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Cites
Entry
Date
00- Wiki Glitches
Tournament: any | Round: 7 | Opponent: you | Judge: all So it turns out some of my cites aren't uploading, but the open-source is available or some open-sources aren't uploading but the cites are.
Contact me if you want anything specific.
10/16/21
00-Broken Interps
Tournament: Life | Round: Quads | Opponent: trix | Judge: you Interpretation: Debaters must disclose all constructive speech docs open source with highlighting on the NDCA LD wiki within an hour after debating.
11/21/21
00-Contact Information
Tournament: All | Round: Finals | Opponent: 1 | Judge: All Hey Im Emerson (He/him).
email: emersonskang@gmail.com
number:646-770-6577
Message me about docs if there is a problem and ill try to send them.
Lmk about trigger warnings. Lmk about Pronouns as well. Ill default to they/them otherwise
If there is anything I can do to accommodate your disclosure practices, lmk and I will be happy to comply to a reasonable extent.
Please tell me if there are any interps you would like me to meet before round and I will be happy to comply to a reasonable extent.
11/21/21
00-Contact Information
Tournament: All | Round: Finals | Opponent: 1 | Judge: All Hey Im Emerson (He/him).
email: emersonskang@gmail.com
number:646-770-6577
Message me about docs if there is a problem and ill try to send them.
Lmk about trigger warnings. Lmk about Pronouns as well. Ill default to they/them otherwise
If there is anything I can do to accommodate your disclosure practices, lmk and I will be happy to comply to a reasonable extent.
Please tell me if there are any interps you would like me to meet before round and I will be happy to comply to a reasonable extent.
11/21/21
00-DebateDrills
Tournament: All | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All I’m on DebateDrills - the following URL has our roster, conflict, policy, code of conduct, relevant team policies, and harassment/bullying complaint form: https://www.debatedrills.com/debate-club?ld
10/16/21
NOVDEC- Agriculture Aff V2
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harrison MB | Judge: Kevin Cheng US climate action specifically spills over and spurs global climate action. Geman 6/7/21 National Journal Energy and Environment Correspondent, reporter for Axios, Ben, “The global stakes of Biden's infrastructure negotiations.” https://www.axios.com/biden-infrastructure-bill-climate-change-87b70d16-fdec-4c84-84a6-e7532c592f15.html The infrastructure drama enveloping Capitol Hill could spill onto the global climate stage. Why it matters: Major new U.S. investments and policies could help spur other nations to take more aggressive and tangible steps to cut emissions. But failure to steer major new initiatives through Congress could hinder the White House diplomatic posture as the U.N. conference looms. State of play: The White House is negotiating with Republicans amid all kinds of uncertainty over whether Democrats can pass legislation without GOP backing. President Biden has proposed major investments in electric vehicles, grid tech, mass transit, clean energy tax incentives and many other initiatives. The negotiations with Republicans — who object to the plan's steep price tag and expansive definition of infrastructure — come ahead of November's critical United Nations climate summit. What they're saying: "Because of the importance of American leadership on climate, the rest of the world is definitely watching what happens on Capitol Hill," said the Environmental Defense Fund's Nathaniel Keohane. Keohane, who leads EDF's climate program, said major U.S. investments will bolster the country's economy and competitiveness. But they're also consequential internationally, he said. "The more the U.S. can demonstrate leadership — not only in the ambition of its targets but in the ambition of its implementation and the seriousness of its implementation — the more likely we are to see the rest of the world stepping into its ambition and accelerating its own climate action," he said. Catch up fast: In April the White House set a voluntary target under the Paris Agreement of cutting U.S. emissions by 50 below 2005 levels by 2030.But that's much harder to achieve absent Capitol Hill approval of new investments and incentives. The Atlantic Council's Margaret Jackson said Biden's climate initiatives thus far have borne some fruit, pointing to several nations strengthening their Paris targets. But Jackson, who has written about the importance of congressional action, also tells Axios: "U.S. allies and partners are still somewhat skeptical in terms of how much this administration can really accomplish, and will it be lasting." Definition of unconditional right to strike: NLRB 85 National Labor Relations Board; “Legislative History of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947: Volume 1,” Jan 1985; https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=7o1tA__v4xwCandrdid=book-7o1tA__v4xwCandrdot=1 Edited for gendered language As for the so-called absolute or unconditional right to strike—there are no absolute rights that do not have their corresponding responsibilities. Under our American Anglo-Saxon system, each individual is entitled to the maximum of freedom, provided however (and this provision is of first importance), his their freedom has due regard for the rights and freedoms of others. The very safeguard of our freedoms is the recognition of this fundamental principle. I take issue very definitely with the suggestion that there is an absolute and unconditional right to concerted action (which after all is what the strike is) which endangers the health and welfare of our people in order to attain a selfish end.
1AR – T Just Gov
CI: Affs ought to debate what a just government would do in a specific country, not that the specific country is a just government. We meet since a just government is evaluating whether the plan is a good idea in the US.
Just is a question of being correctness Merriam Webster, ND, Just defintion, URL: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/just, KR Definition of just (Entry 1 of 3) 1a: having a basis in or conforming to fact or reason : REASONABLE had just reason to believe he was in danger b: conforming to a standard of correctness
1 Ground – no gov is completely just since there’s always a more utopian way to act – force them to provide a caselist that meets their definition. Even if they do, it’ll be on same arbitrary standard which fails to create a commom stasis point . Answers their net benefit and proves the opposite is impossible. That’s bad – A ) If no governments can be just then we have no ground – making it unfair + impossible to affrim b) That kills country specific aff grounds which is key on this topic because every government e has different protections for workers. There is no unifying advantage –
2 Logic – no gov can be just because the def is vague and can’t explain tradeoffs 3 Grammar – the word just means that the government acts just, so all it asks is whether the plan is a just idea 4 Research. Our model incentivies going deeper on the topic through country specifc 5 Reaosnability – good is good enough should control your interpretation of this debate. Anything else kills substance since a small vio is sufficent to stake the round on which o/ws since we only have 2 months of the topic Yes aff rvis- all the reasons still apply. + cant just call me racists and walk away
CP- perm
3rd- no link The literal reasons unions dont form is cuz of the squo
ADV 1: Sustainable Agriculture Population expansion requires farmland expansion to meet food demand—we are on the brink of prohibitive ecological costs from deforestation Tian et al 21-- Tian, Zhixi principal investigator, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and former research geneticist at Purdue, et al. "Designing future crops: challenges and strategies for sustainable agriculture." The Plant Journal 105.5 (2021): 1165-1178. (AG DebateDrills)
From the perspective of human evolution, each period of rapid population growth, such as during the Neolithic agricultural revolution, which began at about 8000 BC, the hydro agricultural or irrigation revolutions in the Near East, which began about 3000 BC, and the medieval and modern agricultural periods, which began about 1000 AD, benefited from an advance in agriculture (Taiz, 2013; Wallace et al., 2018). The recent rapid population growth during the past 300 years, in contrast, mainly resulted from the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain about 1760. The Industrial Revolution greatly increased the range of human activities and accelerated farmland expansion. In 1700, it was reported that nearly 95 of Earth’s ice-free land consisted of wildlands and semi-natural anthromes; however, by 2000, 55 of these regions were used as arable land (Figure 1a, data from https://ourworldindata.org/). The Industrial Revolution also gave birth to new technologies and production systems in agriculture, such as the application of larger irrigation systems, and more fertilizers and pesticides. In the 1960s, semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties were introduced. These semi-dwarf crops exhibit beneficial characteristics, such as improved response to fertilizer input, lodging resistance and enhanced light utilization (Hedden, 2003; Wallace et al., 2018). Along with the fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation systems made possible by the Industrial Revolution, semi-dwarf crops were quickly adopted and resulted in a significant increase in total grain production globally. This big leap in agriculture was known as the ‘Green Revolution’ (Khush, 2001). Indeed, statistical data have revealed that the average daily food supply per person (in terms of calories) has doubled since the middle of the 19th century (Figure 1b, data from https://ourworld indata.org/). It is estimated that the world population will rise to more than 9 billion by 2050 (Alexandratos, 1999; Cassman, 1999), and at that time we will need at least 60 more food than is consumed by humans today. Moreover, our population will continuously increase, reaching over 11 billion by 2100 (Figure 1a, data from https://ourworldindata.org/). How to feed the increasing population is a challenge facing the whole world (Tilman et al., 2001; Godfray et al., 2010; Foley et al., 2011; Wallace et al., 2018). A simple solution to feed a population of 9 billion is to constantly turn wild habitats into farmland. However, this type of expansion is unrealistic as most of the world’s icefree and non-barren land area has been exhausted, and much of the rest is unlikely to sustain high yields (Cassman, 1999). More importantly, intact forests have been known to play essential roles in protecting the environment, such as storing fresh water, decreasing flooding and regenerating fertile soils. Clearing of forests will result in prohibitive ecological costs, such as loss of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. It was reported that, due to agriculture expansion, 30 of all plant species will become extinct (Taiz, 2013). The destruction of tropical forests releases about 1.1 9 1012 tons of carbon per year, which accounts for 12 of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions (Friedlingstein et al., 2010).
Biod loss causes extinction – outweighs neg disads and is a threat multiplier Torres 16 Phil Biologist, conservationist, science advocate and educator. 2 years based in Amazon rainforest, now exploring science around the world. “Biodiversity Loss: An Existential Risk Comparable to Climate Change” http://futureoflife.org/2016/05/20/biodiversity-loss/. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the two greatest existential threats to human civilization stem from climate change and nuclear weapons. Both pose clear and present dangers to the perpetuation of our species, and the increasingly dire climate situation and nuclear arsenal modernizations in the United States and Russia were the most significant reasons why the Bulletin decided to keep the Doomsday Clock set at three minutes before midnight earlier this year. But there is another existential threat that the Bulletin overlooked in its Doomsday Clock announcement: biodiversity loss. This phenomenon is often identified as one of the many consequences of climate change, and this is of course correct. But biodiversity loss is also a contributing factor behind climate change. For example, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere reduces the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by plants, a natural process that mitigates the effects of climate change. So the causal relation between climate change and biodiversity loss is bidirectional. Furthermore, there are myriad phenomena that are driving biodiversity loss in addition to climate change. Other causes include ecosystem fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, oxygen depletion caused by fertilizers running off into ponds and streams, overfishing, human overpopulation, and overconsumption. All of these phenomena have a direct impact on the health of the biosphere, and all would conceivably persist even if the problem of climate change were somehow immediately solved. Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest decreases natural mitigation of CO2 and destroys the habitats of many endangered species. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. 48 of the world’s primates are threatened with extinction. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hageland CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.
The only yet extremely effective solution is innovation that leads to more crop yield—there’s multiple possibilities for innovation Tian et al 21-- Tian, Zhixi principal investigator, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and former research geneticist at Purdue, et al. "Designing future crops: challenges and strategies for sustainable agriculture." The Plant Journal 105.5 (2021): 1165-1178. (AG DebateDrills)
The first straightforward strategy for designing future crops that meet sustainable agriculture requirements is to improve the following aspects of current well-cultivated crops. Increasing yield. It is estimated that the yields of major crops need to increase at a rate of 2.4 per year to meet the food supply demand by 2050. However, the current growth rates of the four major crops, maize (Zea mays), rice (Oryza sativa), wheat (Triticum aestivum), and soybeans (Glycine max), are only approximately half of this anticipated rate (Ray et al., 2013). The development of new varieties with high yield potential that can fill this gap is the foremost mission of the Future Crops Design project. In fact, in a trial, it was reported that a super-high-yield rice variety could produce one- to threefold more grains under optimal conditions than in normal paddy fields (Liu et al., 2020a). Improving nutritional quality. Although the amount of food supply has been significantly improved in the last half-century, changes in human lifestyle and food consumption have resulted in a phenomenon called hidden hunger (Nair et al., 2016). For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa and America, about 17–30 of children under the age of 5 years have an inadequate daily intake of Vitamin A (Harjes et al., 2008; Haskell, 2012). It has been reported that about two billion people are suffering from a chronic deficiency of micronutrients (WHO, 2008), a new threat to human health. Moreover, the incidence of type-2 diabetes, obesity and colon disease has markedly increased in the past decade (Zhou et al., 2016). Hence, the second mission of the Future Crops Design project is to generate crops with higher/balanced nutritional quality or specialized metabolites using metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches (Francis et al., 2017; Martin and Li, 2017; Sweetlove et al., 2017; Vasconcelos et al., 2017). Increasing agricultural resource use efficiency. It was reported that 17 of arable land has lost productivity since 1945 due to inappropriate agriculture management (Oldeman, 1994). In fact, nutrient-use efficiencies of today’s crops only reach 30–50 for nitrogen fertilizer (Cassman et al., 2002) and 45 for phosphorus fertilizer (Smil, 2000). Moreover, fresh water has become a limiting factor for agriculture in many areas in the world. It is estimated that about 2800 km3 of fresh water per year is used for agricultural irrigation, and that crop production decreases by 20 without irrigation (Siebert and Doll, 2010). Therefore, to reduce agricultural inputs and environmental burdens, we should aim to develop high nutrient and water-use efficiency crops without yield penalty.
