECD says India has the highest number of poor in the world. Some 42% of its 1.21 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day. Poverty line "Brazil, Indonesia and, on some indicators, Argentina have recorded
significant progress in reducing inequality over the past 20 years," the report, entitled Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising, says. "By contrast, China, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa have all become less equal over time." In India, the report says, the ratio between the top and the bottom wage-earners has doubled since the early 1990s. India has also not fared well in poverty reduction, the report says. It says 42% of Indians live below the poverty line, as against the official Indian figure of 37%. The Parisbased OECD is a grouping of 34 advanced and emerging economies. Recently, the Indian government was criticised for saying that an individual income of 25 rupees (52 US cents) a day would help provide for adequate "private expenditure on food, education and health" in villages. In cities, it said, individual earnings of 32 rupees a day (66 US cents) were adequate. Many experts said the income limit to define the poor was too low and aimed at artificially reducing the number of people below the poverty line. A World Bank report in May said attempts by the Indian government to combat poverty were not working .

Neither side will start a war, they realize there is no winning mutually assured destruction AND international sanctions. Chari and Rizvi 8 *P. R. Chari is a research professor at the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi and a former member of the Indian
Administrative Service. **Hasan Askari Rizvi is an independent political and defense consultant in Pakistan and is currently a visiting professor with the South Asia Program of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. Making Borders irrelevant in Kashmir http://www.usip.org/files/resources/sr210.pdf The Kashmir dispute has reached an impasse. Unable to impose their preferred solution, both India and Pakistan have become flexible regarding their traditional positions on Kashmir , without officially abandoning them. Subtle changes in their positions have stimulated creative ideas for managing the conflict. Several developments have contributed to this attitudinal shift, among them the end of the Cold War, the

disintegration of the Soviet Union and the current resurgence of Russia, the rise of China and its support for the peace process between India and Pakistan, the spread of globalization and its implications for international security, internal economic pressures, the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in May 1998 that consolidated a nuclear deterrent relationship, and the U.S. global response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The last two of these developments have led India and Pakistan to realize that a military victory over the other is not possible. The acquisition of nuclear weapons has highlighted the grave risks of trying to alter the status quo by military means, as illustrated during the Kargil conflict of 1999 and the 200102 border confrontation. During the Kargil conflict neither country could extend its theater of operations because of fears that the conflict might become nuclearized. For similar reasons, India was deterred from attacking Pakistan during the border confrontation in 200102. Pakistan has also realized the
dangerous implications of supporting militancy; it was Pakistani-backed militants who attacked the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, triggering the border confrontation. Pakistans readiness to support militancy has also diminished since Pakistan itself has become the target of

Islamic jihadists and has experienced terrorist attacks throughout the country. The U.S. global war on terrorism has also increased the cost for Pakistan of indulging in provocative behavior. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., on September
11, 2001, created a global consensus for controlling transnational terrorism, especially Islamic militants and jihadi groups. Pakistan has since found it difficult to support the jihadi Islamic groups in J&K. Furthermore, the passage of a 2007 law in the United States has linked American military and

economic assistance to Pakistan to its performance in stopping cross-border terrorism. The United States has now established a physical presence in Pakistan to pursue its war on terror in Afghanistan, which inhibits hostilities being initiated by either India or Pakistan. Any attempt by either country to improve its ground situation in Kashmir would be frowned upon by the international community and might prompt economic repercussions , as occurred during the 200102 border confrontation crisis when travel advisories were issued by the United States and several other developed countries, discouraging their citizens from visiting India. Given that a major conventional conflict is dangerous, a nuclear conflict is unthinkable, and any forcible alteration of status quo would be unacceptable to the international community, both India and Pakistan have realized that they have no alternative but to enter into a peace process. India has discarded its traditional stand that the whole of Kashmir belongs to India and has shown signs of departing from its stated policy of negotiating with Pakistan only after cross-border terrorism ceases. Further, Indias longstanding policy of shunning international mediation and insisting on strict bilateralism in its dealings with Pakistan has been diluted considerably . On Pakistans part, former President Pervez Musharraf abandoned his countrys traditional position of insisting on implementing the UN resolutions on Kashmir. The new government in Pakistan has declared that it wishes to take the peace process forward. Indeed, Asif Zardari,
cochairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party, even suggested freezing the Kashmir issue, although he later had to backtrack on that proposal. This transformation in India-Pakistan relations can be traced back to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayees statement in the symbolically significant venue of Srinagar the summer capital of J&Kon April 18, 2003, extending a hand of friendship to Pakistan. 1 A cease-fire along the LOC was suggested by Pakistans prime minister, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, in November 2003. India accepted his offer and suggested its extension to Siachen, an undemarcated region north of but adjacent to the

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LOC. On November 26, the cease-fire went into effect, greatly improving the safety of people living along the border. The

resulting peace process, though slow, has made steady progress, with significant improvements occurring in cross-border communications and the movement of people and goods.

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1AR India Turn---XT No War

MAD checks Indo-Pak escalation Lowther 9 Adam, faculty researcher and defense analyst at the Air Force Research Institute, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, The Logic of the Nuclear Arsenal,
Strategic Studies Quarterly Winter 2009, http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA511235&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf Conventional and nuclear weapons are differentvery different. If this were not the case, why is 9 August 1945 the last time that a nuclear weapon was used in war? The same cannot be said of conventional weapons. As Ellen Collier of the Congressional Research Service illustrated in 1993, rarely did a year go by during the Cold War that US troops were not engaged in a conventional conflict.1 The same is true of the postCold War period. Indias response to the 2629 November 200 Mumbai terrorist attack is a good example of the moderating effect nuclear weapons have on the behavior of nuclear-armed adversaries. Prior to developing nuclear weapons, India and Pakistan fought one another in the First Kashmir War (1947), the Second Kashmir War (1965), and the Indo-Pakistani War (1971), along with numerous artillery exchanges in Kashmir over the decades. Lashkar-e-Taibas attack left 172 innocent civilians dead and placed the Indian government under great pressure to respond with force, yet Prime Minister Singh has shown

tremendous restraint that can be attributed to the fear of a conventional conflict escalating to nuclear war. While India would likely win a conventional war with Pakistan, neither country is willing to take such a risk.19 These two rivals are not the only examples of the moderating influence of nuclear weapons . The Cold War provides the single best example of nuclear weapons preventing
conventional conflict among great-power rivals. While it is only possible to speculate, the probability of a conventional conflict between the United States and the USSR would likely have been much higher had both sides not possessed nuclear weapons.

Deterrence solves Peoples Daily 9 Ex-Indian general: Pakistan nuclear weapons prevent India from retaliatory attacks twice, 3/9/09,
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90777/90851/6610093.html

Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons prevented India from attacking it twice, one after the Mumbai attacks last November and the 2001 terrorist attack on Indian Parliament, the semi-official Press Trust of India quoted a former Indian Army general as saying on Monday. Former Indian Army chief Gen. Shankar Roychowdhury told a seminar in New Delhi that Pakistan's nuclear weapons deterred India from attacking that country after the Mumbai strikes, according to the report. He also told the seminar , entitled "Nuclear Risk Reduction and Conflict Resolve" that it was due to Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons that India stopped short of a military retaliation following the attack on Parliament in 2001, said the report. The 2001 Indian Parliament attack was a high-profile
attack by militants belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed groups against the building housing the Parliament of India in New Delhi. The attack led to the death of a dozen people, including five terrorists, six Indian policemen and one civilian. It also led to tensions between India and Pakistan and the 2001-2002 India-Pakistan standoff. India also blames the same militant groups for staging the Mumbai attacks, in which at least 173 people were killed and over 300 wounded.

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1NC Venezuela Turn

1. High food prices cause inflation in Venezuela Marla Dickerson, Staff Writer-LA Times, June 21, 2008 Los Angeles Times, Rising costs push Mexico to hike rates; The
central bank adds a quarter-point to its benchmark despite the government's move to freeze food prices, LexisNexis "The recent dynamic of inflation is worrying," the bank said in a statement. "World inflationary pressures have intensified due to strong price increases in food, energy and other raw materials." Exploding food and fuel prices have reignited overall inflation throughout Latin America. Venezuelan inflation reached an annualized rate of 31.4% in May. Consumer prices in Argentina were up 9.1% last month, according to official estimates. But some private-sector analysts say the government is manipulating the data. They estimate that Argentina's real inflation rate is running above 20%. Mexico's inflation is modest in comparison. But the central bank has been hawkish in combating it. Less than a decade ago, the Mexican economy was pummeled by inflation that approached 20%. The central banks of Chile and Brazil have likewise raised rates in recent weeks because of inflation concerns.

2. High inflation will prevent Chavez from maintaining aid to other countries in Latin America Juan Forero and Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post Foreign Service, February 23, 2007, Chavez Builds His Sphere Of
Influence, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201875_pf.html The question now is how long Venezuela can maintain the aid. Although the economy is growing thanks to high oil prices, it has little private investment and creates few new jobs. And, true to the predictions of economists who are skeptical of the Chavez model, inflation is skyrocketing -- so much so that Chavez recently threatened to nationalize grocery stores if they did not limit price increases. "I don't know if Venezuela can simultaneously sustain internal spending and external spending at the level it has until now," said Teodoro Petkoff, a former leftist guerrilla and a Chavez opponent who runs a newspaper in Caracas. "I've said it before -- this year, the economy is going to begin to cost Chavez."

3. Chavezs aid pushes out US influence in the region Juan Forero and Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post Foreign Service, February 23, 2007, Chavez Builds His Sphere Of
Influence, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201875_pf.html CARACAS, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has long pledged to buck Washington-backed economic policies in Latin America. Now, two months after winning reelection and consolidating his hold on the country with new powers to rule by decree, he is strengthening economic ties in the region in a bid to limit U.S. influence. Chavez recently announced that his government would build housing, a highway and an oil refinery in Nicaragua, part of an aid package that would benefit one of Washington's most tenacious Cold War adversaries, President Daniel Ortega. Farther south, Venezuela has pledged to provide Ecuador with $1 billion in credit, a gesture that would soften the blow if that country's leftist government follows through on its threat to default on foreign debt payments. And, along with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, a foe of the Bush administration, Chavez has announced a $2 billion international investment fund for Latin America. Taken together, economists and others who track the country's affairs say, the investments signify an effort by Venezuela to curb the reach of the U.S. government, whose influence has waned in Latin America. For Chavez, the goal is nothing less than to kill the so-called Washington consensus, the economic prescriptions championed by the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury, which press governments to limit spending, raise interest rates and open their economies to foreign trade and investment.