The reason innovation isn’t happening is lack of profit incentive—there needs to be an incentive for risk taking Mackenzie 20—Conway Mackenzie; Harve Light Managing Director; Innovation in Agriculture: Why is it so slow?; Shale Magazine; February 3 2020; https://shalemag.com/innovation-in-agriculture-why-is-it-so-slow/. (AG DebateDrills)
Innovation is not a new concept in the agriculture industry. As an example, self-driving farm equipment has been around for years and well ahead of the auto industry. This has been a major factor in improving yields and reducing input costs as planting accuracy has improved. However, further automation is needed to improve operating efficiency along the supply chain. Both farmers and processors face significant labor cost increases due to minimum wage hikes that will continue for the next several years. These increases have little positive effect as both farmers and processors still struggle to find people willing to do the work. Robotics will play a significant role in addressing this issue. Whether it’s picking crops in the field or automating functions at the processor, business owners are looking for ways to reduce their labor dependence. Sensor technology via the Internet of Things has also made significant inroads. These sensors improve farmer visibility into what is going on with their land and crops. This allows them to focus their resources to address known issues. Sensors also help processors maintain quality standards throughout their facilities. Sensor technology is also a major component in addressing another industry challenge, traceability. Today, consumers want to easily determine where their food came from. They want to know that it came from companies that believe in and use sustainable practices. In addition, regulators want to be able to pinpoint sources when food safety issues arise. Sensor technology collects the data needed to meet this need. The second part of the issue is harnessing all that data. There are several efforts in their infancy that work toward a data solution. One of the most advanced is blockchain technology. In simple terms, blockchain is a technology that allows for collection of data from all market participants in a single, secure repository. It will allow for an end to end supply chain trail of a single item. This technology will allow for better traceability by retailer, consumer and regulator which is being requested by the likes of Walmart. Eventually, it will also allow for better collaboration between all members of a particular supply chain. Today, the biggest hurdles to this innovation are the protocols or data formats. Companies in the industry need to know what data to collect and the form it should take. They will need a lot of help in putting these requirements all together. So, what’s holding innovation back? While there has been improvement, technological innovation remains slow compared to other industries. Two of the major causes are lack of connectivity and insufficient investment returns. Lack of connectivity is an issue based on the nature of the industry. Farming takes place in rural areas where internet access is spotty at best. This lack of connectivity hampers farmers from collecting data in the field. This results in an inability to make decisions in time to make a difference. Innovation is also inhibited by a lack of investment. Entrepreneurs and startups do not want to invest in developing solutions where they can’t see a clear path to a return on their capital. In agriculture, they can’t see an exit strategy which typically includes the sale of the company to a large industry supplier. For many years, the agriculture industry has been dominated by a few large input suppliers. These suppliers have been making good profits years and see no reason to take on innovation investment risk. Without these large players, startups have no incentive to risk their capital on new solutions. This has led to a very slow rate of development and innovation.
1AC — Plan
Plan text: The United States Government ought to recognize an unconditional right to strike for agricultural laborers by amending the National Labor Relations Act to extend the definition of ‘employee’ to include agricultural laborers.
Squo NLRA fails to protect farmer’s rights to strike – plan amends the NLRA to collectively bargain Reilly, 11, Penn State Law, “Agricultural Laborers: Their Inability to Unionize Under the National Labor Relations Act”, Penn State: Masters of Science, JD Law, URL: https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/aglaw/Publications_Library/Agricultural_Laborers.pdf, 2011 + since most recent citation is from then, KR The NLRA gives workers “freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing” in order to equalize the bargaining power between employers and employees in the hopes of limiting the interruptions to the free flow of commerce.10 The statute covers a large number of workers based on the broad definition of “employee,”11 but excludes from coverage all agricultural laborers.12 The NLRA does not define who these agricultural laborers are that are excluded from the right to organize, but rather Congress has instructed the National Labor Relations Boards (NLRB)13 in the annual Appropriations Act that in determining who is an agricultural laborer excluded from the NLRA, to rely on the definition of “agriculture” found in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).14 Agriculture in the FLSA is defined as “farming in all its branches ... and any practices ... performed by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations...”15 The definition also lists specific activities to further define what would specifically be considered agricultural work.16 Therefore, workers whose responsibilities are contained in the FLSA’s definition of “agriculture” are excluded from the right to organize and form unions under the NLRA. The reasoning behind this exclusion is somewhat vague, especially considering that the bill originally proposed in the Senate did not exclude agricultural laborers from the definition of “employee.”17 There is not much mentioned about the agricultural exclusion because of the statute’s primary focus on addressing problems in the industrial sector. There is, however, a debate from in the House addressing the agricultural laborer exemption,18 where an argument was made that agricultural laborers should be included because they needed the same protections as industrial workers. Agricultural labor issues were brought to light in 1935 after governmental investigations into child labor issues and the lack of clean water provided for such workers.19 In response, two possible reasons were briefly mentioned that may explain why agricultural laborers were excluded: first, in regions like the Midwest, farms are mostly family farms and should not be within the scope of the NLRA, and second there was a concern that Congress did not have jurisdiction over agricultural workers because it was questionable whether such workers were engaged in interstate commerce.20 Many commentators believe that it was the former argument that led to the exclusion of agricultural workers from protection under the NLRA. Another possible reason for this exclusion as presented by some commentators is that the larger farms lobbied to have their workers excluded from the NLRA.21 While not expressly stated, the most likely explanation is that Congress wanted to protect the family farmer from having to pay higher wages that unions would inevitably demand of the employers.22 Realizing that agriculture was important to the entire nation, Congress wanted to shield this industry from unionization, and wanted to protect the family farmer from having to pay what they could not afford. Congress did not think it necessary to equate the family farmer with big business. The broad definition of “agriculture” under the FLSA would seem to exclude from the NLRA any worker who is employed by any agricultural entity. This is not the case, however, because the Supreme Court has adopted a two-part test to determine if an employee is in fact an agricultural laborer excluded from the NLRA.23 An agricultural employee will be excluded from the right to organize if he or she is engaged in either primary or secondary farming. The Supreme Court has taken the FLSA definition of agriculture and essentially limited its application based on a strict application of the statutory language. Primary farming are those tasks specifically referred to in the statutory definition of “agriculture” such as “cultivation and tillage of the soil and dairying.”24 The rest of the definition is considered secondary farming, and therefore a worker is an agricultural laborer if the work performed is of the type that would be performed “by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations.”25 In one of the more recent cases to address the question of who is considered an agricultural employee, the Supreme Court in Holly Farms Corp. v. N.L.R.B. upheld the determination made by the NLRB that workers on live-haul chicken crews do not engage in agricultural labor and therefore are not subject to the agricultural exception from the NLRA.26 The responsibility of the live-haul crew is to enter the farms of independent contractors who raise chickens supplied by Holly Farms; the chickens are then caught and caged by nine chicken catchers, moved by a forklift operator onto a truck to be transported by a truck driver to the processing plant.27 These live-haul crews were not engaged in primary farming because primary farming would have been the actual raising of the poultry, which was the responsibility of the independent contractors, not the live- haul crews.28 The court then focused on whether these live-haul crews were engaged in secondary farming. In doing so, the court immediately found that that the work performed by the live-haul crews were not of the kind “performed by a farmer” because Holly Farms gave up its farmer status as soon as the chicks were delivered to independent contractors for raising.29 As a result of this determination, the truck drivers were not considered agricultural laborers and were therefore not part of the agricultural exception to the NLRA and were able to unionize.30 The court then looked to whether the chicken catchers and forklift operators were engaged in work “on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with” raising poultry.31 The Supreme Court found that neither the chicken catchers nor the forklift operators “worked on a farm” because the work these employees performed were part of Holly Farms’ poultry processing operations and was not of the type of work contemplated to be included in the statutory definition of “farming.”32 The Supreme Court adopted the reasoning of the NLRB in deciding that the catchers and forklift operators were not performing work “incident to or in conjunction with” the farming operations of the independent contractors.33 In doing so, the Supreme Court decided that it was more important to look at the status of the employer as a farmer rather than where the laborer carried out the responsibilities of the job he or she was hired to perform. Because, as previously determined, Holly Farms was not considered a farmer by the time the live- haul crews went in to catch the chickens, the catchers and the forklift operators were not engaged in secondary farming as defined in the FLSA.34 This meant that all the members of the live-haul crews were not agricultural laborers and therefore all had the right to organize under the NLRA. The Supreme Court limited the applicability of the definition of “agriculture” in Holly Farms and in doing so opened up the possibility that more workers employed by large, vertically integrated employers would be able to organize.35 By taking the approach to look at the status of the employer rather than where the work is performed, the Supreme Court broadened the already broad definition of “employee” under the NLRA. More employees working for these vertically integrated employers will be able to experience the protection of the NLRA that has been open to industrial workers since the act was first passed in 1935. The impact of the Holly Farms decision is for courts to engage in an in depth analysis before deciding whether a worker is an agricultural laborer not protected by the NLRA. Switching the focus to the status of the employer rather than where the employees are performing their responsibilities will ensure greater protection for workers and a broader reach of the NLRA. While the definition of “employee” has expanded to include some employees who are employed by agricultural employers, there is still the exception for agricultural laborers included in the statute and therefore there are still many workers who are unable to form unions. These may be the workers that need the most protection because they are the field workers who are subjected to abuse, poverty and hazardous working conditions.36 Many commentators would like to see the NLRA extended to include agricultural laborers. The main advantage to extending the definition of “employee” to include agricultural laborers under the NLRA is that the statute has been in existence for many years, and most of the challenges that would be brought up with respect to agricultural laborers attempting to unionize have most likely already been resolved in other employment sectors allowing the NLRB and courts to rely on precedent. This will make application of the statue to the agricultural laborers consistent with other employment sectors. Reliance on precedent would lead to predictable outcomes when labor disputes arise. Agricultural laborers still have a ways to go before they will be able to reap the benefits of the NLRA; but, if this were to happen, agricultural laborers would be able not only to unionize and have their association protected, but also would have the advantage of being able to rely on others with experience and knowledge of the NLRA and its intricacies.
1AC — Solvency
First is creation of unions Agricultural laborers don’t form unions in the status quo because of they don’t have an explicit right to strike Reilly n.d.-- Jaclyn Reilly; JD from Penn State University; Agricultural Laborers: Their Inability to Unionize Under the National Labor Relations Act; Penn State Law Review; https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/aglaw/Publications_Library/Agricultural_Laborers.pdf Since the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), agricultural laborers have been excluded form its protection to organize workers and form unions for the purpose of collectively bargaining with employers. Employees who engage in collective bargaining are able to band together to bargain with employers for better wages, a safer working environment, fringe benefits and other terms and conditions of employment.1 The NLRA protects this bargaining process and the parties involved. Agricultural laborers are one of only two classes of workers excluded from the protection of the NLRA.2 Although agricultural laborers are not protected under the NLRA because of their exclusion from the definition of “employee,” there is no mention that agricultural laborers are forbidden from forming unions.3 But without the protection offered by the NLRA, farmers do not have to recognize the union nor will they face any consequences in failing to so recognize in contrast with employers in other industries.4 This lack of protection leads to agricultural laborers not forming unions because of the backlash they could face from employers without any recourse to protect themselves from retaliatory practices or the general refusal of employers to bargain.5
Unions are important for fighting for environmental issues- their interests often align with the community’s Rathzel and Uzzell 11-- Räthzel, Nora, and David Uzzell. "Trade unions and climate change: The jobs versus environment dilemma." Global Environmental Change 21.4 (2011): 1215-1223. (AG DebateDrills)
The importance of unions as actors contributing to sustainable development was advocated almost twenty years ago in the Agenda 21 proposals from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit in a document on ‘Strengthening the Role of Workers and their Trade Unions’ (United Nations, 2009). Reading it today, three features in particular are striking. First, environmental issues are often bound up with health and safety issues, an association that we have found in our research as well. Second, there is an emphasis on collaboration within a tripartite system of government, employers’ and workers’ organisations to encourage capacity building within unions in order to involve them in decision-making on the design, implementation, promotion and evaluation of programmes for sustainable development. Finally, it is advocated that unions should be involved in the development of improvements to both the work environment and the production process, as well as working within the local community. Given this early initiative, it is surprising that it was not until 2006 that an international trade union conference on the environment involving more than 150 unions was held in Nairobi (UNEP, 2006). Not only did they discuss the significance of sustainable development for the trade union movement, but also agreed to incorporate environmental rights into their definition of traditional workers’ rights. In 2009, the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) organised an international conference to formulate their demands for an international agreement on climate change policies, and in 2010 the International Federation of Transport (ITF) workers dedicated one day of their three-day world conference to issues of climate change. And as part of COP 15 and 16 local and international unions organised workshops at the World of Work Pavilion (WOW) attended by more than 1000 participants, arguing it is no longer acceptable for unionists to ignore environmental concerns or ‘‘leave them to the environmentalists’’. Since 2009 the ITUC, along with other national and international unions, has constructed a website dedicated to climate change issues. Whether these activities translate into policies at national and local levels is a question that remains to be investigated. Nevertheless,trade unions have become social actors, whose positions towards climate change need to be taken into account by governments, business, and scholars.
National Farmers Union (NFU) President Leland Swenson today requested that Congress act immediately to restore competition in agriculture. He did so before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Business Rights, and Competition in testimony on the current state of agricultural industry concentration, antitrust activity and enforcement, and its implications. "Besides price, competition in the agriculture industry is the issue of greatest concern to family farmers and ranchers," said Swenson. "We need stronger enforcement and greater authority for those charged with fighting antitrust violations." Farmers Union called on Congress to enact legislation to improve market competition and promoted higher levels of enforcement and greater authority for the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to fight anti-competitive behavior. The family farmer and rancher organization also called on Congress to increase antitrust oversight of the retail sector where a few large chains not only exert the market power to independently set food prices, but are also exerting market pressure that affects the price that producers receive. "Competition in the agriculture sector is rapidly diminishing," added Swenson. "Congress and the administration must act quickly before it is too late."
Second is increased worker costs meaning more investment in capital Migrant workers make up the bulk of farm workers— right now they face extreme treatment in the status quo because of their vulnerable position LeRoy 99-- LeRoy, Michael H. Professor, School of Labor and Employment Relations, at University of Illinois, Should 'Agricultural Laborers' Continue to Be Excluded from the National Labor Relations Act?. Emory Law Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1999, U Illinois Law and Economics Research Paper No. LE07-023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=992923
At least part of this labor market competition appears to be coming from 600,000 of farm workers who currently are illegal aliens.29 By one estimate, 57 of all migrant farm workers in the U.S. are illegal aliens30 A recent report by the Department of Labor’s Inspector General suggests that agricultural producers prefer to hire illegal aliens.31 Thus, many farm workers are in one of two binds: they are legal immigrants who are passed over in favor illegal aliens in an already crowded labor market; or, they are illegal aliens who, because of their unlawful presence in the U.S., are exposed to extraordinary potential for employer over-reaching. Current labor market statistics suggest, therefore, that the slow progress that farm workers experienced over the past two decades is giving way to more exploitation. In recent cases of extreme treatment, migrant farm workers were enslaved by a labor contractor,32 coerced into field work against their will,33 or connected to forced prostitution.34 As these abuses have suggested a growing pattern, the U.S. Attorney General has responded by forming a task force to propose suitable solutions.35 Even if coercion happens only rarely to migrant farm workers, they nevertheless are vulnerable to more mundane forms of employer over-reaching. Their itinerant work, combined with their poverty, often means that they depend on employer-provided housing. Housing for migrants, while improved over a generation ago,36 is still sub-standard.37 Ironically, since migrant housing is regulated by federal38 and state law,39 many producers provide no housing and, as a result, migrant workers set up shanty-camps.40
The cause of worker exploitation is lack of collective bargaining so right to strike drastically improves conditions and wages—other industries prove Perea 11—Juan Perea Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago; The Echoes of Slavery: Recognizing the Racist Origins of the Agricultural and Domestic Worker Exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act; 72 OHIO ST. L.J. l 95 (2011).; https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150andcontext=facpubs
There is a direct relationship between this modem slavery and contemporary labor law. Advocates for migrant farm workers express that relationship: "Modem-day slavery cases don't happen in a vacuum. They only occur in degraded labor environments, ones that are fundamentally, systematically exploitive. In industries where the labor force is contingent, day-haul, with subpoverty wages, no benefits, no right to overtime, no fight to organize-that's where you see slavery taking root. ' 13 Slavery does not exist in labor environments that offer adequate worker protections like collective bargaining and other federally protected rights. A huge disparity exists between the exploitation and vulnerability lived by agricultural and domestic workers and the more reasonable and humane labor conditions existing in most other occupations.
Since conditions are so bad and demand is so constrained in agriculture, increase in wages will drastically increase capital investment in areas like RandD Bhaskar 92-- Venkataraman Bhaskar Researcher at Delhi School of Economics; The Effect of Wages on Investment and Employment in a Vintage Model with Uncertain Demand; The Scandinavian Journal of Economics , Mar., 1992, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 123-129; https://www.jstor.org/stable/3440473. (AG DebateDrills)
This note investigates the effect of an increase in the wage on investment and employment when demand is uncertain, and when incentives to factor substitution arise from the existence of different vintages of capital equipment. It is shown that the effect on investment is nonmonotonic and depends on the relative likelihood of demand and supply constraints. Moreover, a wage increase can have an ambiguous effect on employment, raising it in some states while reducing it in others. The effect on the expectation of employment may be positive. The model of investment presented here relates most closely to the work of Albrecht and Hart (1983), Artus and Muet (1984), Lambert and Mulkay (1987) and Moene (1985), who assume a putty-clay technology, a fixed output price, and stochastic demand. The innovation in this note is that incentives to factor substitution arise from the existence of different vintages of installed capital equipment, rather than ex ante substitutability. Investment is undertaken to economize on labour costs by replacing older equipment and to meet additional demand. Higher wages reduce the return to incremental investment in supply-constrained states, by reducing the absolute profit margin. However, a wage increase raises the return to incremental investment in demand-constrained states. Since additional output cannot be sold, new equipment can only be used for replacing older vintages and economizing on labour costs. This return depends on the difference in labour costs between old and new equipment, which is greater with higher wages. Hence a wage increase reduces the return to incre- mental investment if supply-constrained states are more likely, but raises investment if the probability of being demand constrained is high. For a given distribution of future demand, I show that there is a critical level of the wage above which the probability of being supply-constrained becomes dominant. Investment is increasing in the wage if it is below this critical level, but decreasing thereafter. The possible positive effect of wage increases on employment may seem surprising and contrary to standard comparative statics under certainty, but it follows from the effects on investment and demand uncertainty. If higher wages reduce investment, this increases employment in demand- constrained states since the firm must use older equipment. This could more than offset the reduced employment in supply-constrained states, thereby increasing expected employment
1AC — FW
FW The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing or act hedonistic util .
Prefer it: 1 Actor specificity: A Aggregation – every policy benefits some and harms others, which also means side constraints freeze action. B No intent-foresight distinction – If we foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of our deliberation which makes it intrinsic to our action since we intend it to happen o/w 2 Lexical pre-requisite: threats to bodily security preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibits the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose
3 Extinction outweighs Pummer 15 Theron, Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. “Moral Agreement on Saving the World” Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. May 18, 2015 There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent disagreements are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now, whatever general moral view we adopt: that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent beings on this planet are eliminated by an enormous catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. How we might in fact try to reduce such existential risks is discussed elsewhere. My claim here is only that we – whether we’re consequentialists, deontologists, or virtue ethicists – should all agree that we should try to save the world. According to consequentialism, we should maximize the good, where this is taken to be the goodness, from an impartial perspective, of outcomes. Clearly one thing that makes an outcome good is that the people in it are doing well. There is little disagreement here. If the happiness or well-being of possible future people is just as important as that of people who already exist, and if they would have good lives, it is not hard to see how reducing existential risk is easily the most important thing in the whole world. This is for the familiar reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. There are so many possible future people that reducing existential risk is arguably the most important thing in the world, even if the well-being of these possible people were given only 0.001 as much weight as that of existing people. Even on a wholly person-affecting view – according to which there’s nothing (apart from effects on existing people) to be said in favor of creating happy people – the case for reducing existential risk is very strong. As noted in this seminal paper, this case is strengthened by the fact that there’s a good chance that many existing people will, with the aid of life-extension technology, live very long and very high quality lives. You might think what I have just argued applies to consequentialists only. There is a tendency to assume that, if an argument appeals to consequentialist considerations (the goodness of outcomes), it is irrelevant to non-consequentialists. But that is a huge mistake. Non-consequentialism is the view that there’s more that determines rightness than the goodness of consequences or outcomes; it is not the view that the latter don’t matter. Even John Rawls wrote, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” Minimally plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good, from an impartial point of view. They’d thus imply very strong reasons to reduce existential risk, at least when this doesn’t significantly involve doing harm to others or damaging one’s character. What’s even more surprising, perhaps, is that even if our own good (or that of those near and dear to us) has much greater weight than goodness from the impartial “point of view of the universe,” indeed even if the latter is entirely morally irrelevant, we may nonetheless have very strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Even egoism, the view that each agent should maximize her own good, might imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. It will depend, among other things, on what one’s own good consists in. If well-being consisted in pleasure only, it is somewhat harder to argue that egoism would imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk – perhaps we could argue that one would maximize her expected hedonic well-being by funding life extension technology or by having herself cryogenically frozen at the time of her bodily death as well as giving money to reduce existential risk (so that there is a world for her to live in!). I am not sure, however, how strong the reasons to do this would be. But views which imply that, if I don’t care about other people, I have no or very little reason to help them are not even minimally plausible views (in addition to hedonistic egoism, I here have in mind views that imply that one has no reason to perform an act unless one actually desires to do that act). To be minimally plausible, egoism will need to be paired with a more sophisticated account of well-being. To see this, it is enough to consider, as Plato did, the possibility of a ring of invisibility – suppose that, while wearing it, Ayn could derive some pleasure by helping the poor, but instead could derive just a bit more by severely harming them. Hedonistic egoism would absurdly imply she should do the latter. To avoid this implication, egoists would need to build something like the meaningfulness of a life into well-being, in some robust way, where this would to a significant extent be a function of other-regarding concerns (see chapter 12 of this classic intro to ethics). But once these elements are included, we can (roughly, as above) argue that this sort of egoism will imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Add to all of this Samuel Scheffler’s recent intriguing arguments (quick podcast version available here) that most of what makes our lives go well would be undermined if there were no future generations of intelligent persons. On his view, my life would contain vastly less well-being if (say) a year after my death the world came to an end. So obviously if Scheffler were right I’d have very strong reason to reduce existential risk. We should also take into account moral uncertainty. What is it reasonable for one to do, when one is uncertain not (only) about the empirical facts, but also about the moral facts? I’ve just argued that there’s agreement among minimally plausible ethical views that we have strong reason to reduce existential risk – not only consequentialists, but also deontologists, virtue ethicists, and sophisticated egoists should agree. But even those (hedonistic egoists) who disagree should have a significant level of confidence that they are mistaken, and that one of the above views is correct. Even if they were 90 sure that their view is the correct one (and 10 sure that one of these other ones is correct), they would have pretty strong reason, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, to reduce existential risk. Perhaps most disturbingly still, even if we are only 1 sure that the well-being of possible future people matters, it is at least arguable that, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, reducing existential risk is the most important thing in the world. Again, this is largely for the reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. (For more on this and other related issues, see this excellent dissertation). Of course, it is uncertain whether these untold trillions would, in general, have good lives. It’s possible they’ll be miserable. It is enough for my claim that there is moral agreement in the relevant sense if, at least given certain empirical claims about what future lives would most likely be like, all minimally plausible moral views would converge on the conclusion that we should try to save the world. While there are some non-crazy views that place significantly greater moral weight on avoiding suffering than on promoting happiness, for reasons others have offered (and for independent reasons I won’t get into here unless requested to), they nonetheless seem to be fairly implausible views. And even if things did not go well for our ancestors, I am optimistic that they will overall go fantastically well for our descendants, if we allow them to. I suspect that most of us alive today – at least those of us not suffering from extreme illness or poverty – have lives that are well worth living, and that things will continue to improve. Derek Parfit, whose work has emphasized future generations as well as agreement in ethics, described our situation clearly and accurately: “We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy…. Our descendants might, I believe, make the further future very good. But that good future may also depend in part on us. If our selfish recklessness ends human history, we would be acting very wrongly.” (From chapter 36 of On What Matters) A Reversibility – we cannot come back from extinction so under any risk they’re wrong prioritize extinction so we can figure things out B Magnitude – the loss of all future generations would be 500 trillion lives, if we evaluate all lives equally and determine risk by probability-times-magnitude, that suggests placing existential risk first. Anything else says some lives are worth more than others which devolves to genocide.
Underview
Underview
1 1AR theory is legit – anything else means infinite abuse – drop the debater, competing interps, no rvis and the highest layer of the round – 1AR is too short to make up for the time trade-off – no RVIs or 2NR theory and paradigm issues– 6 min 2NR means they can brute force me every time. 2 Assume I-meets to spec shells since bidirectional shells prove abuse is inescapable 3 Give me new 2AR weighing and arguments - I only know what arguments I have to weigh against in the 2NR, but they know in the 1AR. 4 No new 2NR theory arguments – or else they can flood the 2ar with theory and win because the 2ar is too short 5 the ROB is to determine whether the plan is a good idea through policy analysis Fairness – arbitrary frameworks moot the 1AC – there are infinite parts of the 1AC they could problematize which forces 1ar restart. Our scholarship is tied to the consequences of the plan so it makes no sense to separate assumptions from implementation. Fairness matters—debate’s a competitive game and it’s key to foster valuable discussion.Education- Discussing the literal policy of the res is best for education, o/w since we only have two months for this topic and by debating random Fwks we lose a debate we could have used to learn and educate ourselves about the current topic 6 Non-governmental action is a voting issue for reciprocity and prep skew- I defend the government taking an action so the negative should do. That’s key to reciprocal ground otherwise they get access to a ton of state bad and legalism bad turns that are functional nibs in the 1ar. We additionally can’t predict near infinite non-governmental actors while they just have to prep one; outweighs on sequencing since we need prep to debate. Turns and outweighs the K since it indicts our ability to test the truth value of their theory of power.