4. Failure of Latin American liberal democracy allows Chavez to spread his socialist agenda causing multiple scenarios for extinction Manwaring, General Douglas MacArthur Chair and Professor of Military Strategy at the U.S. Army War College and Adjunct Professor of International Politics at Dickinson College, 5 (Max, October, Venezuelas Hugo Chavez, Bolivarian Socialism,
and Asymmetric Warfare www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB628.pdf) At the same time, President Chvezs approach to Latin American security and stability requires a realignment from capitalist and neo-liberal economics and politics to his socialism for the 21st century. That realignment will likely generate instability, conflict, and probably exacerbate the processes of state failure in important parts of the hemisphere. Thus, the corollary at this level must address questions associated with peacekeeping, stability operations, nationbuilding, and state failure. The implications are straightforward. In the contemporary security environment, international organizations such as the UN and the OAS, and individual
national powers, increasingly are being called on to respond to conflict generated by all kinds of material instabilities and human destabilizers. Likewise, the global community increasingly is being asked

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to respond to failing and failed states. In these terms, it is important to remember that state failure is a process, not an outcome. It is a process by which a state loses the capacity and/or the will to perform its essential legitimizing governance and security functions. In either case, the associated question is How should the processes of state failure be addressed before they run their courses and achieve conflict and/or crisis proportions? Conclusions from the Four Levels of Analysis. Chvez understands that every player in the international community from small powers to the U.S. superpower must cope simultaneously with four separate and potentially grave types of contemporary threat. These threats include, first, traditional and lingering boundary and territorial disputes, as well as balance of

Second, each protagonist must deal with the very real possibility that transnational and internal nonstate actors can be used by one nation-state to play serious roles in destabilizing and taking down another. Additionally,
power concerns.

destabilizing nontraditional internal public and personal security threats can been seen all over the hemisphere in ungoverned territories, urban criminal gangs, more conventional terrorism, and insurgency. At the same time, real threats to effective sovereignty exist, stemming from chronic poverty, disease, and other root causes of conflict. Accordingly, all of the above types of threats are seen as methods of choiceor areas for exploitationfor various commercial (narco-traffickers and organized criminals), ideological (insurgencies such as Perus Sendero Luminoso) movements, and caudillos like Chvez who are completely and ruthlessly dedicated to achieving control or radical change in a given nation-state. Nevertheless, rather than considering each level of conflict as an independent form of warfare, Chvez finds that it is more useful to think of them as parts within his concept of total war, a peoples war, or a super insurgency.56 The questions associated with the corollaries and implications of each of the above levels of analysis, thus, imply no easy set of tasks. However,

if the United States and the other countries of the Americas ignore what is happening in the region, that inaction could destroy the democracy, free market economies, and prosperity that has been achieved, and place the posterity of the hemisphere at serious risk. Some Final Thoughts On Chvezs
Asymmetrical Conflict As A Challenge To Hemispheric Security Chvez may be a military caudillo, but he is no nut case. He is, in fact, what Ralph Peters calls a wise competitor.57 He will not even attempt to defeat his enemies on their terms. Rather, he will seek to shift the playing field away from conventional military confrontations and turn to nontraditional forms of assault on a nations stability and integrity. Thus, it appears that this astute warrior is prepared to destabilize, to facilitate the processes of state failure, and thus to destroy in order to rebuild in true revolutionary fashion.58 As

a consequence, it is important to understand that Chvez considers three issues to be key to success (or failure) in contemporary asymmetric conflict. They are closely related to his security scheme, social programs, and communications efforts. First, he understands the sophistication and complexity of war as a whole. He also understands the value of facilitating the processes of state failure to achieve the objectives of bolivarianismo. Finally, Chvez understands the centrality of relative
moral legitimacy in conflict and the critical importance of creating popular perceptions that his cause is morally correct, and will lead to a better life. These are the bases of powerall else, to him, is illusion. The Sophistication and Complexity of War as a Whole. Chvez understands that contemporary nontraditional war is not a kind of appendage (a lesser or limited thing) to the more comfortable conventional military attrition and maneuver warfare paradigms. It is a great deal more. Again, it may be military or nonmilitary, lethal or nonlethal, or a mix of everything within a states or a coalition of states array of instruments of power. As such, it may be a zerosum game in which only one winner emerges or, in a worst-case scenario, no winner. It is, thus, total. That is to say, the battlefield is extended to everyone, everything, and everywhere.59 To give the mind as much room as possible to contemplate the sophistication and complexityand the totalityof contemporary conflict, two Chinese colonels, Liang and Xiangsui, have provided a scenario that is instructive and sobering: If the attacking side secretly musters large amounts of capital without the enemy nation being aware of this, and launches a sneak attack against its financial markets, then after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and hacker detachment in the opponents computer system in advance, while at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network, and mass media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy nation to fall into social panic, street riots, and a political crisis. There is finally the forceful bearing down by the army, and military means are utilized in gradual stages until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty.60 Chvez understands all this. He understands that war is no longer limited to using military violence to bring about desired political change. Rather, all means that can be brought to bear on a given situation must be used to compel a targeted government to do ones will. This caudillo will tailor his campaign to his adversaries political and economic vulnerabilities, and to their psychological precepts. And this is the basis of Chvezs instruction to the Venezuelan armed forces (at the 1st Military Forum on

President Chvez also understands that the process leading to state failure is the most dangerous long-term security challenge facing the global community today. The argument in general is that failing and failed state status is the breeding ground for instability, criminality, insurgency, regional conflict, and terrorism. These conditions breed massive humanitarian disasters and major refugee flows. They can host evil networks of all kinds, whether they involve criminal business enterprise, narco-trafficking, or some form of ideological crusade such as Bolivarianismo. More specifically, these conditions spawn all kinds of things people in general do not like such as murder, kidnapping, corruption, intimidation, and destruction of infrastructure. These means of coercion and persuasion can spawn further human rights violations, torture, poverty, starvation, disease, the recruitment and use of child soldiers, trafficking in women and body parts, trafficking and proliferation of conventional weapons systems and WMD, genocide, ethnic cleansing, warlordism, and criminal anarchy. At the same time, these actions are usually unconfined and spill over into regional syndromes of poverty, destabilization, and conflict.62 Perus Sendero Luminoso calls violent and destructive activities that facilitate the processes of state failure armed propaganda. Drug cartels operating throughout the Andean Ridge of South America and elsewhere call these activities business incentives. Chvez considers these actions to be steps that must be taken to bring about the political conditions necessary to establish Latin American socialism for the 21st century.63 Thus, in addition to helping to provide wider latitude to further their tactical and operational objectives, state and nonstate actors strategic efforts are aimed at progressively lessening a targeted regimes credibility and capability in terms of its ability and willingness to govern and develop its national territory and society. Chvezs intent is to focus his primary attack politically and psychologically on selected Latin American governments ability and right to govern. In that context, he understands that popular perceptions of corruption,
Fourth Generation War and Asymmetric War in 2004) to develop a doctrinal paradigm change from conventional to peoples war.61 The Issue of State Failure.

disenfranchisement, poverty, and lack of upward mobility limit the right and the ability of a given regime to conduct the business of the state. Until a given populace generally perceives that its government is dealing with these and other basic issues of political, economic, and social injustice fairly and effectively, instability and the threat of subverting or destroying such a government are real.64 But failing and failed states simply do not go away. Virtually anyone can take advantage of such an unstable situation. The tendency is that the best motivated and best armed organization on the scene will control that instability. As a consequence, failing and failed states become dysfunctional states, rogue states, criminal states, narco-states, or new peoples democracies. In

connection with the creation of new peoples democracies, one can rest assured that Chvez and his Bolivarian populist allies will be available to provide money, arms, and leadership at any given opportunity. And, of course, the longer dysfunctional, rogue, criminal, and narco-states and peoples democracies persist, the more they and their associated problems endanger global security, peace, and prosperity.65

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2NC Venezuela Turn---Econ Scenario

Inflation is key to preventing voters from granting Chavez more constitutional powers The Irish Times, December 6, 2007, Defeat for Chvez, LexisNexis
The key fact about Sunday's surprise defeat of President Hugo Chvez's proposal to change Venezeula's constitution was the massive abstention of his own supporters. Compared to the seven million votes he received in the presidential election last December, only 4.3 million voted in favour of these changes. Overall turnout was down from 70 to 56 per cent. His opponents rallied some 30 per cent of the electorate to give them a very narrow victory of 50.7 to 49.3 per cent. This is the first vote Mr Chvez has lost since coming to power in 1998. It proposed a complex package of constitutional changes which he insisted be treated as a unitary whole. They ranged from abolishing presidential term limits that would have allowed him to stand again in 2013, entrenching socialist values, decreasing central bank autonomy, to social changes like reducing the working day from eight to six hours, extending social security to the selfemployed and directly funding the community councils he has created as a bulwark for his "Bolivarian revolution". This combination of legal and social change has a contradictory content and appeal. Mr Chvez acknowledged that in a statement accepting defeat when he said he has attempted too much change too rapidly. Many of his supporters were worried that abolishing the limit on presidential terms would further encourage the authoritarian tendencies already so visible in his populist style of rule. Influential allies broke with him on this issue, saying he should not be trusted on it and that a personality cult is developing alongside plans to merge his supporters into one political party. Parallel attacks on opposition media had a similar resonance, notably among a freshly mobilised student movement. These proposed changes became more salient because of the recent uneven performance of the Venezuelan economy, notwithstanding the oil boom which has sustained Mr Chvez's social programme. Growing inflation, corruption and shortages of staple products like flour, eggs, milk, cooking oil, meat and sugar have mocked his promises of greater equality and raised questions about whether they will be delivered upon. The proposals to fund community organisations directly could make a difference here, but they depend on local control rather than the centralisation implied by Mr Chvez's own political role. This setback is a healthy democratic check for Mr Chvez. It may galvanise the fragmented opposition but is not likely to affect the underlying popularity of his programme of change.

Chavez would use increased Constitutional power to cut off oil to the US, causing a recession Rowan & Schoen 11-13-07
(Michael-, Latin American Newspaper Columnist & Consultant, Douglas-, Political Consultant, Los Angeles Times, Does Hugo Chavez have us over a barrel?, Lexis; Jacob) On Dec. 2, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez can tip the world into a recession. On that day, if Venezuelan citizens pass the dozens of constitutional amendments on the ballot, Chavez will essentially be granted dictatorial powers -- an elected strongman reminiscent of Spain's Franco, Italy's Mussolini and Orwell's Big Brother. The day could easily deteriorate into one of violence, martial law and suspension of oil production, the latter calculated to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy. With the price of oil hovering near $100 a barrel and markets skittish because of the subprime housing crisis (not to mention the stability of U.S. banks, the U.S. trade deficit, the weak dollar and deteriorating domestic consumer confidence), such a move on Chavez's part would go a long way in triggering a recession. An oil crisis during the Christmas season -- with its 40% share of annual retail sales -- would be especially detrimental in the U.S. Rising oil prices have caused global recessions in the past. The Saudis and other oil-producing countries have tried to increase output to offset rising costs. But working against stability and for high oil prices are Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who are in a strategic alliance to push up the price of oil. Oil economists calculate that on a supply-anddemand basis alone, the price of oil would be about $50; the remaining $45 in the current price is a political premium caused by uncertainty in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran's suspected nuclear plans, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and social unrest in Pakistan, Nigeria and Venezuela. But where the world sees a threat, Ahmadinejad and Chavez see opportunity: Civil discord lines their pockets. In Chavez's eyes, a world economic crisis would prove that capitalism is a failure and the U.S.' "evil empire" is historically over. Chavez's Bolivarian socialist economic order would supposedly move to the forefront. For his part, Ahmadinejad can use world chaos to gain hegemonic strength in the Middle East. The two, working in cahoots, could then reach out to partners in Syria and elsewhere in the region. NUCLEAR WAR Cook 7 (Richard C., June 14, pg. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5964) Times of economic crisis produce international tension and politicians tend to go to war rather than face the economic music. The classic example is the worldwide depression of the 1930s leading to World War II. Conditions in the coming years could be as

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bad as they were then. We could have a really big war if the U.S. decides once and for all to haul off and let China, or whomever, have it in the chops. If they dont want our dollars or our debt any more, how about a few nukes?