7All K Links must quote explicit lines in the aff a) infinite amount of things the aff can implicitly justify which means the K becomes for for strat than change b) pigeon-holes you into a mere assumption – this is the root cause of oppressive mindsets since those labeled as “different” are assumed to deviate from “normal”
12/3/21
NOVDEC- Agriculture Aff V2
Tournament: Princeton | Round: 1 | Opponent: Harrison MB | Judge: Kevin Cheng US climate action specifically spills over and spurs global climate action. Geman 6/7/21 National Journal Energy and Environment Correspondent, reporter for Axios, Ben, “The global stakes of Biden's infrastructure negotiations.” https://www.axios.com/biden-infrastructure-bill-climate-change-87b70d16-fdec-4c84-84a6-e7532c592f15.html The infrastructure drama enveloping Capitol Hill could spill onto the global climate stage. Why it matters: Major new U.S. investments and policies could help spur other nations to take more aggressive and tangible steps to cut emissions. But failure to steer major new initiatives through Congress could hinder the White House diplomatic posture as the U.N. conference looms. State of play: The White House is negotiating with Republicans amid all kinds of uncertainty over whether Democrats can pass legislation without GOP backing. President Biden has proposed major investments in electric vehicles, grid tech, mass transit, clean energy tax incentives and many other initiatives. The negotiations with Republicans — who object to the plan's steep price tag and expansive definition of infrastructure — come ahead of November's critical United Nations climate summit. What they're saying: "Because of the importance of American leadership on climate, the rest of the world is definitely watching what happens on Capitol Hill," said the Environmental Defense Fund's Nathaniel Keohane. Keohane, who leads EDF's climate program, said major U.S. investments will bolster the country's economy and competitiveness. But they're also consequential internationally, he said. "The more the U.S. can demonstrate leadership — not only in the ambition of its targets but in the ambition of its implementation and the seriousness of its implementation — the more likely we are to see the rest of the world stepping into its ambition and accelerating its own climate action," he said. Catch up fast: In April the White House set a voluntary target under the Paris Agreement of cutting U.S. emissions by 50 below 2005 levels by 2030.But that's much harder to achieve absent Capitol Hill approval of new investments and incentives. The Atlantic Council's Margaret Jackson said Biden's climate initiatives thus far have borne some fruit, pointing to several nations strengthening their Paris targets. But Jackson, who has written about the importance of congressional action, also tells Axios: "U.S. allies and partners are still somewhat skeptical in terms of how much this administration can really accomplish, and will it be lasting." Definition of unconditional right to strike: NLRB 85 National Labor Relations Board; “Legislative History of the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947: Volume 1,” Jan 1985; https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=7o1tA__v4xwCandrdid=book-7o1tA__v4xwCandrdot=1 Edited for gendered language As for the so-called absolute or unconditional right to strike—there are no absolute rights that do not have their corresponding responsibilities. Under our American Anglo-Saxon system, each individual is entitled to the maximum of freedom, provided however (and this provision is of first importance), his their freedom has due regard for the rights and freedoms of others. The very safeguard of our freedoms is the recognition of this fundamental principle. I take issue very definitely with the suggestion that there is an absolute and unconditional right to concerted action (which after all is what the strike is) which endangers the health and welfare of our people in order to attain a selfish end.
1AR – T Just Gov
CI: Affs ought to debate what a just government would do in a specific country, not that the specific country is a just government. We meet since a just government is evaluating whether the plan is a good idea in the US.
Just is a question of being correctness Merriam Webster, ND, Just defintion, URL: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/just, KR Definition of just (Entry 1 of 3) 1a: having a basis in or conforming to fact or reason : REASONABLE had just reason to believe he was in danger b: conforming to a standard of correctness
1 Ground – no gov is completely just since there’s always a more utopian way to act – force them to provide a caselist that meets their definition. Even if they do, it’ll be on same arbitrary standard which fails to create a commom stasis point . Answers their net benefit and proves the opposite is impossible. That’s bad – A ) If no governments can be just then we have no ground – making it unfair + impossible to affrim b) That kills country specific aff grounds which is key on this topic because every government e has different protections for workers. There is no unifying advantage –
2 Logic – no gov can be just because the def is vague and can’t explain tradeoffs 3 Grammar – the word just means that the government acts just, so all it asks is whether the plan is a just idea 4 Research. Our model incentivies going deeper on the topic through country specifc 5 Reaosnability – good is good enough should control your interpretation of this debate. Anything else kills substance since a small vio is sufficent to stake the round on which o/ws since we only have 2 months of the topic Yes aff rvis- all the reasons still apply. + cant just call me racists and walk away
CP- perm
3rd- no link The literal reasons unions dont form is cuz of the squo
ADV 1: Sustainable Agriculture Population expansion requires farmland expansion to meet food demand—we are on the brink of prohibitive ecological costs from deforestation Tian et al 21-- Tian, Zhixi principal investigator, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and former research geneticist at Purdue, et al. "Designing future crops: challenges and strategies for sustainable agriculture." The Plant Journal 105.5 (2021): 1165-1178. (AG DebateDrills)
From the perspective of human evolution, each period of rapid population growth, such as during the Neolithic agricultural revolution, which began at about 8000 BC, the hydro agricultural or irrigation revolutions in the Near East, which began about 3000 BC, and the medieval and modern agricultural periods, which began about 1000 AD, benefited from an advance in agriculture (Taiz, 2013; Wallace et al., 2018). The recent rapid population growth during the past 300 years, in contrast, mainly resulted from the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain about 1760. The Industrial Revolution greatly increased the range of human activities and accelerated farmland expansion. In 1700, it was reported that nearly 95 of Earth’s ice-free land consisted of wildlands and semi-natural anthromes; however, by 2000, 55 of these regions were used as arable land (Figure 1a, data from https://ourworldindata.org/). The Industrial Revolution also gave birth to new technologies and production systems in agriculture, such as the application of larger irrigation systems, and more fertilizers and pesticides. In the 1960s, semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties were introduced. These semi-dwarf crops exhibit beneficial characteristics, such as improved response to fertilizer input, lodging resistance and enhanced light utilization (Hedden, 2003; Wallace et al., 2018). Along with the fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation systems made possible by the Industrial Revolution, semi-dwarf crops were quickly adopted and resulted in a significant increase in total grain production globally. This big leap in agriculture was known as the ‘Green Revolution’ (Khush, 2001). Indeed, statistical data have revealed that the average daily food supply per person (in terms of calories) has doubled since the middle of the 19th century (Figure 1b, data from https://ourworld indata.org/). It is estimated that the world population will rise to more than 9 billion by 2050 (Alexandratos, 1999; Cassman, 1999), and at that time we will need at least 60 more food than is consumed by humans today. Moreover, our population will continuously increase, reaching over 11 billion by 2100 (Figure 1a, data from https://ourworldindata.org/). How to feed the increasing population is a challenge facing the whole world (Tilman et al., 2001; Godfray et al., 2010; Foley et al., 2011; Wallace et al., 2018). A simple solution to feed a population of 9 billion is to constantly turn wild habitats into farmland. However, this type of expansion is unrealistic as most of the world’s icefree and non-barren land area has been exhausted, and much of the rest is unlikely to sustain high yields (Cassman, 1999). More importantly, intact forests have been known to play essential roles in protecting the environment, such as storing fresh water, decreasing flooding and regenerating fertile soils. Clearing of forests will result in prohibitive ecological costs, such as loss of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. It was reported that, due to agriculture expansion, 30 of all plant species will become extinct (Taiz, 2013). The destruction of tropical forests releases about 1.1 9 1012 tons of carbon per year, which accounts for 12 of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions (Friedlingstein et al., 2010).
Biod loss causes extinction – outweighs neg disads and is a threat multiplier Torres 16 Phil Biologist, conservationist, science advocate and educator. 2 years based in Amazon rainforest, now exploring science around the world. “Biodiversity Loss: An Existential Risk Comparable to Climate Change” http://futureoflife.org/2016/05/20/biodiversity-loss/. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the two greatest existential threats to human civilization stem from climate change and nuclear weapons. Both pose clear and present dangers to the perpetuation of our species, and the increasingly dire climate situation and nuclear arsenal modernizations in the United States and Russia were the most significant reasons why the Bulletin decided to keep the Doomsday Clock set at three minutes before midnight earlier this year. But there is another existential threat that the Bulletin overlooked in its Doomsday Clock announcement: biodiversity loss. This phenomenon is often identified as one of the many consequences of climate change, and this is of course correct. But biodiversity loss is also a contributing factor behind climate change. For example, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere reduces the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by plants, a natural process that mitigates the effects of climate change. So the causal relation between climate change and biodiversity loss is bidirectional. Furthermore, there are myriad phenomena that are driving biodiversity loss in addition to climate change. Other causes include ecosystem fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, oxygen depletion caused by fertilizers running off into ponds and streams, overfishing, human overpopulation, and overconsumption. All of these phenomena have a direct impact on the health of the biosphere, and all would conceivably persist even if the problem of climate change were somehow immediately solved. Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest decreases natural mitigation of CO2 and destroys the habitats of many endangered species. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. 48 of the world’s primates are threatened with extinction. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hageland CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.
The only yet extremely effective solution is innovation that leads to more crop yield—there’s multiple possibilities for innovation Tian et al 21-- Tian, Zhixi principal investigator, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and former research geneticist at Purdue, et al. "Designing future crops: challenges and strategies for sustainable agriculture." The Plant Journal 105.5 (2021): 1165-1178. (AG DebateDrills)
The first straightforward strategy for designing future crops that meet sustainable agriculture requirements is to improve the following aspects of current well-cultivated crops. Increasing yield. It is estimated that the yields of major crops need to increase at a rate of 2.4 per year to meet the food supply demand by 2050. However, the current growth rates of the four major crops, maize (Zea mays), rice (Oryza sativa), wheat (Triticum aestivum), and soybeans (Glycine max), are only approximately half of this anticipated rate (Ray et al., 2013). The development of new varieties with high yield potential that can fill this gap is the foremost mission of the Future Crops Design project. In fact, in a trial, it was reported that a super-high-yield rice variety could produce one- to threefold more grains under optimal conditions than in normal paddy fields (Liu et al., 2020a). Improving nutritional quality. Although the amount of food supply has been significantly improved in the last half-century, changes in human lifestyle and food consumption have resulted in a phenomenon called hidden hunger (Nair et al., 2016). For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa and America, about 17–30 of children under the age of 5 years have an inadequate daily intake of Vitamin A (Harjes et al., 2008; Haskell, 2012). It has been reported that about two billion people are suffering from a chronic deficiency of micronutrients (WHO, 2008), a new threat to human health. Moreover, the incidence of type-2 diabetes, obesity and colon disease has markedly increased in the past decade (Zhou et al., 2016). Hence, the second mission of the Future Crops Design project is to generate crops with higher/balanced nutritional quality or specialized metabolites using metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches (Francis et al., 2017; Martin and Li, 2017; Sweetlove et al., 2017; Vasconcelos et al., 2017). Increasing agricultural resource use efficiency. It was reported that 17 of arable land has lost productivity since 1945 due to inappropriate agriculture management (Oldeman, 1994). In fact, nutrient-use efficiencies of today’s crops only reach 30–50 for nitrogen fertilizer (Cassman et al., 2002) and 45 for phosphorus fertilizer (Smil, 2000). Moreover, fresh water has become a limiting factor for agriculture in many areas in the world. It is estimated that about 2800 km3 of fresh water per year is used for agricultural irrigation, and that crop production decreases by 20 without irrigation (Siebert and Doll, 2010). Therefore, to reduce agricultural inputs and environmental burdens, we should aim to develop high nutrient and water-use efficiency crops without yield penalty.
The reason innovation isn’t happening is lack of profit incentive—there needs to be an incentive for risk taking Mackenzie 20—Conway Mackenzie; Harve Light Managing Director; Innovation in Agriculture: Why is it so slow?; Shale Magazine; February 3 2020; https://shalemag.com/innovation-in-agriculture-why-is-it-so-slow/. (AG DebateDrills)
Innovation is not a new concept in the agriculture industry. As an example, self-driving farm equipment has been around for years and well ahead of the auto industry. This has been a major factor in improving yields and reducing input costs as planting accuracy has improved. However, further automation is needed to improve operating efficiency along the supply chain. Both farmers and processors face significant labor cost increases due to minimum wage hikes that will continue for the next several years. These increases have little positive effect as both farmers and processors still struggle to find people willing to do the work. Robotics will play a significant role in addressing this issue. Whether it’s picking crops in the field or automating functions at the processor, business owners are looking for ways to reduce their labor dependence. Sensor technology via the Internet of Things has also made significant inroads. These sensors improve farmer visibility into what is going on with their land and crops. This allows them to focus their resources to address known issues. Sensors also help processors maintain quality standards throughout their facilities. Sensor technology is also a major component in addressing another industry challenge, traceability. Today, consumers want to easily determine where their food came from. They want to know that it came from companies that believe in and use sustainable practices. In addition, regulators want to be able to pinpoint sources when food safety issues arise. Sensor technology collects the data needed to meet this need. The second part of the issue is harnessing all that data. There are several efforts in their infancy that work toward a data solution. One of the most advanced is blockchain technology. In simple terms, blockchain is a technology that allows for collection of data from all market participants in a single, secure repository. It will allow for an end to end supply chain trail of a single item. This technology will allow for better traceability by retailer, consumer and regulator which is being requested by the likes of Walmart. Eventually, it will also allow for better collaboration between all members of a particular supply chain. Today, the biggest hurdles to this innovation are the protocols or data formats. Companies in the industry need to know what data to collect and the form it should take. They will need a lot of help in putting these requirements all together. So, what’s holding innovation back? While there has been improvement, technological innovation remains slow compared to other industries. Two of the major causes are lack of connectivity and insufficient investment returns. Lack of connectivity is an issue based on the nature of the industry. Farming takes place in rural areas where internet access is spotty at best. This lack of connectivity hampers farmers from collecting data in the field. This results in an inability to make decisions in time to make a difference. Innovation is also inhibited by a lack of investment. Entrepreneurs and startups do not want to invest in developing solutions where they can’t see a clear path to a return on their capital. In agriculture, they can’t see an exit strategy which typically includes the sale of the company to a large industry supplier. For many years, the agriculture industry has been dominated by a few large input suppliers. These suppliers have been making good profits years and see no reason to take on innovation investment risk. Without these large players, startups have no incentive to risk their capital on new solutions. This has led to a very slow rate of development and innovation.