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2NC Venezuela Turn---UQ

Inflation high now Eyanir Chinea 4/16 writer for Reuters, Chavez battles re-election hurdle: Venezuela inflation, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/16/us-venezuelainflation-idUSBRE83F16N20120416 (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

is so determined to contain one of the world's highest inflation rates in an election year that his price control officials are sticking signs outside stores to enforce compliance. The red-yellow-green traffic light notices tell shoppers whether a store is obeying new price caps. Businesses that don't comply face fines, temporary closure or outright expropriation by his socialist government. The initial freezing of prices of 19 key goods in December has begun to kick in: Consumer prices rose 3.5 percent in the first three months of 2012, the lowest quarterly rate since the oil exporting country introduced a new index four years ago. But most economists believe Chavez's efforts to contain inflation will have only short-term results because increased public spending in the run-up to the October 7 presidential election is bound to stoke prices again in the oil-producing OPEC nation. The analysts say price controls will only distort a highly regulated economy further and speed up inflation in the long run as the cheaper regulated goods become scarce and producers compensate their losses by raising prices on unregulated goods. "What's happening is they are containing inflation but not really attacking the causes of inflation. In fact, many of the causes are being deepened," said economist Pedro Palma of the Caracas-based consultancy Ecoanalitica.
Chavez, who has nationalized great swathes of the Venezuelan economy, maintains that speculators and hoarders are fueling inflation, and he accuses his political opponents of trying to disrupt the economy to undermine his government. "We will continue monitoring clothing, cars, food above all, medicine ... to reduce speculation to zero because it is one of the main factors causing inflation," he vowed recently. "This is just the start." Despite suffering from an unspecified cancer, for which he is having radiation treatment in Cuba, Chavez is seeking another six-year term in October in the toughest election battle he has faced in 13 years in office. Amid doubts over his health, Chavez's opposition is taking him to task for the high cost of living, a major gripe with voters, as well as over a rising crime rate that has made Venezuelan cities unsafe. CASH INJECTION Chavez has made clear that his election strategy is to put more money in the pockets of Venezuelans by stepping up an array of social programs that have redistributed income to the poor as part of his so-called socialist revolution. The cash flow is expected to begin in the second quarter, and includes a 30 percent increase in the minimum wage that will be seen in paychecks in two stages, May and September. His government plans to spend $26 billion on social programs for 2011-2012 and has expanded this year's national budget by 45 percent. Additional funding will come from new bond issues after the government eliminated the debt ceiling by decree in March. Last year, Venezuela issued

more sovereign paper than any other Latin American state - more than $17 billion - to fund housing projects, the import of food and medicine as well as non-essential consumer goods. Financial analysts expect Venezuela to place at least another $15 billion in bonds on the capital markets this year. The massive injection of funds is expected to heat up the economy and speed up inflation, putting further
stress on a weakened private sector. Venezuelan business leaders criticize the government for suffocating the economy with regulations like price controls that reduce productivity and increase the country's dependence on imported goods. "Some producers are operating almost at a loss," complained Moises Bittan of Fedecamaras, Venezuela's main business lobby. Venezuela has the most regulated economy in Latin America after communist Cuba and inflation rates that are four or five times higher than the region's average, according to Jose Manuel Puentes of the IESA business school in Caracas. The official inflation target for this year is in the 22-25 percent range, but market players expect it to be closer to last year's 27.2 percent. The government's dilemma is that the more it regulates the economy, the worse inflation will get, said Puentes.

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2NC Venezuela Turn---XT Link

High food prices prevent Chavez from gaining more powers- empirically proven Frank Jack Daniel, Reuters, April 30, 2008, Stumbling toward food security; Hobbled by poor planning, Venezuela confronts
shortages, The International Herald Tribune, LexisNexis Hurt by sporadic shortages of basic products last year, Chvez is determined to reduce Venezuela's dependence on costly imports and make its fields more productive, as world food prices hit all-time highs. ''Some day Venezuela will export food,'' Chvez, a leftist populist, said Thursday during a visit to a newly irrigated corn farm in the neighboring state of Barinas, where new tractors worked the land. ''Output keeps on rising.'' Venezuela is a lush country, but agriculture began to diminish in importance as oil boomed in the 1920s, and coffee and cocoa farms were neglected. Even as a member of OPEC, the country is now one of the few net food importers in Latin America. Oil wealth contributes to a strong currency, meaning imports are often less expensive than home-grown produce. There is little doubt that Chvez is paying more attention to the countryside than any government in a generation. Harvests of many crops have risen steadily since he took office. ''It was totally abandoned,'' said Andrs Tuesta, a leader of peasant farmers. ''This is a serious attempt to break with a model based only on oil and diversify the economy.'' But cases like the empty plant in Mantecal show that bad planning, along with an overvalued currency, have slowed Chvez's drive to make the fertile land produce more. Food shortages are a tinderbox issue everywhere in the world, as unrest from Haiti to Senegal has shown in recent months. Anger at long lines for milk contributed to Chvez's defeat in a referendum on extending his powers last year. Venezuela has promised to help other left-leaning governments in the region - like Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba - to increase their grain production, but it has run into difficulties at home. Chvez, who says high food prices show that capitalism is a failed system, has sheltered consumers from rising world food costs with subsidies and price controls. Even so, some products have been scarce as world supplies tighten, fixed prices distort the supply chain and a bonanza from record oil prices drives up domestic demand.

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2NC Venezuela Turn---XT Kills US Influence

Venezuelan aid is pushing the US out of Latin America Juan Forero and Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post Foreign Service, February 23, 2007, Chavez Builds His Sphere Of
Influence, Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/22/AR2007022201875_pf.html The amount of Venezuelan aid is hard to quantify. The Center of Economic Investigations, a consulting firm in Caracas, the capital, has kept track of Chavez's frequent pronouncements and says that in 2006, he pledged $47 billion in aid and agreements -- impossible to deliver considering that Venezuela's annual budget hovers around $50 billion. Still, the country's central bank recorded billions spent on foreign bonds and other investments in the first nine months of last year, dwarfing the amount the United States offers in assistance to Latin America. In Venezuela, the closer ties to Ecuador and Nicaragua, coupled with Chavez's recent announcements that he will nationalize utilities and take greater control of oil projects at the expense of multinational corporations, has enthralled supporters who believe the country is in the vanguard of a new era in Latin America. Venezuela is proposing a new multinational bank, a Bank of the South, to replace Washington-based lenders. "We are distancing ourselves fundamentally from the imperial pretensions of the United States," said Haiman El Troudi, a former chief of staff to Chavez who studies economic issues at the state-funded International Miranda Center in Caracas. "The leftist, progressive thought is thinking the same, thinking of human beings, the installation of new social relations to get along, thinking of the conditions of people's lives and people's culture." The Venezuelan model, which is predicated on a break with all multinational institutions with Washington ties, has plainly gathered steam in some Latin American countries. Last year, Argentina, recovering after its 2001 economic collapse by ignoring some crucial aspects of IMF advice, paid off the last of the $10 billion it owed the fund. It was aided by Venezuela, which had bought $2.5 billion in Argentine debt. In Bolivia, Morales nationalized the gas industry and renegotiated agreements with foreign investors -- measures opposed by orthodox economists. Last March, after spending nearly two decades under the strictures of an IMF program, Bolivia let its agreement with the fund end. Meanwhile, Venezuela has committed more than $140 million in loans and grants while pledging to invest as much as $1.5 billion in Bolivia's gas industry in coming years. Bolivian leaders said Venezuelan aid comes with fewer strings attached. "In the case of the United States, we're locked into specific areas -- aid for roads, aid for health, aid for electricity," Alvaro Garcia Linera, the vice president, said in an interview in his office. The Venezuelan aid "allows us greater flexibility to choose projects with more productive impact, especially those ventures that include a state presence." With Venezuela offering loans, Ecuador, too, has moved to cut back its ties to the IMF and related lenders. The Correa administration said it would not sign an agreement allowing the fund to monitor the government's economic plan.

Chavezs aid increases Venezuelan influence Rowan & Schoen 11-13-07

(Michael-, Latin American Newspaper Columnist & Consultant, Douglas-, Political Consultant, Los Angeles Times, Does Hugo Chavez have us over a barrel?, Lexis; Jacob) Chavez is a brilliant military strategist who has reportedly spent or committed $110 billion since 2004 (an amount equivalent in today's dollars to what the U.S. spent in the Marshall Plan after World War II) in political investments in the Americas and elsewhere. His plan is to spread the revolution against capitalism and the United States. So far, he has a string of victories to show for it. Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua are already in his camp; Argentina owes him $5 billion, and his candidates came within 1% of winning elections in Mexico and Costa Rica in 2006.

Venezuelan inflation decreasing Venezuelan News Agency 12 (Venezuela's Inflation Falls for 5 Months in a Row, May 4th, http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6970)
Venezuelas National Consumer Price Index recorded a 0.8% inflationary increase in April, which represents a decline in inflation for the fifth month in a row, informed Finance Minister Jorge Giordani during a joint press conference with the president of the Venezuelan Central Bank, Nelson Merentes. Presenting the results of a report drafted by the Venezuelan Central Bank and the National Statistics Institute, authorities confirmed that accrued inflation during the first four months of 2012 amounts to 4.4%, while the annual rate from May 2011 to April 2012 is 23.8%. This represents a fall from the annualised inflation rate in March of 24.6%. Giordani said this downward trend reaffirms the goal set in the national budget of annual inflation in

2AC Venezuala Uniqueness

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2012 of between 20% and 22%. This data "is accompanied by a decline in the unemployment rate (7.9% in March), and the result of first quarter economic performance, the minister stated. Variation of the National Consumer Price Index rated 0.9% in March. In February it was 1.1%, in January 1.5% and in December 2011, 1.8%.

Venezuelan inflation slowing down expected to fall to 18% this year Minaya 12 (Ezequiel, Venezuela Inflation Could Slow to 18% in 2012 - Government Official, http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120612-710137.html)
CARACAS--Venezuela's

annual inflation rate could ease to as low as 18% by year's end, which would mean a reduction of nearly 10 percentage points when compared to the end of 2011, according to the vice president of the parliament's finance committee. "We are confident that the downward trend that is being registered will continue," said National Assemblyman Jesus Faria in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires. "I personally estimate an inflation [rate] below 20%. I am optimistic. I think it can reach 18% or 19%." Mr. Faria's forecast improves on predications by the heads of Venezuela's central bank and finance ministry, who expect 2012 inflation of between 20% and 22%, down from the 27.6% posted last year. Venezuela has made progress toward the goal, with annualized inflation slowing through the first five months of the year to register at 22.6% in May, according to a report from the central bank last week. The downward trend appears at risk,
however, with the consumer price index climbing 1.6% last month when compared to April, the sharpest rise so far in 2012. The latest results followed two consecutive month-on-month increases below 1.0%, the smallest jumps in four years.