1AC — Plan
Plan text: The United States Government ought to recognize an unconditional right to strike for agricultural laborers by amending the National Labor Relations Act to extend the definition of ‘employee’ to include agricultural laborers.
Squo NLRA fails to protect farmer’s rights to strike – plan amends the NLRA to collectively bargain Reilly, 11, Penn State Law, “Agricultural Laborers: Their Inability to Unionize Under the National Labor Relations Act”, Penn State: Masters of Science, JD Law, URL: https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/aglaw/Publications_Library/Agricultural_Laborers.pdf, 2011 + since most recent citation is from then, KR The NLRA gives workers “freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing” in order to equalize the bargaining power between employers and employees in the hopes of limiting the interruptions to the free flow of commerce.10 The statute covers a large number of workers based on the broad definition of “employee,”11 but excludes from coverage all agricultural laborers.12 The NLRA does not define who these agricultural laborers are that are excluded from the right to organize, but rather Congress has instructed the National Labor Relations Boards (NLRB)13 in the annual Appropriations Act that in determining who is an agricultural laborer excluded from the NLRA, to rely on the definition of “agriculture” found in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).14 Agriculture in the FLSA is defined as “farming in all its branches ... and any practices ... performed by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations...”15 The definition also lists specific activities to further define what would specifically be considered agricultural work.16 Therefore, workers whose responsibilities are contained in the FLSA’s definition of “agriculture” are excluded from the right to organize and form unions under the NLRA. The reasoning behind this exclusion is somewhat vague, especially considering that the bill originally proposed in the Senate did not exclude agricultural laborers from the definition of “employee.”17 There is not much mentioned about the agricultural exclusion because of the statute’s primary focus on addressing problems in the industrial sector. There is, however, a debate from in the House addressing the agricultural laborer exemption,18 where an argument was made that agricultural laborers should be included because they needed the same protections as industrial workers. Agricultural labor issues were brought to light in 1935 after governmental investigations into child labor issues and the lack of clean water provided for such workers.19 In response, two possible reasons were briefly mentioned that may explain why agricultural laborers were excluded: first, in regions like the Midwest, farms are mostly family farms and should not be within the scope of the NLRA, and second there was a concern that Congress did not have jurisdiction over agricultural workers because it was questionable whether such workers were engaged in interstate commerce.20 Many commentators believe that it was the former argument that led to the exclusion of agricultural workers from protection under the NLRA. Another possible reason for this exclusion as presented by some commentators is that the larger farms lobbied to have their workers excluded from the NLRA.21 While not expressly stated, the most likely explanation is that Congress wanted to protect the family farmer from having to pay higher wages that unions would inevitably demand of the employers.22 Realizing that agriculture was important to the entire nation, Congress wanted to shield this industry from unionization, and wanted to protect the family farmer from having to pay what they could not afford. Congress did not think it necessary to equate the family farmer with big business. The broad definition of “agriculture” under the FLSA would seem to exclude from the NLRA any worker who is employed by any agricultural entity. This is not the case, however, because the Supreme Court has adopted a two-part test to determine if an employee is in fact an agricultural laborer excluded from the NLRA.23 An agricultural employee will be excluded from the right to organize if he or she is engaged in either primary or secondary farming. The Supreme Court has taken the FLSA definition of agriculture and essentially limited its application based on a strict application of the statutory language. Primary farming are those tasks specifically referred to in the statutory definition of “agriculture” such as “cultivation and tillage of the soil and dairying.”24 The rest of the definition is considered secondary farming, and therefore a worker is an agricultural laborer if the work performed is of the type that would be performed “by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations.”25 In one of the more recent cases to address the question of who is considered an agricultural employee, the Supreme Court in Holly Farms Corp. v. N.L.R.B. upheld the determination made by the NLRB that workers on live-haul chicken crews do not engage in agricultural labor and therefore are not subject to the agricultural exception from the NLRA.26 The responsibility of the live-haul crew is to enter the farms of independent contractors who raise chickens supplied by Holly Farms; the chickens are then caught and caged by nine chicken catchers, moved by a forklift operator onto a truck to be transported by a truck driver to the processing plant.27 These live-haul crews were not engaged in primary farming because primary farming would have been the actual raising of the poultry, which was the responsibility of the independent contractors, not the live- haul crews.28 The court then focused on whether these live-haul crews were engaged in secondary farming. In doing so, the court immediately found that that the work performed by the live-haul crews were not of the kind “performed by a farmer” because Holly Farms gave up its farmer status as soon as the chicks were delivered to independent contractors for raising.29 As a result of this determination, the truck drivers were not considered agricultural laborers and were therefore not part of the agricultural exception to the NLRA and were able to unionize.30 The court then looked to whether the chicken catchers and forklift operators were engaged in work “on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with” raising poultry.31 The Supreme Court found that neither the chicken catchers nor the forklift operators “worked on a farm” because the work these employees performed were part of Holly Farms’ poultry processing operations and was not of the type of work contemplated to be included in the statutory definition of “farming.”32 The Supreme Court adopted the reasoning of the NLRB in deciding that the catchers and forklift operators were not performing work “incident to or in conjunction with” the farming operations of the independent contractors.33 In doing so, the Supreme Court decided that it was more important to look at the status of the employer as a farmer rather than where the laborer carried out the responsibilities of the job he or she was hired to perform. Because, as previously determined, Holly Farms was not considered a farmer by the time the live- haul crews went in to catch the chickens, the catchers and the forklift operators were not engaged in secondary farming as defined in the FLSA.34 This meant that all the members of the live-haul crews were not agricultural laborers and therefore all had the right to organize under the NLRA. The Supreme Court limited the applicability of the definition of “agriculture” in Holly Farms and in doing so opened up the possibility that more workers employed by large, vertically integrated employers would be able to organize.35 By taking the approach to look at the status of the employer rather than where the work is performed, the Supreme Court broadened the already broad definition of “employee” under the NLRA. More employees working for these vertically integrated employers will be able to experience the protection of the NLRA that has been open to industrial workers since the act was first passed in 1935. The impact of the Holly Farms decision is for courts to engage in an in depth analysis before deciding whether a worker is an agricultural laborer not protected by the NLRA. Switching the focus to the status of the employer rather than where the employees are performing their responsibilities will ensure greater protection for workers and a broader reach of the NLRA. While the definition of “employee” has expanded to include some employees who are employed by agricultural employers, there is still the exception for agricultural laborers included in the statute and therefore there are still many workers who are unable to form unions. These may be the workers that need the most protection because they are the field workers who are subjected to abuse, poverty and hazardous working conditions.36 Many commentators would like to see the NLRA extended to include agricultural laborers. The main advantage to extending the definition of “employee” to include agricultural laborers under the NLRA is that the statute has been in existence for many years, and most of the challenges that would be brought up with respect to agricultural laborers attempting to unionize have most likely already been resolved in other employment sectors allowing the NLRB and courts to rely on precedent. This will make application of the statue to the agricultural laborers consistent with other employment sectors. Reliance on precedent would lead to predictable outcomes when labor disputes arise. Agricultural laborers still have a ways to go before they will be able to reap the benefits of the NLRA; but, if this were to happen, agricultural laborers would be able not only to unionize and have their association protected, but also would have the advantage of being able to rely on others with experience and knowledge of the NLRA and its intricacies.
1AC — Solvency
First is creation of unions Agricultural laborers don’t form unions in the status quo because of they don’t have an explicit right to strike Reilly n.d.-- Jaclyn Reilly; JD from Penn State University; Agricultural Laborers: Their Inability to Unionize Under the National Labor Relations Act; Penn State Law Review; https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/aglaw/Publications_Library/Agricultural_Laborers.pdf Since the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), agricultural laborers have been excluded form its protection to organize workers and form unions for the purpose of collectively bargaining with employers. Employees who engage in collective bargaining are able to band together to bargain with employers for better wages, a safer working environment, fringe benefits and other terms and conditions of employment.1 The NLRA protects this bargaining process and the parties involved. Agricultural laborers are one of only two classes of workers excluded from the protection of the NLRA.2 Although agricultural laborers are not protected under the NLRA because of their exclusion from the definition of “employee,” there is no mention that agricultural laborers are forbidden from forming unions.3 But without the protection offered by the NLRA, farmers do not have to recognize the union nor will they face any consequences in failing to so recognize in contrast with employers in other industries.4 This lack of protection leads to agricultural laborers not forming unions because of the backlash they could face from employers without any recourse to protect themselves from retaliatory practices or the general refusal of employers to bargain.5
Unions are important for fighting for environmental issues- their interests often align with the community’s Rathzel and Uzzell 11-- Räthzel, Nora, and David Uzzell. "Trade unions and climate change: The jobs versus environment dilemma." Global Environmental Change 21.4 (2011): 1215-1223. (AG DebateDrills)
The importance of unions as actors contributing to sustainable development was advocated almost twenty years ago in the Agenda 21 proposals from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit in a document on ‘Strengthening the Role of Workers and their Trade Unions’ (United Nations, 2009). Reading it today, three features in particular are striking. First, environmental issues are often bound up with health and safety issues, an association that we have found in our research as well. Second, there is an emphasis on collaboration within a tripartite system of government, employers’ and workers’ organisations to encourage capacity building within unions in order to involve them in decision-making on the design, implementation, promotion and evaluation of programmes for sustainable development. Finally, it is advocated that unions should be involved in the development of improvements to both the work environment and the production process, as well as working within the local community. Given this early initiative, it is surprising that it was not until 2006 that an international trade union conference on the environment involving more than 150 unions was held in Nairobi (UNEP, 2006). Not only did they discuss the significance of sustainable development for the trade union movement, but also agreed to incorporate environmental rights into their definition of traditional workers’ rights. In 2009, the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) organised an international conference to formulate their demands for an international agreement on climate change policies, and in 2010 the International Federation of Transport (ITF) workers dedicated one day of their three-day world conference to issues of climate change. And as part of COP 15 and 16 local and international unions organised workshops at the World of Work Pavilion (WOW) attended by more than 1000 participants, arguing it is no longer acceptable for unionists to ignore environmental concerns or ‘‘leave them to the environmentalists’’. Since 2009 the ITUC, along with other national and international unions, has constructed a website dedicated to climate change issues. Whether these activities translate into policies at national and local levels is a question that remains to be investigated. Nevertheless,trade unions have become social actors, whose positions towards climate change need to be taken into account by governments, business, and scholars.
National Farmers Union (NFU) President Leland Swenson today requested that Congress act immediately to restore competition in agriculture. He did so before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Business Rights, and Competition in testimony on the current state of agricultural industry concentration, antitrust activity and enforcement, and its implications. "Besides price, competition in the agriculture industry is the issue of greatest concern to family farmers and ranchers," said Swenson. "We need stronger enforcement and greater authority for those charged with fighting antitrust violations." Farmers Union called on Congress to enact legislation to improve market competition and promoted higher levels of enforcement and greater authority for the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to fight anti-competitive behavior. The family farmer and rancher organization also called on Congress to increase antitrust oversight of the retail sector where a few large chains not only exert the market power to independently set food prices, but are also exerting market pressure that affects the price that producers receive. "Competition in the agriculture sector is rapidly diminishing," added Swenson. "Congress and the administration must act quickly before it is too late."
Second is increased worker costs meaning more investment in capital Migrant workers make up the bulk of farm workers— right now they face extreme treatment in the status quo because of their vulnerable position LeRoy 99-- LeRoy, Michael H. Professor, School of Labor and Employment Relations, at University of Illinois, Should 'Agricultural Laborers' Continue to Be Excluded from the National Labor Relations Act?. Emory Law Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1999, U Illinois Law and Economics Research Paper No. LE07-023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=992923
At least part of this labor market competition appears to be coming from 600,000 of farm workers who currently are illegal aliens.29 By one estimate, 57 of all migrant farm workers in the U.S. are illegal aliens30 A recent report by the Department of Labor’s Inspector General suggests that agricultural producers prefer to hire illegal aliens.31 Thus, many farm workers are in one of two binds: they are legal immigrants who are passed over in favor illegal aliens in an already crowded labor market; or, they are illegal aliens who, because of their unlawful presence in the U.S., are exposed to extraordinary potential for employer over-reaching. Current labor market statistics suggest, therefore, that the slow progress that farm workers experienced over the past two decades is giving way to more exploitation. In recent cases of extreme treatment, migrant farm workers were enslaved by a labor contractor,32 coerced into field work against their will,33 or connected to forced prostitution.34 As these abuses have suggested a growing pattern, the U.S. Attorney General has responded by forming a task force to propose suitable solutions.35 Even if coercion happens only rarely to migrant farm workers, they nevertheless are vulnerable to more mundane forms of employer over-reaching. Their itinerant work, combined with their poverty, often means that they depend on employer-provided housing. Housing for migrants, while improved over a generation ago,36 is still sub-standard.37 Ironically, since migrant housing is regulated by federal38 and state law,39 many producers provide no housing and, as a result, migrant workers set up shanty-camps.40
The cause of worker exploitation is lack of collective bargaining so right to strike drastically improves conditions and wages—other industries prove Perea 11—Juan Perea Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago; The Echoes of Slavery: Recognizing the Racist Origins of the Agricultural and Domestic Worker Exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act; 72 OHIO ST. L.J. l 95 (2011).; https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150andcontext=facpubs
There is a direct relationship between this modem slavery and contemporary labor law. Advocates for migrant farm workers express that relationship: "Modem-day slavery cases don't happen in a vacuum. They only occur in degraded labor environments, ones that are fundamentally, systematically exploitive. In industries where the labor force is contingent, day-haul, with subpoverty wages, no benefits, no right to overtime, no fight to organize-that's where you see slavery taking root. ' 13 Slavery does not exist in labor environments that offer adequate worker protections like collective bargaining and other federally protected rights. A huge disparity exists between the exploitation and vulnerability lived by agricultural and domestic workers and the more reasonable and humane labor conditions existing in most other occupations.