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1NC Africa Turn

1. High food prices spur international aid and development in the ag sectors Sub Saharan Africa- best way to solve poverty Declan Butler, agriculture expert, 1 May 2008, Nature Magazine, A research menu,
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/full/453001b.html There are various ways in which the fruits of scientific research might have helped ease the suffering that comes from this confluence of factors. But here, too, the harvest is not what it might have been. Public spending on basic agricultural research fell during the 1980s and 1990s in rich countries (see page 8). The proportion of US aid ploughed into agriculture wilted from 25% to 1% , bilateral farming aid from Europe dropped by two-thirds and World Bank lending in the sector slipped from 30% to 8% . The reasons for this included the perceived success of Green Revolution technologies in Asia, and, indeed, some backlash against intensified farming among green groups. The downslide was most pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa, where the cutbacks were still severe even though there had been no
Green Revolution comparable to that in Asia. A contributing factor to this decline from the 1990s on was Europe's attitude to genetically modified crops, which both chilled research in the area and reduced incentives for such technologies to be fielded in countries looking to European export markets. One might assume that such cutbacks in research reflected poor results. Not so; the pay-offs to agricultural research are massive. The World Bank's World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development (http://tinyurl.com/2ngyqd) the first of the annual reports to focus on agriculture for a quarter of a century, the bank noted with self-reproach cites 700 published estimates of rates of return on investment in agricultural research, development and extension services in developing countries. It reports an average annual return of 43% . Agriculture has poverty-busting powers beyond

straightforward revenue increases. One reason for this is that poor people in poor countries who earn a little extra cash will spend it on basic local goods and services agricultural growth spurs economic growth from the bottom up. A study of 42 developing countries covering the period from 1981 to 2003 found that growth in gross domestic product (GDP) that originated in agriculture increased spending by the poor two-and-a-half times more than does GDP growth in other sectors. The past weeks have brought signs that global institutions and donors are beginning to bow, belatedly, to this logic. On 2 April the World Bank announced its intention to double agricultural lending to subSaharan Africa over the next year, and bank administrators say that a portion of the new money will go towards basic research. Britain, the International Monetary Fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are also opening their coffers. In the case of the Gates's money, much will be channelled through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa led by Kofi Annan. There are many useful directions for such development; higher yields, drought resistance and reduced requirements for inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides are all promising. But the more pressing problem for poor farmers is not the development of new technologies but access to those already there. Plenty of good agricultural science such as locally adapted seed varieties and soil surveys sits unused because it has not been delivered in a form adequately tailored to the end users and their limited means. Resources need to go towards coordinating and strengthening local agricultural extension services as an integral part of revamping and reintegrating the research infrastructure. Agricultural research systems in sub-Saharan Africa are fragmented into almost 400 distinct agencies, eight times the number in the United States and four times the number in India.

2. Furthermore the economic disparities created by U.S. Cotton subsides fuel anti-American sentiment increasing terrorist recruitment Griswold, Slivinski, & Preble Trade & Foreign Policy Studies Cato 6
(Daniel, Stephen, and Christopher, Feb. 1, Six Reasons to Kill Farm Subsidies and Trade Barriers, http://www.freetrade.org/node/493; Jacob) The collective effect of American farm policies is to depress the income of agricultural producers worldwide, exacerbating poverty in areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia, where people are heavily dependent on agriculture. The frustration and despair caused by these policies undermine American security. Many people who depend on agriculture for their survival, both as a source of nourishment and a means of acquiring wealth, perceive U.S. farm policy as part of an anti-American narrative in which Washington wants to keep the rest of the world locked in poverty. Indeed, in a survey of anti-American sentiment around the world, the Pew Research Center found a majority of respondents in more than a dozen countries were convinced that U.S. farm and trade policies increased the "poverty gap" worldwide. These sentiments transcended geographic, ethnic, or religious boundaries. In such an environment, terrorist ringleaders find fertile ground for their message of hate and violence. Nicholas Stern, chief economist at the World Bank, is blunt about America's leadership role. "It is hypocritical to preach the advantages of free trade and free markets," Stern told the U.N. publication Africa Recovery, "and then erect obstacles in precisely those markets in which developing countries have a comparative advantage." Johan Norberg, of the Swedish think tank Timbro, argues that farm

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protection in developed countries amounts to a "deliberate and systematic means of undermining the very type of industry in which the developing countries do have comparative advantages." (See "Poor Man's Hero," December 2003.) American subsidies and tariffs amount to much more money than its foreign aid to the developing world. According to Oxfam, "in crop year 2002, the U.S. government provided $3.4 billion in total subsidies to the cotton sector," including about 25,000 growers. "To put this figure into perspective," Oxfam says, "it is nearly twice the total amount of U.S. foreign aid given to sub-Saharan Africa. It is also more than the GDP of Benin, Burkina Faso, or Chad, the main cotton-producing countries in the region." The subsidies drive down world cotton prices, costing developing countries billions of dollars in lost export earnings. Poor countries don't want our pity; they want our respect. To the extent that American security depends on the expansion of liberal democratic institutions and free market economics, Washington must be particularly sensitive to policies that exacerbate poverty in the developing world.

3. Terrorism causes extinction SID-AHMED 04

(Mohamed, internationally renowned reporter and columnist in Al Ahram, Extinction! Al-Ahram Weekly, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/705/op5.htm) 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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2NC Africa Turn---XT Link

High food prices prompt investment in African agriculture- creates long term solution to poverty and hunger Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, August 1, 2008, The Proposition's rebuttal statement,
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829065 At todays higher food prices, which correspond to the same real level as in the 1960s and 1970s, many new opportunities present themselves. The Gates and Rockefeller Foundations created an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa in 2006, with significant funding to improve seeds and soil. They are trying to replicate the successful Green Revolution which helped large parts of Asia defeat hunger in the 1970s. Writing about that success, Norman Borlaug, Nobel Laureate and the father of the Green Revolution, credits the Indian governments decision to drop price controls on food to restore market incentives to a point where farmers would rapidly introduce the new varieties. It was high food prices in the 1960s and 1970s that helped initiate and sustain the Green Revolution and there is every reason to suppose that high food prices today can serve as a prologue for a similar revolution in Africa in the years to come.

High food prices key to increasing investment and research in African agriculture- solves poverty and hunger Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, August 1, 2008, The Proposition's rebuttal statement,
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829065 Mr von Braun deplores the change in the status quo that higher food prices represent. The real point is that the status quo of low food prices was itself the problem. The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, called the hunger and malnutrition goal the forgotten MDG, a silent tsunami that threatened humanity. Now the alarm has been rung and misguided agricultural policies are being rectified. As Paul Romer, one of the leading economists of our generation has said on another occasion, A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. There is every hope that changes in trade policy, investment in agriculture and more agricultural science and technologyall of which are called for by Mr von Braun will result from high food prices. The World Bank has already announced $350m more in agricultural support for Africa next year. As we would expect, none of this happened when food prices were low.

High food prices prompt agencies to build better social protection infrastructure AllAfrica.com, September 3, 2008, West Africa: Do High Food Prices Warrant a Cash Response?
http://allafrica.com/stories/200809040012.html Experts say many of the right conditions are in place across West Africa to make cash distributions work in the current global food price crisis. Michael O'Donnell, head of hunger reduction for non-governmental organisation (NGO) Save the Children, said "the current food price crisis could be an opportunity for governments to work with NGOs and UN agencies to provide cash transfers to build up stronger social protection systems for the chronically poor."

High food prices will spur investment in African agriculture, which is key to the sector Denise Wolter, Carlo Schmid Fellow at OECD Development Centre, May 2008, Higher Food Prices A Blessing in Disguise
For Africa? OECD Development Centre, http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/7/40573527.pdf The curse of higher food prices can be turned into a blessing if African agriculture finally becomes a business. The continent is losing out in world agricultural trade. The share of African products in world agricultural imports has actually declined from 5.4 per cent in the mid-1980s to 3.2 per cent in 2006. The commercialisation of agriculture would provide many opportunities for Africa even though the approach does not seem to sit easily with the notions of poverty reduction and food security. Yet, even countries which are in principle food-secure, such as Tanzania and Ghana, continue to experience food-security problems for two main reasons: the malfunctioning of internal food markets and low productivity. Food aid, subsidies and export restrictions have not resolved Africas food-security problems. These measures can only provide short-term emergency relief as long as agricultural productivity remains low. In Africa, yields for
cereals, and roots and tubers have stagnated during 1990-2006, while yields in Southeast Asia increased by more than 30 per cent (see Figures 1 and 2). African agriculture is still dominated by traditional, rain-fed, smallholder production systems with little acreage and limited intensification. Zambia is a case in point: less than 15 per cent of its arable land is under cultivation, only 10 per cent of the land area suitable for irrigation is being irrigated, and 40 per cent of rural households are solely engaged in subsistence agriculture. Stagnating productivity and the pre-dominance of subsistence

agriculture represent the current sorry state of agriculture but also indicate unexploited agricultural potential and

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commercial opportunities. Governments and donors should aim their interventions at unleashing this potential.
OECD Development Centre research shows that donor projects, which adopted a commercial approach, produced positive results in the horticultural sectors in Ghana, Senegal and to a lesser extent in Mali and Zambia. Contract farming (e.g. outgrower schemes) has proved to be an effective mechanism for involving smallholder farmers in export-crop production and to achieve economies of scale. Donor support has been crucial in facilitating the establishment of those schemes, especially in Senegal. Building on the lessons learned from successful commercialisation programmes in the export sector, donors should now turn their attention to the commercial potential of food crops. Rising local and regional demand in Africa provides ample opportunities to expand

production and to develop food-processing industries. The current food-price crisis could become a blessing if it leads to a stronger focus on how to make food markets work. Poor transport infrastructure, lack of market information and unpredictable government interventions currently hinder commercial development. This is why, for example, in Tanzania
surplus regions prefer to export their produce to neighbouring countries, rather to other regions of their own. Yet, while commercialisation programmes for export crops are quite common, comparable examples for food crops are rare. So far, donors and governments have focused too much on production, leaving aside market linkages and institutional capacity building. Admittedly the design of such programmes for food crops is more challenging; however, the potential impact on poverty reduction and economic development should not be underestimated. Moreover, the observed improvements in agricultural productivity in Southeast Asia have been closely linked to increased public spending on agricultural research and development (R&D) and better extension services. In Africa, public R&D spending has been declining over the last three decades. This trend should be reversed and extension services need to be improved to ensure that farmers obtain the full benefit from R&D results. Seeing agriculture as a business also requires a broadening of the scope of the actors to be involved. Donors and governments need to move beyond working only with small-scale producers to alleviate poverty. Traders, wholesalers and exporters, who may not be considered poor themselves, are important intermediaries in the agro-food value chain. Last but not least,

commercialising food-crop production also presents the opportunity for Africa to re-gain ground in world agricultural trade. According to recent OECD Development Centre research, large European agro-food companies are already examining the investment possibilities in African agriculture to ensure future supplies for their domestic markets. The chance of combining business with agricultural development should not be missed as in the long-term a vibrant private sector should be
the motor of development. Increasing the productivity of food crops will require sizeable investments in irrigation, storage and transport infrastructure as well as improved access to inputs (such as fertilisers, seeds, planting materials and credit) and markets.