Since conditions are so bad and demand is so constrained in agriculture, increase in wages will drastically increase capital investment in areas like RandD Bhaskar 92-- Venkataraman Bhaskar Researcher at Delhi School of Economics; The Effect of Wages on Investment and Employment in a Vintage Model with Uncertain Demand; The Scandinavian Journal of Economics , Mar., 1992, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 123-129; https://www.jstor.org/stable/3440473. (AG DebateDrills)
This note investigates the effect of an increase in the wage on investment and employment when demand is uncertain, and when incentives to factor substitution arise from the existence of different vintages of capital equipment. It is shown that the effect on investment is nonmonotonic and depends on the relative likelihood of demand and supply constraints. Moreover, a wage increase can have an ambiguous effect on employment, raising it in some states while reducing it in others. The effect on the expectation of employment may be positive. The model of investment presented here relates most closely to the work of Albrecht and Hart (1983), Artus and Muet (1984), Lambert and Mulkay (1987) and Moene (1985), who assume a putty-clay technology, a fixed output price, and stochastic demand. The innovation in this note is that incentives to factor substitution arise from the existence of different vintages of installed capital equipment, rather than ex ante substitutability. Investment is undertaken to economize on labour costs by replacing older equipment and to meet additional demand. Higher wages reduce the return to incremental investment in supply-constrained states, by reducing the absolute profit margin. However, a wage increase raises the return to incremental investment in demand-constrained states. Since additional output cannot be sold, new equipment can only be used for replacing older vintages and economizing on labour costs. This return depends on the difference in labour costs between old and new equipment, which is greater with higher wages. Hence a wage increase reduces the return to incre- mental investment if supply-constrained states are more likely, but raises investment if the probability of being demand constrained is high. For a given distribution of future demand, I show that there is a critical level of the wage above which the probability of being supply-constrained becomes dominant. Investment is increasing in the wage if it is below this critical level, but decreasing thereafter. The possible positive effect of wage increases on employment may seem surprising and contrary to standard comparative statics under certainty, but it follows from the effects on investment and demand uncertainty. If higher wages reduce investment, this increases employment in demand- constrained states since the firm must use older equipment. This could more than offset the reduced employment in supply-constrained states, thereby increasing expected employment
1AC — FW
FW The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing or act hedonistic util .
Prefer it: 1 Actor specificity: A Aggregation – every policy benefits some and harms others, which also means side constraints freeze action. B No intent-foresight distinction – If we foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of our deliberation which makes it intrinsic to our action since we intend it to happen o/w 2 Lexical pre-requisite: threats to bodily security preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibits the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose
3 Extinction outweighs Pummer 15 Theron, Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy at St. Anne's College, University of Oxford. “Moral Agreement on Saving the World” Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. May 18, 2015 There appears to be lot of disagreement in moral philosophy. Whether these many apparent disagreements are deep and irresolvable, I believe there is at least one thing it is reasonable to agree on right now, whatever general moral view we adopt: that it is very important to reduce the risk that all intelligent beings on this planet are eliminated by an enormous catastrophe, such as a nuclear war. How we might in fact try to reduce such existential risks is discussed elsewhere. My claim here is only that we – whether we’re consequentialists, deontologists, or virtue ethicists – should all agree that we should try to save the world. According to consequentialism, we should maximize the good, where this is taken to be the goodness, from an impartial perspective, of outcomes. Clearly one thing that makes an outcome good is that the people in it are doing well. There is little disagreement here. If the happiness or well-being of possible future people is just as important as that of people who already exist, and if they would have good lives, it is not hard to see how reducing existential risk is easily the most important thing in the whole world. This is for the familiar reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. There are so many possible future people that reducing existential risk is arguably the most important thing in the world, even if the well-being of these possible people were given only 0.001 as much weight as that of existing people. Even on a wholly person-affecting view – according to which there’s nothing (apart from effects on existing people) to be said in favor of creating happy people – the case for reducing existential risk is very strong. As noted in this seminal paper, this case is strengthened by the fact that there’s a good chance that many existing people will, with the aid of life-extension technology, live very long and very high quality lives. You might think what I have just argued applies to consequentialists only. There is a tendency to assume that, if an argument appeals to consequentialist considerations (the goodness of outcomes), it is irrelevant to non-consequentialists. But that is a huge mistake. Non-consequentialism is the view that there’s more that determines rightness than the goodness of consequences or outcomes; it is not the view that the latter don’t matter. Even John Rawls wrote, “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” Minimally plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good, from an impartial point of view. They’d thus imply very strong reasons to reduce existential risk, at least when this doesn’t significantly involve doing harm to others or damaging one’s character. What’s even more surprising, perhaps, is that even if our own good (or that of those near and dear to us) has much greater weight than goodness from the impartial “point of view of the universe,” indeed even if the latter is entirely morally irrelevant, we may nonetheless have very strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Even egoism, the view that each agent should maximize her own good, might imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. It will depend, among other things, on what one’s own good consists in. If well-being consisted in pleasure only, it is somewhat harder to argue that egoism would imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk – perhaps we could argue that one would maximize her expected hedonic well-being by funding life extension technology or by having herself cryogenically frozen at the time of her bodily death as well as giving money to reduce existential risk (so that there is a world for her to live in!). I am not sure, however, how strong the reasons to do this would be. But views which imply that, if I don’t care about other people, I have no or very little reason to help them are not even minimally plausible views (in addition to hedonistic egoism, I here have in mind views that imply that one has no reason to perform an act unless one actually desires to do that act). To be minimally plausible, egoism will need to be paired with a more sophisticated account of well-being. To see this, it is enough to consider, as Plato did, the possibility of a ring of invisibility – suppose that, while wearing it, Ayn could derive some pleasure by helping the poor, but instead could derive just a bit more by severely harming them. Hedonistic egoism would absurdly imply she should do the latter. To avoid this implication, egoists would need to build something like the meaningfulness of a life into well-being, in some robust way, where this would to a significant extent be a function of other-regarding concerns (see chapter 12 of this classic intro to ethics). But once these elements are included, we can (roughly, as above) argue that this sort of egoism will imply strong reasons to reduce existential risk. Add to all of this Samuel Scheffler’s recent intriguing arguments (quick podcast version available here) that most of what makes our lives go well would be undermined if there were no future generations of intelligent persons. On his view, my life would contain vastly less well-being if (say) a year after my death the world came to an end. So obviously if Scheffler were right I’d have very strong reason to reduce existential risk. We should also take into account moral uncertainty. What is it reasonable for one to do, when one is uncertain not (only) about the empirical facts, but also about the moral facts? I’ve just argued that there’s agreement among minimally plausible ethical views that we have strong reason to reduce existential risk – not only consequentialists, but also deontologists, virtue ethicists, and sophisticated egoists should agree. But even those (hedonistic egoists) who disagree should have a significant level of confidence that they are mistaken, and that one of the above views is correct. Even if they were 90 sure that their view is the correct one (and 10 sure that one of these other ones is correct), they would have pretty strong reason, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, to reduce existential risk. Perhaps most disturbingly still, even if we are only 1 sure that the well-being of possible future people matters, it is at least arguable that, from the standpoint of moral uncertainty, reducing existential risk is the most important thing in the world. Again, this is largely for the reason that there are so many people who could exist in the future – there are trillions upon trillions… upon trillions. (For more on this and other related issues, see this excellent dissertation). Of course, it is uncertain whether these untold trillions would, in general, have good lives. It’s possible they’ll be miserable. It is enough for my claim that there is moral agreement in the relevant sense if, at least given certain empirical claims about what future lives would most likely be like, all minimally plausible moral views would converge on the conclusion that we should try to save the world. While there are some non-crazy views that place significantly greater moral weight on avoiding suffering than on promoting happiness, for reasons others have offered (and for independent reasons I won’t get into here unless requested to), they nonetheless seem to be fairly implausible views. And even if things did not go well for our ancestors, I am optimistic that they will overall go fantastically well for our descendants, if we allow them to. I suspect that most of us alive today – at least those of us not suffering from extreme illness or poverty – have lives that are well worth living, and that things will continue to improve. Derek Parfit, whose work has emphasized future generations as well as agreement in ethics, described our situation clearly and accurately: “We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have even greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy…. Our descendants might, I believe, make the further future very good. But that good future may also depend in part on us. If our selfish recklessness ends human history, we would be acting very wrongly.” (From chapter 36 of On What Matters) A Reversibility – we cannot come back from extinction so under any risk they’re wrong prioritize extinction so we can figure things out B Magnitude – the loss of all future generations would be 500 trillion lives, if we evaluate all lives equally and determine risk by probability-times-magnitude, that suggests placing existential risk first. Anything else says some lives are worth more than others which devolves to genocide.
Underview
Underview
1 1AR theory is legit – anything else means infinite abuse – drop the debater, competing interps, no rvis and the highest layer of the round – 1AR is too short to make up for the time trade-off – no RVIs or 2NR theory and paradigm issues– 6 min 2NR means they can brute force me every time. 2 Assume I-meets to spec shells since bidirectional shells prove abuse is inescapable 3 Give me new 2AR weighing and arguments - I only know what arguments I have to weigh against in the 2NR, but they know in the 1AR. 4 No new 2NR theory arguments – or else they can flood the 2ar with theory and win because the 2ar is too short 5 the ROB is to determine whether the plan is a good idea through policy analysis Fairness – arbitrary frameworks moot the 1AC – there are infinite parts of the 1AC they could problematize which forces 1ar restart. Our scholarship is tied to the consequences of the plan so it makes no sense to separate assumptions from implementation. Fairness matters—debate’s a competitive game and it’s key to foster valuable discussion.Education- Discussing the literal policy of the res is best for education, o/w since we only have two months for this topic and by debating random Fwks we lose a debate we could have used to learn and educate ourselves about the current topic 6 Non-governmental action is a voting issue for reciprocity and prep skew- I defend the government taking an action so the negative should do. That’s key to reciprocal ground otherwise they get access to a ton of state bad and legalism bad turns that are functional nibs in the 1ar. We additionally can’t predict near infinite non-governmental actors while they just have to prep one; outweighs on sequencing since we need prep to debate. Turns and outweighs the K since it indicts our ability to test the truth value of their theory of power.
7All K Links must quote explicit lines in the aff a) infinite amount of things the aff can implicitly justify which means the K becomes for for strat than change b) pigeon-holes you into a mere assumption – this is the root cause of oppressive mindsets since those labeled as “different” are assumed to deviate from “normal”
12/3/21
NOVDEC-Agriculture Aff V1
Tournament: GlennBrooks | Round: 7 | Opponent: Isidore Newman PJ | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo ADV 1: Sustainable Agriculture Population expansion requires farmland expansion to meet food demand—we are on the brink of prohibitive ecological costs from deforestation Tian et al 21-- Tian, Zhixi principal investigator, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and former research geneticist at Purdue, et al. "Designing future crops: challenges and strategies for sustainable agriculture." The Plant Journal 105.5 (2021): 1165-1178. (AG DebateDrills)
From the perspective of human evolution, each period of rapid population growth, such as during the Neolithic agricultural revolution, which began at about 8000 BC, the hydro agricultural or irrigation revolutions in the Near East, which began about 3000 BC, and the medieval and modern agricultural periods, which began about 1000 AD, benefited from an advance in agriculture (Taiz, 2013; Wallace et al., 2018). The recent rapid population growth during the past 300 years, in contrast, mainly resulted from the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain about 1760. The Industrial Revolution greatly increased the range of human activities and accelerated farmland expansion. In 1700, it was reported that nearly 95 of Earth’s ice-free land consisted of wildlands and semi-natural anthromes; however, by 2000, 55 of these regions were used as arable land (Figure 1a, data from https://ourworldindata.org/). The Industrial Revolution also gave birth to new technologies and production systems in agriculture, such as the application of larger irrigation systems, and more fertilizers and pesticides. In the 1960s, semi-dwarf wheat and rice varieties were introduced. These semi-dwarf crops exhibit beneficial characteristics, such as improved response to fertilizer input, lodging resistance and enhanced light utilization (Hedden, 2003; Wallace et al., 2018). Along with the fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation systems made possible by the Industrial Revolution, semi-dwarf crops were quickly adopted and resulted in a significant increase in total grain production globally. This big leap in agriculture was known as the ‘Green Revolution’ (Khush, 2001). Indeed, statistical data have revealed that the average daily food supply per person (in terms of calories) has doubled since the middle of the 19th century (Figure 1b, data from https://ourworld indata.org/). It is estimated that the world population will rise to more than 9 billion by 2050 (Alexandratos, 1999; Cassman, 1999), and at that time we will need at least 60 more food than is consumed by humans today. Moreover, our population will continuously increase, reaching over 11 billion by 2100 (Figure 1a, data from https://ourworldindata.org/). How to feed the increasing population is a challenge facing the whole world (Tilman et al., 2001; Godfray et al., 2010; Foley et al., 2011; Wallace et al., 2018). A simple solution to feed a population of 9 billion is to constantly turn wild habitats into farmland. However, this type of expansion is unrealistic as most of the world’s icefree and non-barren land area has been exhausted, and much of the rest is unlikely to sustain high yields (Cassman, 1999). More importantly, intact forests have been known to play essential roles in protecting the environment, such as storing fresh water, decreasing flooding and regenerating fertile soils. Clearing of forests will result in prohibitive ecological costs, such as loss of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. It was reported that, due to agriculture expansion, 30 of all plant species will become extinct (Taiz, 2013). The destruction of tropical forests releases about 1.1 9 1012 tons of carbon per year, which accounts for 12 of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions (Friedlingstein et al., 2010).
Biod loss causes extinction – outweighs neg disads and is a threat multiplier Torres 16 Phil Biologist, conservationist, science advocate and educator. 2 years based in Amazon rainforest, now exploring science around the world. “Biodiversity Loss: An Existential Risk Comparable to Climate Change” http://futureoflife.org/2016/05/20/biodiversity-loss/. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the two greatest existential threats to human civilization stem from climate change and nuclear weapons. Both pose clear and present dangers to the perpetuation of our species, and the increasingly dire climate situation and nuclear arsenal modernizations in the United States and Russia were the most significant reasons why the Bulletin decided to keep the Doomsday Clock set at three minutes before midnight earlier this year. But there is another existential threat that the Bulletin overlooked in its Doomsday Clock announcement: biodiversity loss. This phenomenon is often identified as one of the many consequences of climate change, and this is of course correct. But biodiversity loss is also a contributing factor behind climate change. For example, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere reduces the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by plants, a natural process that mitigates the effects of climate change. So the causal relation between climate change and biodiversity loss is bidirectional. Furthermore, there are myriad phenomena that are driving biodiversity loss in addition to climate change. Other causes include ecosystem fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, oxygen depletion caused by fertilizers running off into ponds and streams, overfishing, human overpopulation, and overconsumption. All of these phenomena have a direct impact on the health of the biosphere, and all would conceivably persist even if the problem of climate change were somehow immediately solved. Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest decreases natural mitigation of CO2 and destroys the habitats of many endangered species. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. 48 of the world’s primates are threatened with extinction. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hageland CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.
The only yet extremely effective solution is innovation that leads to more crop yield—there’s multiple possibilities for innovation Tian et al 21-- Tian, Zhixi principal investigator, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and former research geneticist at Purdue, et al. "Designing future crops: challenges and strategies for sustainable agriculture." The Plant Journal 105.5 (2021): 1165-1178. (AG DebateDrills)
The first straightforward strategy for designing future crops that meet sustainable agriculture requirements is to improve the following aspects of current well-cultivated crops. Increasing yield. It is estimated that the yields of major crops need to increase at a rate of 2.4 per year to meet the food supply demand by 2050. However, the current growth rates of the four major crops, maize (Zea mays), rice (Oryza sativa), wheat (Triticum aestivum), and soybeans (Glycine max), are only approximately half of this anticipated rate (Ray et al., 2013). The development of new varieties with high yield potential that can fill this gap is the foremost mission of the Future Crops Design project. In fact, in a trial, it was reported that a super-high-yield rice variety could produce one- to threefold more grains under optimal conditions than in normal paddy fields (Liu et al., 2020a). Improving nutritional quality. Although the amount of food supply has been significantly improved in the last half-century, changes in human lifestyle and food consumption have resulted in a phenomenon called hidden hunger (Nair et al., 2016). For instance, in sub-Saharan Africa and America, about 17–30 of children under the age of 5 years have an inadequate daily intake of Vitamin A (Harjes et al., 2008; Haskell, 2012). It has been reported that about two billion people are suffering from a chronic deficiency of micronutrients (WHO, 2008), a new threat to human health. Moreover, the incidence of type-2 diabetes, obesity and colon disease has markedly increased in the past decade (Zhou et al., 2016). Hence, the second mission of the Future Crops Design project is to generate crops with higher/balanced nutritional quality or specialized metabolites using metabolic engineering and synthetic biology approaches (Francis et al., 2017; Martin and Li, 2017; Sweetlove et al., 2017; Vasconcelos et al., 2017). Increasing agricultural resource use efficiency. It was reported that 17 of arable land has lost productivity since 1945 due to inappropriate agriculture management (Oldeman, 1994). In fact, nutrient-use efficiencies of today’s crops only reach 30–50 for nitrogen fertilizer (Cassman et al., 2002) and 45 for phosphorus fertilizer (Smil, 2000). Moreover, fresh water has become a limiting factor for agriculture in many areas in the world. It is estimated that about 2800 km3 of fresh water per year is used for agricultural irrigation, and that crop production decreases by 20 without irrigation (Siebert and Doll, 2010). Therefore, to reduce agricultural inputs and environmental burdens, we should aim to develop high nutrient and water-use efficiency crops without yield penalty.
The reason innovation isn’t happening is lack of profit incentive—there needs to be an incentive for risk taking Mackenzie 20—Conway Mackenzie; Harve Light Managing Director; Innovation in Agriculture: Why is it so slow?; Shale Magazine; February 3 2020; https://shalemag.com/innovation-in-agriculture-why-is-it-so-slow/. (AG DebateDrills)
Innovation is not a new concept in the agriculture industry. As an example, self-driving farm equipment has been around for years and well ahead of the auto industry. This has been a major factor in improving yields and reducing input costs as planting accuracy has improved. However, further automation is needed to improve operating efficiency along the supply chain. Both farmers and processors face significant labor cost increases due to minimum wage hikes that will continue for the next several years. These increases have little positive effect as both farmers and processors still struggle to find people willing to do the work. Robotics will play a significant role in addressing this issue. Whether it’s picking crops in the field or automating functions at the processor, business owners are looking for ways to reduce their labor dependence. Sensor technology via the Internet of Things has also made significant inroads. These sensors improve farmer visibility into what is going on with their land and crops. This allows them to focus their resources to address known issues. Sensors also help processors maintain quality standards throughout their facilities. Sensor technology is also a major component in addressing another industry challenge, traceability. Today, consumers want to easily determine where their food came from. They want to know that it came from companies that believe in and use sustainable practices. In addition, regulators want to be able to pinpoint sources when food safety issues arise. Sensor technology collects the data needed to meet this need. The second part of the issue is harnessing all that data. There are several efforts in their infancy that work toward a data solution. One of the most advanced is blockchain technology. In simple terms, blockchain is a technology that allows for collection of data from all market participants in a single, secure repository. It will allow for an end to end supply chain trail of a single item. This technology will allow for better traceability by retailer, consumer and regulator which is being requested by the likes of Walmart. Eventually, it will also allow for better collaboration between all members of a particular supply chain. Today, the biggest hurdles to this innovation are the protocols or data formats. Companies in the industry need to know what data to collect and the form it should take. They will need a lot of help in putting these requirements all together. So, what’s holding innovation back? While there has been improvement, technological innovation remains slow compared to other industries. Two of the major causes are lack of connectivity and insufficient investment returns. Lack of connectivity is an issue based on the nature of the industry. Farming takes place in rural areas where internet access is spotty at best. This lack of connectivity hampers farmers from collecting data in the field. This results in an inability to make decisions in time to make a difference. Innovation is also inhibited by a lack of investment. Entrepreneurs and startups do not want to invest in developing solutions where they can’t see a clear path to a return on their capital. In agriculture, they can’t see an exit strategy which typically includes the sale of the company to a large industry supplier. For many years, the agriculture industry has been dominated by a few large input suppliers. These suppliers have been making good profits years and see no reason to take on innovation investment risk. Without these large players, startups have no incentive to risk their capital on new solutions. This has led to a very slow rate of development and innovation.
1AC — Plan
Plan text: The United States ought to recognize an unconditional right to strike for agricultural laborers by amending the National Labor Relations Act to extend the definition of ‘employee’ to include agricultural laborers.
Squo NLRA fails to protect farmer’s rights to strike – plan amends the NLRA to collectively bargain Reilly, 11, Penn State Law, “Agricultural Laborers: Their Inability to Unionize Under the National Labor Relations Act”, Penn State: Masters of Science, JD Law, URL: https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/aglaw/Publications_Library/Agricultural_Laborers.pdf, 2011 + since most recent citation is from then, KR The NLRA gives workers “freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing” in order to equalize the bargaining power between employers and employees in the hopes of limiting the interruptions to the free flow of commerce.10 The statute covers a large number of workers based on the broad definition of “employee,”11 but excludes from coverage all agricultural laborers.12 The NLRA does not define who these agricultural laborers are that are excluded from the right to organize, but rather Congress has instructed the National Labor Relations Boards (NLRB)13 in the annual Appropriations Act that in determining who is an agricultural laborer excluded from the NLRA, to rely on the definition of “agriculture” found in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).14 Agriculture in the FLSA is defined as “farming in all its branches ... and any practices ... performed by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations...”15 The definition also lists specific activities to further define what would specifically be considered agricultural work.16 Therefore, workers whose responsibilities are contained in the FLSA’s definition of “agriculture” are excluded from the right to organize and form unions under the NLRA. The reasoning behind this exclusion is somewhat vague, especially considering that the bill originally proposed in the Senate did not exclude agricultural laborers from the definition of “employee.”17 There is not much mentioned about the agricultural exclusion because of the statute’s primary focus on addressing problems in the industrial sector. There is, however, a debate from in the House addressing the agricultural laborer exemption,18 where an argument was made that agricultural laborers should be included because they needed the same protections as industrial workers. Agricultural labor issues were brought to light in 1935 after governmental investigations into child labor issues and the lack of clean water provided for such workers.19 In response, two possible reasons were briefly mentioned that may explain why agricultural laborers were excluded: first, in regions like the Midwest, farms are mostly family farms and should not be within the scope of the NLRA, and second there was a concern that Congress did not have jurisdiction over agricultural workers because it was questionable whether such workers were engaged in interstate commerce.20 Many commentators believe that it was the former argument that led to the exclusion of agricultural workers from protection under the NLRA. Another possible reason for this exclusion as presented by some commentators is that the larger farms lobbied to have their workers excluded from the NLRA.21 While not expressly stated, the most likely explanation is that Congress wanted to protect the family farmer from having to pay higher wages that unions would inevitably demand of the employers.22 Realizing that agriculture was important to the entire nation, Congress wanted to shield this industry from unionization, and wanted to protect the family farmer from having to pay what they could not afford. Congress did not think it necessary to equate the family farmer with big business. The broad definition of “agriculture” under the FLSA would seem to exclude from the NLRA any worker who is employed by any agricultural entity. This is not the case, however, because the Supreme Court has adopted a two-part test to determine if an employee is in fact an agricultural laborer excluded from the NLRA.23 An agricultural employee will be excluded from the right to organize if he or she is engaged in either primary or secondary farming. The Supreme Court has taken the FLSA definition of agriculture and essentially limited its application based on a strict application of the statutory language. Primary farming are those tasks specifically referred to in the statutory definition of “agriculture” such as “cultivation and tillage of the soil and dairying.”24 The rest of the definition is considered secondary farming, and therefore a worker is an agricultural laborer if the work performed is of the type that would be performed “by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations.”25 In one of the more recent cases to address the question of who is considered an agricultural employee, the Supreme Court in Holly Farms Corp. v. N.L.R.B. upheld the determination made by the NLRB that workers on live-haul chicken crews do not engage in agricultural labor and therefore are not subject to the agricultural exception from the NLRA.26 The responsibility of the live-haul crew is to enter the farms of independent contractors who raise chickens supplied by Holly Farms; the chickens are then caught and caged by nine chicken catchers, moved by a forklift operator onto a truck to be transported by a truck driver to the processing plant.27 These live-haul crews were not engaged in primary farming because primary farming would have been the actual raising of the poultry, which was the responsibility of the independent contractors, not the live- haul crews.28 The court then focused on whether these live-haul crews were engaged in secondary farming. In doing so, the court immediately found that that the work performed by the live-haul crews were not of the kind “performed by a farmer” because Holly Farms gave up its farmer status as soon as the chicks were delivered to independent contractors for raising.29 As a result of this determination, the truck drivers were not considered agricultural laborers and were therefore not part of the agricultural exception to the NLRA and were able to unionize.30 The court then looked to whether the chicken catchers and forklift operators were engaged in work “on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with” raising poultry.31 The Supreme Court found that neither the chicken catchers nor the forklift operators “worked on a farm” because the work these employees performed were part of Holly Farms’ poultry processing operations and was not of the type of work contemplated to be included in the statutory definition of “farming.”32 The Supreme Court adopted the reasoning of the NLRB in deciding that the catchers and forklift operators were not performing work “incident to or in conjunction with” the farming operations of the independent contractors.33 In doing so, the Supreme Court decided that it was more important to look at the status of the employer as a farmer rather than where the laborer carried out the responsibilities of the job he or she was hired to perform. Because, as previously determined, Holly Farms was not considered a farmer by the time the live- haul crews went in to catch the chickens, the catchers and the forklift operators were not engaged in secondary farming as defined in the FLSA.34 This meant that all the members of the live-haul crews were not agricultural laborers and therefore all had the right to organize under the NLRA. The Supreme Court limited the applicability of the definition of “agriculture” in Holly Farms and in doing so opened up the possibility that more workers employed by large, vertically integrated employers would be able to organize.35 By taking the approach to look at the status of the employer rather than where the work is performed, the Supreme Court broadened the already broad definition of “employee” under the NLRA. More employees working for these vertically integrated employers will be able to experience the protection of the NLRA that has been open to industrial workers since the act was first passed in 1935. The impact of the Holly Farms decision is for courts to engage in an in depth analysis before deciding whether a worker is an agricultural laborer not protected by the NLRA. Switching the focus to the status of the employer rather than where the employees are performing their responsibilities will ensure greater protection for workers and a broader reach of the NLRA. While the definition of “employee” has expanded to include some employees who are employed by agricultural employers, there is still the exception for agricultural laborers included in the statute and therefore there are still many workers who are unable to form unions. These may be the workers that need the most protection because they are the field workers who are subjected to abuse, poverty and hazardous working conditions.36 Many commentators would like to see the NLRA extended to include agricultural laborers. The main advantage to extending the definition of “employee” to include agricultural laborers under the NLRA is that the statute has been in existence for many years, and most of the challenges that would be brought up with respect to agricultural laborers attempting to unionize have most likely already been resolved in other employment sectors allowing the NLRB and courts to rely on precedent. This will make application of the statue to the agricultural laborers consistent with other employment sectors. Reliance on precedent would lead to predictable outcomes when labor disputes arise. Agricultural laborers still have a ways to go before they will be able to reap the benefits of the NLRA; but, if this were to happen, agricultural laborers would be able not only to unionize and have their association protected, but also would have the advantage of being able to rely on others with experience and knowledge of the NLRA and its intricacies.