High food prices are an opportunity for poor farmers in SSA to increase profits Heidi Fritschel, International Food Policy Research Institute, March 2008, What Goes Down Must Come Up: Global Food
Prices Reach New Heights, http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/newsletters/ifpriforum/if200803.asp High food prices should present a golden opportunity for poor farmers to ramp up production and increase their profits. The FAO's Daniel Gustafson sees evidence that certain countries will significantly raise agricultural production. South Africa is expected to increase its planted area by 8 percent, he says, and farmers in Malawi and Zambia are likely to increase their production owing to subsidized input programs in those countries. A number of countries, especially in Asia, have been producing record harvests in recent years anyway, so future large harvests may not represent large increases over past production. "We could see some significant increases in Indian cereal production," says Gustafson. "The price rise really is quite dramatic, and there are many parts of India where even if the local rise in prices doesn't match international ones, there could still be a big jump. There are other areas where people have left the farm, or some members of the family have left the farm, leaving land fallow, so if high prices prevail, which they probably will, we could see some of these people returning to what now may be a better option."

Low food prices caused low investment production, contributing to African poverty Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, August 1, 2008, The Proposition's rebuttal statement,
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829065 The prolonged period of low food prices did very little to reduce poverty and hunger, especially in Africa where it is most intransigent. According to the United Nations, more than 20% of children under five were severely or moderately underweight (the UNs indicator of hunger) in 2000-04 in most of sub-Saharan Africa and in several countries in Asia. There has been very little progress in Africa over the last decade. Low international food prices were partly to blame. By the mid-1990s, rice production in Africa was being outstripped by population growth. Africa had to use scarce foreign exchange to import rice and household food consumption did not grow. African conditions were not suitable for high-yielding Asian hybrids and African highyielding varieties were not developed and distributed. African food production per head has declined by 12% since 1980. Falling production is the inevitable response when private producers are faced with falling prices. But governments also responded by cutting their investments in agriculture. As real food prices fell from 1975 onwards, the growth rate of public investment in agriculture fell in every region in the world. The fall in developed countries was most dramatic: from 1991 to 2000 real growth was negative. In Africa in the 1990s, it averaged just 1% per year. USAID support for agricultural science in Africa has been cut by 75% over the last two decades. In an assessment of declining African food production, Joachim von Brauns own organisation, the International Food Policy Research Institute, singles out poor infrastructure, high transport costs, limited investment in agriculture, and pricing and marketing policies that penalized farmers. That is code for saying that prices were too low. Low food prices meant that rates of

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return on proposed projects in roads, irrigation and marketing infrastructure were too low to justify investment. Africas poor farmers simply could not compete when international food was so cheap.

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2NC Africa Turn---War Impact

1. African poverty and limited exports cause civil wars that escalate outside the continent Bone-associate editor The Age 3
(Pamela-, Assoc. Editor The Age, July 12, At last, America discovers Africa, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/07/11/ 1057783349674.html; Jacob) Africa's wars are often dismissed as "ethnic" conflicts. But a recent World Bank study of 52 major civil wars found most were caused not by ethnic tensions but by entrenched poverty and heavy dependence on natural resource exports.The report concluded that because the effects of these wars often spill over into neighbouring countries - and even to faraway rich countries - the international community has "compelling" reasons to try to prevent them, even apart from the humanitarian reasons.

2. Nuclear War
Deutsch-Phd economics George Mason2
(Jeffrey, Founder of Rabid Tiger Project, Nov. 18, Rabid Tiger Newsletter, Vol. 2 #9, http://users.rcn.com/jeff-deutsch/rtn/ newsletterv2n9.html; Jacob)

Rabid Tiger Project, a political risk consulting and related research firm,
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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2NC Africa Turn---Poverty Impact

Poverty is a form of structural violence that is equivalent to an ongoing nuclear war against the poor; it is also the root cause of all other violence James Gilligan professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for the Study of Violence, and a
member of the Academic Advisory Council of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence. Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes. 1996. P. 191-196 The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill our prisons and mental
hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcible and constantly reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterizes their lives. Hearing about their lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhi's observation that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed. Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence in our society takes place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths. Any approach to a theory of violence needs to

begin with a look at the structural violence in this country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are far more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint. By "structural violence" I mean the
increased rates of death, and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted with the relatively lower death rates experienced by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence," by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from behavioral violence in at least three major respects. *The lethal effects of structural violence operate continuously, rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms of behavioral violence occur one at a time. *Structural violence operates more or less independently of individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. *Structural violence is normally invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes.

[Continued (9 Paragraphs Later)]

The finding that structural violence causes far more deaths than behavioral violence does is not limited to this country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess deaths caused by socioeconomic inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the nation that had come closes to eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income and living standards, and the lowest discrepancies in death rates and life expectancy; and the highest overall life expectancy in the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in the other socioeconomic systems against Sweden, they found that 18 million deaths a year could be attributed to the "structural violence" to which the citizens of all the other nations were being subjected. During the past decade, the

discrepancies between the rich and poor nations have increased dramatically and alarmingly. The 14 to 18 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide or about eight million per year, 1939-1945), the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000) deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million, 1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232 million), it was clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide, perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of violencestructural or behavioralis more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.

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2NC Africa Turn---Terrorism Impact

Boosting regional agriculture is key to solving terrorism Lang 5
(Susan, February 24, pg. http://www.news.cornell.edu/chronicle/05/2.24.05/AAAS.Andersen.Africa.html) If the developed world fails to invest more in African agriculture and rural infrastructure to benefit the poor and help them escape poverty, the world will become a much more dangerous place, Cornell economist Per Pinstrup-Andersen said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 21. Investment in productivity-increasing agricultural research, he said, is particularly important because at present agricultural science and investment generally benefit affluent farmers and consumers. He pointed out that about one-fifth of the world's population lives in dire poverty, and the already very skewed gap between rich and poor keeps growing. PinstrupAndersen is the H.E. Babcock Professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell, the 2001 World Food Prize Laureate and chair of the Science Council for the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a consortium of 15 international research agricultural centers that focuses on setting priorities for international agricultural research. Some 800 million people in the world don't have enough to eat, said Pinstrup-Andersen. The consequences of such destitution are malnutrition, environmental degradation and worldwide instability. These circumstances, he warned, also leave millions of people with nothing to lose, making them ripe for turning to international terrorism in their frustration. These people need to be heard, he said. Much of his research is focused on developing policies to improve the global food system for the benefit of the nutritional status of low-income people.

Terrorists operating in Africa will deploy nuclear weapons against the U.S. Dempsey-Director of African Studies , Army War College-6 (Thomas, Director of African Studies @ U.S. Army War College
and served as a strategic intelligence analyst for Africa at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and as Chief of Africa Branch for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Counterterrorism in African Failed States: Challenges and Potential Solutions, April, http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/pub649.pdf) Raising the Stakes:The Nuclear Dimension of the Terrorist Threat. The threat that terrorist hubs based in failed

states pose to the United States and to its allies escalates dramatically if those hubs can obtain access to nuclear weapons. The risk that such weapons will find their way into terrorist hands is increasing significantly as a result of three interrelated factors. The end of the Cold War has witnessed an alarming erosion of control and security of Russian nuclear technology and weaponry. It has also witnessed increasing nuclear proliferation among non-nuclear states. The circumstances surrounding that proliferationprimarily its clandestine and covert naturemake it far more likely for nuclear weapons to find their way from state proliferators into the hands of terrorist groups. The problematic issue of
accounting for and controlling Sovietera nuclear weapons and technology has been explored thoroughly by Jessica Stern in her 1999 study of terrorism and WMD. Stern described a Soviet-era military that was melting down, unpaid, and rife with corruption. Loss of accountability for fissionable materials, poor controls on the technology

of nuclear weapons production, and poor supervision of Russias militarized scientific community characterized the post-Cold War Russian nuclear sector. Lapses may have even included loss of operational nuclear devices.46 More recent reporting on the situation is hardly more encouraging. A survey in 2002 of 602 Russian
scientists working in the Russian WMD sector revealed that roughly 20 percent of the Russian scientists interviewed expressed a willingness to work for nations identified as WMD proliferators: Iran, North Korea or Syria.47 Most recently, Busch and Holmes have catalogued the efforts of rogue states and of Al Qaeda to acquire nuclear weapons capability from the inadequately controlled Russian nuclear sector, and have identified the human element of that sector as being especially vulnerable.48 When viewed in combination with the growing influence and reach of Russian organized crime, the lack of security in the Russian weaponized nuclear technology sector represents a significant risk of nuclear capability finding its way into the hands of terrorist hubs. Exacerbating this risk are the efforts of non-nuclear states that are seeking to develop a nuclear strike capability. While North Korea frequently is cited as the best example of this sort of nuclear proliferation, in the context of terrorist access to WMD, Iran may prove to be far more dangerous. The clandestine Iranian nuclear weapons program is reportedly well-advanced. A recent study of the Iranian nuclear program published by the U.S. Army War College considers Iranian fielding of operational nuclear weapons to be inevitable and estimates the time frame for such a fielding to be 12 to 48 months.49 Given Irans well-established relationship with Hezballah in Lebanon and its increasingly problematic, even hostile, relationship with the United States, the Iranian nuclear weapons program would seem to offer a tempting opportunity to Al Qaeda elements seeking clandestine access to nuclear technology. Even if the Iranian leadership does not regard sharing nuclear secrets with terrorist groups as a wise policy, elements within the Iranian government or participants in its nuclear weapons program may be willing to do so for their own reasons. The nature of clandestine nuclear weapons programs makes them especially vulnerable to compromise, as the Pakistani experience has demonstrated. The clandestine nuclear weapons program directed by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan on behalf of the Pakistani government exemplifies the risks inherent in such secret undertakings. As the details of Khans nuclear weapons operation have emerged, it has become increasingly evident that he exercised little control over the elements of his network operating outside of Pakistan. His non-Pakistani partners in acquiring nuclear technology appear to have been motivated almost entirely by money, and Khan himself seems to have operated with minimal oversight from the Pakistani government.50 Under such circumstances, the risk that critical nuclear technology will be diverted to groups like Al Qaeda is particularly high, especially when those groups have access to significant financial resources, and program participants are able to profit from diversion with little chance of detection by either the proliferating

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While both hubs and nodes exist in failed state terrorist networks in SubSaharan Africa, only the hubs present a threat of genuinely serious proportions to U.S. interests. Escalating nuclear proliferation offers terrorist hubs sheltering in failed states the opportunity to translate funding into weapons access. If those hubs are successful in maintaining even a tenuous connection through their virtual network to terrorist nodes existing within the United States or the territory of its allies, or in other areas of vital U.S. interest, then the risk posed by terrorist groups operating from failed states becomes real and immediate. The recent attacks by terrorist nodes in
state or by opponents of that proliferation.

London, Cairo, and Madrid suggest that such is the case. Developing the nexus between nuclear weapons acquisition, delivery to a local terrorist node, and employment in a terrorist attack probably will require significant resources and considerable time. Evolved terrorist hubs operating in failed states like Sierra Leone, Liberia, or Somalia may have both. Identifying those hubs, locating their members, and entering the failed state in which they are located to apprehend or destroy them will be a complex and difficult task.

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Poverty in Africa isnt getting better

Ari , 2 (Nirit Ben, Israeli Journalist, Poverty is worsening in African LDCs, September 2002, http://www.un.org/en/africarenewal/vol16no2/162povty.htm) Compared with least developed countries in other parts of the world, poverty in African LDCs is rising markedly, says the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). According to the agency, the proportion of people in 29 African LDCs living below $2 per day increased from 82 per cent in the late 1960s to 87.5 per cent in the late 1990s. For those in extreme poverty -- under $1 per day -- the increase was from 55.8 per cent to 64.9 per cent, reports UNCTAD's Least Developed Countries 2002, released in June. The number of Africans living in extreme poverty in these countries rose dramatically from 89.6 million to 233.5 million over the same
period. The UN has classified 49 countries around the world as LDCs, based on their low GDP per capita, weak human resource base and low level of economic diversification. Of that number, 33 are in sub-Saharan Africa, with most of the rest in Asia and the Pacific. The UNCTAD report uses a new way to measure poverty. Rather than calculating the proportion of poor people on the basis of only household survey data, as the World Bank and other agencies have done, UNCTAD also uses estimates based on national accounts. This, the report argues, is more accurate in especially poor countries, since household surveys have often underrepresented the poorest sectors of the population, and thereby have led to underestimates of overall poverty levels, both in the past and more recently. Not

only is poverty in African LDCs widening, the study notes, it is also deepening. Among Africans living on less than $1 a day, average
daily consumption declined from $0.66 in 1975-79 to $0.59 in 1995-99. In contrast, the average daily consumption of the extremely poor in five Asian LDCs rose from $0.84 to $0.90. The proportion of poor people in Asian LDCs also has declined steadily (see graph).

Even in Africas 2nd largest economy, poverty still continues to grow

Brock, 12(Joe, Energy Correspondent, Nigerian Poverty rising despite economic growth, 2/13/12, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/13/us-nigeriapoverty-idUSTRE81C0KR20120213)

Poverty in Nigeria is rising with almost 100 million people living on less than $1 a day, despite strong growth in Africa's second largest economy, data showed on Monday. The percentage of Nigerians living in absolute poverty - those who can afford only the bare essentials of food, shelter and clothing - rose to 60.9 percent in 2010, compared with 54.7 percent in 2004, the national bureau of statistics said. Although Nigeria's economy is projected to continue growing, poverty is likely to get worse as the gap between rich and poor in Africa's largest oil producer continues to widen. "It remains a paradox ... that despite the fact that the Nigerian economy is growing, the proportion of Nigerians living in poverty is increasing every year," Statistician General Yemi Kale told reporters in the capital Abuja.

2AC AFRICA TURN

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1NC China Turn

1. Rising food prices solve poverty in China Sandra Polaski, Senior Associate and Director, Trade, Equity and Development Program, MAY 2008, Rising Food Prices,
Poverty, and the Doha Round, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/polaski__food_prices.pdf As noted, India is home to the largest number of poor people in the world. The second largest concentration of the poor is in China. Several studies using general equilibrium models have shown that rising world prices for grains would reduce poverty in China.8 Higher prices are offset by higher earnings for labor and land, leading to a decline in poverty for all household groups with significant poverty, including urban households.9 Most historical studies conclude that the large reduction in poverty in China since 1978 was based primarily on better incomes in rural areas, attributable mainly to higher prices for food.

2. Chinese poverty causes Sino-Russia nuclear war Sharavin 10-1-2K1 (Alexander, The Third Threat, What The Papers Say (Russia))
Chinese propaganda has constantly been showing us skyscrapers in free trade zones in southeastern China. It should not be forgotten, however, that some 250 to 300 million people live there, i.e. at most a quarter of China's population. A billion Chinese people are still living in misery. For them, even the living standards of a backwater Russian town remain inaccessibly high. They have absolutely nothing to lose. There is every prerequisite for "the final throw to the north." The strength of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (CPLA) has been growing quicker than the Chinese economy. A decade ago the CPLA was equipped with inferior copies of Russian arms from late 1950s to the early 1960s. However, through its own efforts Russia has nearly managed to liquidate its most significant technological advantage. Thanks to our zeal, from antique MiG-21 fighters of the earliest modifications and S-75 air defense missile systems the Chinese antiaircraft defense forces have adopted Su-27 fighters and S-300 air defense missile systems. China's air defense forces have received Tor systems instead of anti-aircraft guns which could have been used during World War II. The shock air force of our "eastern brethren" will in the near future replace antique Tu-16 and Il-28 airplanes with Su-30 fighters, which are not yet available to the Russian Armed Forces! Russia may face the "wonderful" prospect of combating the Chinese army, which, if full mobilization is called, is comparable in size with Russia's entire population, which also has nuclear weapons (even tactical weapons become strategic if states have common borders) and would be absolutely insensitive to losses (even a loss of a few million of the servicemen would be acceptable for China). Such a war would be more horrible than the World War II. It would require from our state maximal tension, universal mobilization and complete accumulation of the army military hardware, up to the last tank or a plane, in a single direction (we would have to forget such "trifles" like Talebs and Basaev, but this does not guarantee success either). Massive nuclear strikes on basic military forces and cities of China would finally be the only way out, what would exhaust Russia's armament completely. We have not got another set of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-based missiles, whereas the general forces would be extremely exhausted in the border combats. In the long run, even if the aggression would be stopped after the majority of the Chinese are killed, our country would be absolutely unprotected against the "Chechen" and the "Balkan" variants both, and even against the first frost of a possible nuclear winter. An aforementioned prospect is, undoubtedly, rather disagreeable and we would not like to believe it can be true. However, it is a realistic prospect - just like a war against NATO or Islamic extremists.

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2NC China Turn---XT Link

Rising food prices decrease Chinese poverty Patrice Hill, The Washington Times, June 2, 2008, High prices not all bad; Developing nations provide materials, LexisNexis
Rising food prices clearly helped lift the incomes and living standards of poor people in China and India, the two countries with the biggest concentrations of poor people in the world, most of whom live in rural areas, said Sandra Polaski, author of the Carnegie study. "The large reduction in poverty in China since 1978 was based primarily on better incomes in rural areas, attributable mainly to higher prices for food," she said. Also in India, which has the largest number of poor living on less than $2 a day, the poorest households saw the biggest gains from increasing rice prices.

High food prices decrease Chinese poverty and income inequality Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow @ Wolfensohn Center for Development, July 29, 2008, The Proposition's opening statement
The Economist, http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=article&debate_id=10&story_id=11829062
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has just completed a study including the three countries with the largest rural populations in the world: India, China and Indonesia.Consider India, which has a long history of subsidising agricultural input and output prices. According to the ADB, this has led to a system which is unproductive, financially unsustainable, and environmentally destructive; (it) also accentuates inequality among rural Indian states. Higher world food prices might be just the push needed by India, along with many other countries, to persuade it to reform its agricultural pricing system and provide new opportunities for its desperate farmers. The ADB report also analyses China in some detail. It concludes that rural

households in China should enjoy a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty as a result of high food prices. Although some urban households will be made worse off, these are the same households which have seen steady growth in wages in the last few years and have a middle-class living standard. In fact, a short while ago many analysts claimed that the greatest risk to Chinas development was the growing gap between income levels in urban and rural areas. With todays food prices, that problem has receded.

higher food prices key to resolving rich poor gap in china Kharas 8 (Homi, sr. fellow @ the Brookings Institute, July 29, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0729_food_prices_kharas.aspx)
The ADB report also analyses China in some detail. It concludes that rural households in China should enjoy a significant reduction in the incidence of poverty as a result of high food prices. Although some urban households will be made worse off, these are the same households which have seen steady growth in wages in the last few years and have a middle-class living standard . In fact, a short while ago many analysts claimed that the greatest risk to Chinas development was the growing gap between income levels in urban and rural areas. With todays food prices, that problem has receded.

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2NC China Turn---Rich/Poor Gap --> Instability

rich poor gap leads to chinese instability Brunei Times 8 (March 6, pg. http://www.bt.com.bn/en/international_business/2008/03/06/rich_poor_gap_could_lead_to_more_strife)
A WIDENING rich-poor gap in countries around the world could lead to a rise in class conflicts, former World Bank president James Wolfensohn said here yesterday. Despite sharp growth in countries like China and India, the absolute number of poor in the world was still growing, particularly in Africa, he told a public forum in the Philippine capital. Fifteen years ago, there were about five billion poor people in the world a number that "will grow to eight billion people in the next five years", he said. The increasing income disparity between nations and within their borders "will ensure you will have growing conflicts between the rich and the poor", he told business and civic leaders. Unlike in the past, the poor in
undeveloped countries were well-informed and knew about the comforts and jobs out of their reach.

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2NC China Turn---XT Impact

chinese instability risks world war 3 Plate 3 (Tom, UCLA professor, Straits Times, June 28, LN)
But, while China's prosperity may be good for Americans, is it necessarily the same for the totalitarians running China? After all, having created a runaway economic elephant, will the Communist Party leaders be able to stay in the saddle? Before long, the Chinese middle class alone may approach the size of the entire population of America. It will want more freedom, not less - bet on it. But imagine a China disintegrating - on its own, without neo-conservative or Central Intelligence Agency prompting, much less outright military invasion - because the economy (against all predictions) suddenly collapses. That would knock Asia into chaos. A massive flood of refugees would head for Indonesia and other places with poor border controls, which don't want them and can't handle them; some in Japan might lick their lips at the prospect of World War II Revisited and look to annex a slice of China. That would send Singapore and Malaysia - once occupied by Japan - into nervous breakdowns . Meanwhile, India might make a grab for Tibet, and Pakistan for Kashmir. Then you can say hello to World War III, Asia-style. That's why wise policy encourages Chinese stability, security and economic growth - the very direction the White House now seems to prefer.

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2AC China Turn---Poverty High

China sucks at poverty reduction Rediff Business 6/21 China has over 100 mn living below poverty line, http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-china-has-over-100mn-living-below-poverty-line/20120621.htm Calculated according to a new standard, China still has more than 100 million people living below the poverty line , official media here quoted him as saying while addressing the meeting at Rio de Janeiro. He said China faces an uphill journey in promoting sustainable development . "Moreover, pressure from resources and the environment continues to mount, and problems of unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development remain challenging. "Last year World Bank pegged China's below poverty line population who lived on less than $1.25 a day at about 150 million.

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High Food prices INCREASE the rate of poverty in China

China Post, 11 (Rising Food Prices threaten Asias poor, 4/27/11, http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/asia/asian-market/2011/04/27/300112/Risingfood.htm)

World food prices that surged 30 percent in the first two months of the year threaten to push millions of Asians into extreme poverty and cut economic growth, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said Tuesday. The surging prices translated into domestic food inflation of 10 percent on average in many Asian economies, which could drive 64 million people into poverty, the bank said in a report, adding that it will also erode the living standards of families already living in poverty. Food prices have been driven higher by surging oil prices, production shortfalls due to bad weather and export restrictions by several food producing countries. If higher food and oil prices persist for the rest of the year, they could shave as much as 1.5 percentage points from economic growth in developing Asian countries, the report said.

2AC China turn- Rising Food prices bad

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Chinese Inflation increases because of high food prices

AFP, 12 (The Telegraph, China Inflation Rises as bad weather pushes up food prices, 4/9/12, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/chinabusiness/9194038/China-inflation-rises-as-bad-weather-pushes-up-food-prices.html) "CPI

was mainly pushed up by food prices, which resulted from an undersupply of vegetables due to relatively cold weather in March," Li think the downward trend will likely be unchanged, with the CPI bottoming out in July this year." Stock markets throughout Asia reacted negatively to Monday's figure which was slightly higher than analysts' expectations of 3.3pc. Tokyo fell 1.47pc and Shanghai dropped 0.9pc, while Seoul was down 1.57pc. Premier Wen Jiabao, speaking at the opening of the annual session of parliament in March, warned consumer prices remained high and said the government's aim was to keep inflation within four percent this year. Inflation has triggered social unrest in the past and senior leaders are anxious to keep prices of basic goods such as vegetables, meat and housing under control ahead of a once-a-decade power transition that begins later this year.
Huiyong, a Shanghai-based analyst at Shenyin Wanguo Securities said. "We

And Chinese Inflation will collapse their economy

Jones 2010 (Daryl, Chinese inflation might be out of control, http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/19/news/international/china.inflation.fortune/index.htm ) What worries Chinese economic planners considering these fixes is that rather than just slow down and control growth, they have the potential of "popping" the bubble, making Jim Chanos a happy man but also causing serious damage to China's export heavy economy. China would like to have it both ways right now: rapid growth and wealth creation, but also the safety of a properly valued, non-inflationary economy. That's a tough task: nearly every time we've seen this movie before, the ending is the same.

Chinese economic collapse leads to multiple scenarios of nuclear war

Plate 2003 [Tom (Professor at UCLA); Neo-Cons: A Bigger Risk to Bush than China; Straits Times; June 28; l/n nick] But imagine a China disintegrating -- on its own, without neo-con or CIA prompting, much less outright military invasion -- because the economy (against all predictions) suddenly collapses. That would knock Asia into chaos. Refugees by the gazillions would head for Indonesia and other poorly border-patrolled places, which don't want them and can't handle them; some in Japan might lick their chops for World War II Redux and look to annex a slice of China. That would send small but successful Singapore and Malaysia -- once Japanese colonies -- into absolute nervous breakdowns. India might make a grab for Tibet, and while it does, Pakistan for Kashmir. Say hello to World War III Asia-style!

2AC Chinese Inflation Turn

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1NC Brazil Turn

High food prices key to Brazils economy Patrice Hill, The Washington Times, June 2, 2008, High prices not all bad; Developing nations provide materials, LexisNexis
Brazil's star rising Perhaps the most notable rising star among developing countries getting a lift from the commodities boom is Brazil, the Latin American giant whose exports of everything from beef to oranges have turned it into an economic force to contend with this decade. The surge in food prices after years of stagnation has been especially kind to Brazil, which at the turn of the decade was a debt-ridden ward of the International Monetary Fund. Brazil's economy expanded by 5.4 percent in 2007 - the fastest rate in three years - and its exports have tripled since 2003 amid booming global demand for steel, iron-ore, soybeans, orange juice and sugar. With a recent major discovery of oil off the coast of Rio de Janiero, some analysts think Brazil may soon become a major exporter of oil as well. Brazil's record commodity exports have bolstered its revenues and reserves to the point that it shed its external debts and became a net creditor to the world in January, prompting Wall Street ratings agencies to raise the nation's credit rating above junk status - a fitting symbol for the country's meteoric rise. The growing incomes and rising opportunities for people in Brazil and other commodity-rich countries have raised living standards and enabled consumers to purchase more from abroad, causing imports of all kinds to leap by 172 percent to $6 trillion in those nations between 2000 and 2007, said Joseph P. Quinlan, chief market strategist at Bank of America Corp. "The penchant to consume is gaining traction globally, most notably in developing nations," he said. "Going to the mall on Saturday afternoon is just as popular in Bangkok and Sao Paulo as it is in Boston and San Antonio."

Brazil is key to the global economy Property Wire, 03 May 2008, Brazil tipped to be major world economic power, http://www.propertywire.com/news/southamerica/brazil-tipped-to-be-major-world-economic-power-20080503906.html Sam Zell, chief executive of Chicago Tribune and chairman and president of Equity Group Investments LLC, believes Brazil ticks all the right boxes. He said Brazil's large population of 180 million people, highly-trained work force, and array of crops and natural resources has made it largely self-sufficient. 'I'd buy Brazil,' Zell told the Milken Institute Global Conference. 'It has the chance 30 years from now of being a bigger economic power than China.' Goldman Sachs is also tipping Brazil for big things although on a longer timescale than Zell. The investment bank believes Brazil is on course to be the 5th largest economy in the world by 2050.

Nuclear war Royal 10 Jedediah Royal, Director of Cooperative Threat Reduction at the U.S. Department of Defense, 2010, Economic Integration, Economic Signaling and
the Problem of Economic Crises, in Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal and Political Perspectives, ed. Goldsmith and Brauer, p. 213-215 Less intuitive is how periods of economic decline may increase the likelihood of external conflict. Political science literature has contributed a moderate degree of attention to the impact of economic decline and the security and defense behavior of interdependent states. Research in this vein has been considered at systemic, dyadic and national levels. Several notable contributions follow. First, on the systemic level, Pollins (2008) advances Modelski and Thompsons (1996) work on leadership cycle theory, finding that rhythms in the global economy are associated with the rise and fall of a pre-eminent power and the often bloody transition from one pre-eminent leader to the next. As such, exogenous shocks such as economic crisis could usher in a redistribution of relative power (see also Gilpin, 1981) that leads to uncertainty about power balances, increasing the risk of miscalculation (Fearon, 1995). Alternatively, even a relatively certain redistribution of power could lead to a permissive environment for conflict as a rising power may seek to challenge a declining power (Werner, 1999). Seperately, Pollins (1996) also shows that global economic cycles combined with parallel leadership cycles impact the likelihood of conflict among major, medium and small powers, although he suggests that the causes and connections between global economic conditions and security conditions remain unknown. Second, on a dyadic level, Copelands (1996, 2000) theory of trade

expectations suggests that future expectation of trade is a significant variable in understanding economic conditions and security behavious of states. He argues that interdependent states are likely to gain pacific benefits from trade so long as they have an optimistic view of future trade relations , However, if the expectations of future trade decline , particularly for difficult to replace items such as energy resources, the likelihood for conflict increases, as states will be inclined to use force to gain access to those resources. Crisis could potentially be the trigger for decreased trade expectations either on its own or because it triggers protectionist moves by interdependent states. Third, others have considered the link between economic decline and external armed conflict at a national level. Blomberg and Hess (2002) find a strong correlation between internal conflict and external conflict, particularly during periods of economic downturn. They write, The linkages between internal and external conflict and prosperity are strong and mutually reinforcing. Economic conflict tends to
spawn internal conflict, which in turn returns the favor. Moreover, the presence of a recession tends to amplify the extent to which international and external conflict self-reinforce each other. (Blomberg & Hess, 2002. P. 89) Economic decline has been linked with an increase in the likelihood of terrorism (Blomberg, Hess, & Weerapana, 2004), which has the capacity to spill across borders and lead to external tensions. Furthermore, crises generally reduce the popularity of a sitting government. Diversionary theory suggests that, when facing unpopularity arising from economic decline, sitting

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governments have increase incentives to fabricate external military conflicts to create a rally around the flag effect. Wang
(1996), DeRouen (1995), and Blomberg, Hess, and Thacker (2006) find supporting evidence showing that economic decline and use of force are at least indirectly correlated. Gelpi (1997), Miller (1999), and Kisangani and Pickering (2009) suggest that the tendency towards diversionary tactics are greater for democratic states than autocratic states, due to the fact that democratic leaders are generally more susceptible to being removed from office due to lack of domestic support. DeRouen (2000) has provided evidence showing that periods of weak economic performance in the United States, and thus weak Presidential popularity, are statistically linked to an increase in the use of force. In summary, recent economic scholarship positively correlated economic integration with an increase in the frequency of economic crises, whereas political science scholarship links economic decline with external conflict at systemic, dyadic and national levels. This implied connection between integration, crisis and armed conflict has not featured prominently in the economicsecurity debate and deserves more attention.

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2NC Brazil Turn---UQ

Brazils economy is growing Bernama 6/21 Malaysian National News Agency 2012 Brazils Central Bank Forecast Strong Rebound In 2013
http://www.bernama.com/bernama/v6/newsworld.php?id=674707 SAO PAULO, June 21 (BERNAMA-NNN-MERCOPRESS) Brazils

economy will be expanding in the beginning of next year at the fastest pace since the last quarter of 2010, said central bank President Alexandre Tombini . The worlds biggest emerging economy after China will grow more than 4.5% in the first quarter of 2013 from a year earlier, Tombini said at an event in Sao Paulo. Growth will accelerate to a 4% pace in the last quarter of this year, he said. President Dilma Rousseffs administration has reduced the benchmark interest rate to a record low, cut taxes and taken measures to boost credit in a bid to shore up economic growth. Record low unemployment will help sustain domestic demand, spurring a rebound from the first quarter, when Brazil posted its weakest year-over-year economic performance since the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. bankruptcy in 2008. Cosumption is what will propagate growth, stimulating new private investments that will support sustainable growth over the next years, Tombini said. Important stimulus measures that have already been introduced havent fully taken hold yet. The economy expanded 0.75% in the first
quarter of 2012 from a year earlier, its worst performance since a 1.47% contraction in the third quarter of 2009, the national statistics agency said. Tombini said Brazil has room to boost economic growth by fuelling consumption without threatening its 4.5% inflation target. Inflation slowed to 4.99% in the 12 months through May, down from 7.31% in Sept, according to the statistics agency. Its import to highlight, at this moment that inflation continues to slow and move toward the target Tombini said.

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2NC Brazil Turn---KT Econ

Brazils economy is key to the global economy- better positioned than China Claus Vistesen, macroeconomist- Copenhagen Business School, May 20, 2008, Brazil's Economy - Not Emerging Anymore?
http://globaleconomydoesmatter.blogspot.com/2008/05/brazils-economy-not-emerging-anymore.html Brazil is interesting; not only because of its fabulous nature, its rhythmic and musical heritage, and its (alleged) repository of beautiful women but also because of the position it commands in the global economy, the latter topic being the focus of this note. Consequently, Brazil's economy represents an excellent point of departure for the evaluation of many highly strung discourses in the context of the global economy and her financial markets. These discourses include the debate on decoupling/re-coupling, global inflation, Bretton Woods II/global imbalances, and global liquidity/SWFs just to name a few. In what follows, I will try to present an argument to explain why it is that I am so very constructive on the upside potential for Brazil's economy, while at the same time trying to untangle (as I have tried so many times before) some of the above mentioned areas of discussion and debate in the context of the global economy and Brazil.

Perhaps the most telling sign of Brazil's increasing status as a global force to be reckoned with was the recent announcement by Brazil's National Petroleum Agency (ANP) of the discovery of a new oil field (Carioca) which potentially holds as much as 33 billion barrels of oil - enough to supply every refinery in the U.S. for six years - making it the third-largest oil field ever discovered (only Saudi Arabia's Ghawar and Kuwait's Burgan fields are bigger - Ghawar reputedly holds as much as 83 billion barrels of crude, while Burgan is claimed to have up to 72 billion). Coupled with the
discovery last year of the Tupi field - which has an estimated reservoir of between 5 and 8 billion barrels of oil, and could itself produce output at the not to be sneezed at rate of a million barrels a day - this is very likely to fast forward Brazil rapidly up through the ranks of global oil producing nations. This new found oil prowess even prompted the president Lula da Silva recently to suggest that Brazil enter OPEC. Such oil discoveries come at a near-perfect time for Brazil who thus seems set not only to enjoy the upward march of commodities such as sugar, rice, beef, soya, oranges, iron ore etc but now also the black gold. Of course, the set up of a proper supply chain in the context of oil production takes time and it will take at least one year before we see the first barrels rolling in from Tupi not to speak of Carioca. However, Petrobras (Petroleo Brasileiro SA) is not sitting idle and the effects of Brazil's oil discoveries are already rippling through the market. Extraordinary evidence of this was delivered in the context of Petrobras' demand for the world's deepest-drilling offshore rigs to put action behind the recent discoveries. Petrobras is rumored to be hawking as much as 80% of global capacity as a function of the company's demand for deep drilling rigs and given the fact that these things don't exactly come off the shelf with the same ease as flat screens it will take some time for supply to respond to the increased demand thus pushing up rent for these vessels. In many ways, as Edward also hints in a recent

article the oil discoveries mentioned above represent a good initial image of Brazil's growing role in the global economy. Petrobras thus projects investments to the tune of 112 billion USD between 2008 and 2012 which, if realized, are sure to calm down even the
most careful treasurer in the Brazilian finance ministry. Thus assured of Brazil's current economic potential we should take a few steps back and have a look at the historical economic performance of Brazil, how it got to where it is today and where it is likely to go in the future? First, why not take a glance at some charts? It does not take much of a macroeconomist to see how the stories above tell a story of rapid economic development. Obviously, it is

difficult to make solid conclusions solely on the basis of growth figures but as can readily be observed Brazil is moving up in the world. Especially, the figures for PPP adjusted GDP are interesting since they show how Brazil is steadily and unrelentlessly creating an ever larger share of global GDP. The inflation figure also shows that almost a decade's worth of rampant inflation has now receded to much more comfortable levels. As for the allure of Brazilian asset markets the last figure just about sums it up. Over the three year period a US investor investing 1 mill USD the 16th of May 2005 would have been able to walk away with just shy of 4.5 mill USD the corresponding date 2008 (note that the exchange rate is with our US friend here too). Of course, such examples are not kosher as we are not looking at risk (e.g. standard deviation or global beta) but the rate of expansion in the main stock index is still quite remarkable, even border lining on a bubble if you look at the growth rate alone. This performance is, of course, to some extent shared by the other usual suspects who make up the notorious BRIC group, as originally coined by Goldman Sachs. I would not want to take anything away from GS here but simply note that the BRIC narrative is not exactly fitting for what is happening in the global economy. It is indeed true that the four economies are amongst the fastest growing economies of the world but they are very difficult in terms of structural setup which tends to blur the analysis. Specifically, I would distinguish between Brazil, India, and China on one side and Russia on the other. Soon in fact China may join Russia's side of the fence if the inflation bonfire currently experienced proves inextinguishable.

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2AC Brazil Turn

Brazilian economy slowing Hanks 6/5 (Douglas, Brazilian economy losing steam, 2012, http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/04/2832867/brazilian-economy-losing-steam.html)
The Western Hemispheres economic darling may be losing its shine. Brazils

economy has slowed considerably in recent months, according to the latest statistics. Government figures show g Brazils economy grew only .2 percent in the first quarter of 2012, compared to a meager 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011. In a report issued Monday, Well Fargo pinned much of the problem on a plunge in the South American giants farming and cattle industries, as a weakening global economy cuts into demand. Manufacturing continues to grow, but the gains are slowing. The best performer in Brazil: government spending, which increased 1.5 percent. That means the public sector is preventing an even worse slowdown. Consumer spending grew by 1 percent in the first quarter. A slowing economy has sent the real down 21 percent against the dollar since the summer from 1.58 per dollar to $1.98`, according to Wells Fargo.

Consumer-led growth model running out of steam hurts their economy Colitt 6/1 (Raymond, Weaker Brazil Economy Raises Doubts About Credit-Led Growth, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-01/weakening-brazil-economy-raises-doubts-about-credit-ledgrowth.html)
Brazils economy grew less than analysts expected in the first quarter, reinforcing signs that its consumer-led growth model, a magnet for investment over the past decade, is running out of steam. Gross domestic product expanded 0.2 percent in the first quarter and 0.8 percent from the same period a year ago, the national statistics agency said in a report today. Growth in the first three months of the year was lower than expected by all but one of 50 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, whose median forecast was for a 0.5 percent expansion. While economists expect the pace of growth to accelerate in coming months, they forecast the second-largest developing economy after China will grow less than 3 percent for the second consecutive year in 2012, trailing the rest of Latin America. Consumer demand driven by credit expansion, the strategy pursued by two successive presidents, is faltering even as the government cuts taxes and lowers borrowing costs to stoke spending by the 40 million Brazilians who rose out of poverty from 2003-2011. Retail sales barely rose in February and March, while vehicle sales fell 11 percent in April as the default rate among tapped-out consumers rose to 5.8 percent. Brazil had a great decade and now its going into a slowdown, Michael Shaoul, chairman of Marketfield Asset Management, said by telephone from New York before the report was released. People owe a lot and own too much stuff. BRICS Faltering Investors are concerned that some of Brazils fastest- growing sectors will lose steam. The MSCI Brazil Consumer Discretionary Index of construction and retail companies has plunged 13 percent this year compared with a 5 percent fall for the Bovespa (IBOV) stock index. A slowdown in mortgage lending, which grew by 43 percent over the past 12 months, is a particular risk to the housing market, Shaoul said. As Europes debt crisis has deepened, causing $3.9 trillion in losses in world stock markets since May, the government has abandoned its goal of boosting growth to 4.5 percent from last years 2.7 percent. Economists in the latest weekly central bank survey cut their forecast for 2012 growth for
the third straight week to 2.99 percent. Other emerging markets that have been powering the world economy since the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2008 are also losing steam. India reported first quarter growth of 5.3 percent yesterday, the least in nine years. China this year will expand 8.2 percent, its slowest pace in 13 years, according to a Bloomberg News survey of analysts. Debt Burden Nearly

a quarter of Brazilian households, particularly those in lower-income brackets, are over-indebted, according to MB Associados, a Sao Paulo-based economic consulting firm. That means they spend more than 30 percent of total income on servicing debt, compared with an average 10.9 percent for all U.S. households, the firm said.

Brazilian econ sucks Bloomberg 6/4 Brazils economic growth slows http://gulfnews.com/business/economy/brazil-s-economic-growth-slows-1.1031340
Brazil's real fell to a one-week low and yields on interest-rate futures contracts dropped after reports showed the nation's economic growth was slower than forecast. Traders are projecting that central bank President Alexandre Tombini will reduce the target lending rate to as low as 7.75 per cent by the end of August, the futures yields indicate. The real fell for a third straight month in May, its longest losing streak since February 2009. The economy is stuck, Italo Lombardi, a Latin America economist at Standard Chartered Bank,

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said by phone from New York. The GDP data reinforce the trend of the central bank to cut rates. The real declined 0.9 per cent to
2.0401 per US dollar after touching 2.0447, the weakest level since May 24. It fell 2.6 per cent this week and 6.5 per cent in May. Yields on the interest-rate futures contract due in January 2014 fell 4 basis points, or 0.04 per centage point, to 8.23 per cent, extending their weekly decrease to 29 basis points. Brazil's

economy expanded 0.2 per cent in the first quarter from the previous three months, compared with the 0.5 per cent median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg. Gross domestic product grew 0.8 per cent from a year earlier, falling short of the 1.3 per cent median projection. The worsening global outlook and speculation that Brazil's central bank will make deeper cuts in borrowing costs helped drive the real's depreciation, according to Lombardi.

Brazilian economy is resilient LA Times 8 Brazil unfazed by U.S. market crisis http://articles.latimes.com/2008/sep/22/world/fg-brazil22 9/22
But as the U.S. financial system seemed to teeter on collapse, few here seemed too concerned . Like other emerging countries that learned the bitter lessons of the 1990s, Brazils economy is much stronger this time around, more diversified and better able to withstand global shocks including the economic ups and downs of its powerful neighbor to the north. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in fact felt confident enough Friday to take a few pokes at the United States, saying in effect that in terms of financial crises, the shoe is on the other meaning American foot. A few years ago, if the United States coughed, Brazil got pneumonia, Lula said at a gathering in the northern city of Mossoro. Now we have diversified, we dont depend so much on one or two countries . Ask [President] Bush about the crisis because its his, not mine. Brazils growing appeal to investors from around the world is a convincing endorsement of his confidence. In addition to Germanys ThyssenKrupp, two other international steel companies, Baosteel of China and Dongkuk of South Korea, are building multibillion-dollar steel plants in partnership with Brazilian iron ore producer Vale. They are investing to produce steel for export to Asian

markets but also to supply Brazilian manufacturers struggling to meet accelerating domestic demand for motor vehicles, appliances, housing and public works. They are at the vanguard of foreign companies rushing in to position themselves for what many see as a structural change in Brazils economy. That change, already underway, centers on the emergence of a middle class, booming consumption and reduced poverty.

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2NC Arab Spring Scenario

High food prices key to Arab Spring revolts Senator Richard Lugar 11 ADDRESS AT THE NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION Congressional Press Release Dec 13 lexis
In recent years, we have seen two clear examples of how hunger can lead to instability and conflict. The first was in 2008, when a spike in global food prices sparked disturbances in many countries around the globe. By one count, there were food riots, sometimes quite violent, in 15 countries in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. More recently, some have argued that the upheavals in the Middle East have their roots in high food prices. Following the self-immolation death of a Tunisian produce vendor, the subsequent

pro-democracy demonstrations included protestors waiving baguettes because grain prices had reached intolerably high levels. I believe it is more than a coincidence that in December 2010, when the Arab Spring began, an index of global food prices had reached a record high, even higher than in 2008. An article in Foreign Affairs magazine earlier this year noted that a list of the world`s major wheat importers in 2010 includes of number of Middle Eastern countries where governments are fragile or have already fallen. They include Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Libya and Tunisia.