1AC — Solvency
First is creation of unions Agricultural laborers don’t form unions in the status quo because of they don’t have an explicit right to strike Reilly n.d.-- Jaclyn Reilly; JD from Penn State University; Agricultural Laborers: Their Inability to Unionize Under the National Labor Relations Act; Penn State Law Review; https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/_file/aglaw/Publications_Library/Agricultural_Laborers.pdf Since the enactment of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), agricultural laborers have been excluded form its protection to organize workers and form unions for the purpose of collectively bargaining with employers. Employees who engage in collective bargaining are able to band together to bargain with employers for better wages, a safer working environment, fringe benefits and other terms and conditions of employment.1 The NLRA protects this bargaining process and the parties involved. Agricultural laborers are one of only two classes of workers excluded from the protection of the NLRA.2 Although agricultural laborers are not protected under the NLRA because of their exclusion from the definition of “employee,” there is no mention that agricultural laborers are forbidden from forming unions.3 But without the protection offered by the NLRA, farmers do not have to recognize the union nor will they face any consequences in failing to so recognize in contrast with employers in other industries.4 This lack of protection leads to agricultural laborers not forming unions because of the backlash they could face from employers without any recourse to protect themselves from retaliatory practices or the general refusal of employers to bargain.5
Unions are important for fighting for environmental issues- their interests often align with the community’s Rathzel and Uzzell 11-- Räthzel, Nora, and David Uzzell. "Trade unions and climate change: The jobs versus environment dilemma." Global Environmental Change 21.4 (2011): 1215-1223. (AG DebateDrills)
The importance of unions as actors contributing to sustainable development was advocated almost twenty years ago in the Agenda 21 proposals from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit in a document on ‘Strengthening the Role of Workers and their Trade Unions’ (United Nations, 2009). Reading it today, three features in particular are striking. First, environmental issues are often bound up with health and safety issues, an association that we have found in our research as well. Second, there is an emphasis on collaboration within a tripartite system of government, employers’ and workers’ organisations to encourage capacity building within unions in order to involve them in decision-making on the design, implementation, promotion and evaluation of programmes for sustainable development. Finally, it is advocated that unions should be involved in the development of improvements to both the work environment and the production process, as well as working within the local community. Given this early initiative, it is surprising that it was not until 2006 that an international trade union conference on the environment involving more than 150 unions was held in Nairobi (UNEP, 2006). Not only did they discuss the significance of sustainable development for the trade union movement, but also agreed to incorporate environmental rights into their definition of traditional workers’ rights. In 2009, the International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) organised an international conference to formulate their demands for an international agreement on climate change policies, and in 2010 the International Federation of Transport (ITF) workers dedicated one day of their three-day world conference to issues of climate change. And as part of COP 15 and 16 local and international unions organised workshops at the World of Work Pavilion (WOW) attended by more than 1000 participants, arguing it is no longer acceptable for unionists to ignore environmental concerns or ‘‘leave them to the environmentalists’’. Since 2009 the ITUC, along with other national and international unions, has constructed a website dedicated to climate change issues. Whether these activities translate into policies at national and local levels is a question that remains to be investigated. Nevertheless,trade unions have become social actors, whose positions towards climate change need to be taken into account by governments, business, and scholars.
National Farmers Union (NFU) President Leland Swenson today requested that Congress act immediately to restore competition in agriculture. He did so before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Business Rights, and Competition in testimony on the current state of agricultural industry concentration, antitrust activity and enforcement, and its implications. "Besides price, competition in the agriculture industry is the issue of greatest concern to family farmers and ranchers," said Swenson. "We need stronger enforcement and greater authority for those charged with fighting antitrust violations." Farmers Union called on Congress to enact legislation to improve market competition and promoted higher levels of enforcement and greater authority for the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to fight anti-competitive behavior. The family farmer and rancher organization also called on Congress to increase antitrust oversight of the retail sector where a few large chains not only exert the market power to independently set food prices, but are also exerting market pressure that affects the price that producers receive. "Competition in the agriculture sector is rapidly diminishing," added Swenson. "Congress and the administration must act quickly before it is too late."
Second is increased worker costs meaning more investment in capital Migrant workers make up the bulk of farm workers— right now they face extreme treatment in the status quo because of their vulnerable position LeRoy 99-- LeRoy, Michael H. Professor, School of Labor and Employment Relations, at University of Illinois, Should 'Agricultural Laborers' Continue to Be Excluded from the National Labor Relations Act?. Emory Law Journal, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1999, U Illinois Law and Economics Research Paper No. LE07-023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=992923
At least part of this labor market competition appears to be coming from 600,000 of farm workers who currently are illegal aliens.29 By one estimate, 57 of all migrant farm workers in the U.S. are illegal aliens30 A recent report by the Department of Labor’s Inspector General suggests that agricultural producers prefer to hire illegal aliens.31 Thus, many farm workers are in one of two binds: they are legal immigrants who are passed over in favor illegal aliens in an already crowded labor market; or, they are illegal aliens who, because of their unlawful presence in the U.S., are exposed to extraordinary potential for employer over-reaching. Current labor market statistics suggest, therefore, that the slow progress that farm workers experienced over the past two decades is giving way to more exploitation. In recent cases of extreme treatment, migrant farm workers were enslaved by a labor contractor,32 coerced into field work against their will,33 or connected to forced prostitution.34 As these abuses have suggested a growing pattern, the U.S. Attorney General has responded by forming a task force to propose suitable solutions.35 Even if coercion happens only rarely to migrant farm workers, they nevertheless are vulnerable to more mundane forms of employer over-reaching. Their itinerant work, combined with their poverty, often means that they depend on employer-provided housing. Housing for migrants, while improved over a generation ago,36 is still sub-standard.37 Ironically, since migrant housing is regulated by federal38 and state law,39 many producers provide no housing and, as a result, migrant workers set up shanty-camps.40
The cause of worker exploitation is lack of collective bargaining so right to strike drastically improves conditions and wages—other industries prove Perea 11—Juan Perea Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago; The Echoes of Slavery: Recognizing the Racist Origins of the Agricultural and Domestic Worker Exclusion from the National Labor Relations Act; 72 OHIO ST. L.J. l 95 (2011).; https://lawecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1150andcontext=facpubs
There is a direct relationship between this modem slavery and contemporary labor law. Advocates for migrant farm workers express that relationship: "Modem-day slavery cases don't happen in a vacuum. They only occur in degraded labor environments, ones that are fundamentally, systematically exploitive. In industries where the labor force is contingent, day-haul, with subpoverty wages, no benefits, no right to overtime, no fight to organize-that's where you see slavery taking root. ' 13 Slavery does not exist in labor environments that offer adequate worker protections like collective bargaining and other federally protected rights. A huge disparity exists between the exploitation and vulnerability lived by agricultural and domestic workers and the more reasonable and humane labor conditions existing in most other occupations.
Since conditions are so bad and demand is so constrained in agriculture, increase in wages will drastically increase capital investment in areas like RandD Bhaskar 92-- Venkataraman Bhaskar Researcher at Delhi School of Economics; The Effect of Wages on Investment and Employment in a Vintage Model with Uncertain Demand; The Scandinavian Journal of Economics , Mar., 1992, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Mar., 1992), pp. 123-129; https://www.jstor.org/stable/3440473. (AG DebateDrills)
This note investigates the effect of an increase in the wage on investment and employment when demand is uncertain, and when incentives to factor substitution arise from the existence of different vintages of capital equipment. It is shown that the effect on investment is nonmonotonic and depends on the relative likelihood of demand and supply constraints. Moreover, a wage increase can have an ambiguous effect on employment, raising it in some states while reducing it in others. The effect on the expectation of employment may be positive. The model of investment presented here relates most closely to the work of Albrecht and Hart (1983), Artus and Muet (1984), Lambert and Mulkay (1987) and Moene (1985), who assume a putty-clay technology, a fixed output price, and stochastic demand. The innovation in this note is that incentives to factor substitution arise from the existence of different vintages of installed capital equipment, rather than ex ante substitutability. Investment is undertaken to economize on labour costs by replacing older equipment and to meet additional demand. Higher wages reduce the return to incremental investment in supply-constrained states, by reducing the absolute profit margin. However, a wage increase raises the return to incremental investment in demand-constrained states. Since additional output cannot be sold, new equipment can only be used for replacing older vintages and economizing on labour costs. This return depends on the difference in labour costs between old and new equipment, which is greater with higher wages. Hence a wage increase reduces the return to incre- mental investment if supply-constrained states are more likely, but raises investment if the probability of being demand constrained is high. For a given distribution of future demand, I show that there is a critical level of the wage above which the probability of being supply-constrained becomes dominant. Investment is increasing in the wage if it is below this critical level, but decreasing thereafter. The possible positive effect of wage increases on employment may seem surprising and contrary to standard comparative statics under certainty, but it follows from the effects on investment and demand uncertainty. If higher wages reduce investment, this increases employment in demand- constrained states since the firm must use older equipment. This could more than offset the reduced employment in supply-constrained states, thereby increasing expected employment
1AC — FW
FW The standard is maximizing expected wellbeing. Prefer it: 1 Actor specificity: A Aggregation – every policy benefits some and harms others, which also means side constraints freeze action. B No act-omission distinction – choosing to omit is an act itself – governments decide not to act which means being presented with the aff creates a choice between two actions, neither of which is an omission C No intent-foresight distinction – If we foresee a consequence, then it becomes part of our deliberation which makes it intrinsic to our action since we intend it to happen o/w
2 Lexical pre-requisite: threats to bodily security preclude the ability for moral actors to effectively act upon other moral theories since they are in a constant state of crisis that inhibits the ideal moral conditions which other theories presuppose
3 Only consequentialism explains degrees of wrongness—if I break a promise to meet up for lunch, that is not as bad as breaking a promise to take a dying person to the hospital. Only the consequences of breaking the promise explain why the second one is much worse than the first. Intuitions outweigh—they’re the foundational basis for any argument and theories that contradict our intuitions are most likely false even if we can’t deductively determine why.
11/21/21
SEPTOCT-Stock V1
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 2 | Opponent: Peninsula RM | Judge: Lena Mizrahi 1rst adv is Econ
Vaccines will not cover LMICS until at least 2023—fortunately there is massive room for supply increase Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., RJP, DebateDrills.
Since consequentialist justifications AND of its vaccine?’18
Unequal vaccine distribution has massive economic costs even with conservative estimates that don’t account for the Delta variant Çakmakli 21-- Çakmakli, Cem Assistant Professor at Koç University. PhD: Pennsylvania State University et al. The economic case for global vaccinations: An epidemiological model with international production networks. No. w28395. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021. (AG DebateDrills)
Economic Collapse goes Nuclear. Tønnesson 15, Stein. "Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace." International Area Studies Review 18.3 (2015): 297-311. (the Department of Peace and Conflict, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Peace research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway)
Several recent works AND Beijing to intervene.
2nd adv- is Disease
The plan sets a precedent to seamlessly shift to a direct support model during pandemics--that solves future pandemics but avoids the innovation DA.
Solvency Plan: Member nations of the WTO ought to grant a TRIPS waiver for novel pandemics
-the TRIPS waiver will be triggered by conditions modified from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology: Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC 19). Center for Disease Control sub-branch.https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/outbreaks-epidemics-and-pandemics-what-you-need-to-know/ January 2nd,2019 The geographical area is world wide. It rapidly infects people at an elevated stage above epidemic is often caused by a new strain that has not circulated among people for a long time. Humans usually have little to no immunity against it. The illness spreads quickly from person-to-person worldwide. causes an elevated rate of death compared to a well known counterpart (IE. swine flu vs common flu) often creates social disruption, economic loss, and general hardship. India and South Africa have signaled ability to increase vaccine production after a TRIPS waiver—this is also our solvency advocate Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., AG, DebateDrills
Framing Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valueable and disvalueable – everything else regresses. Evolutionary knowledge is reliable – broad consensus and robust neuroscience prove. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S.
Pleasure is not addiction or RDS.
Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being or act hedonistic util. Prefer additionally –
1 Outweighs – A Predictability – most authors assume util when discussing the cost/benefit tradeoffs of voting B topic ed – other frameworks don’t engage with key questions of implemented policy impacts – that’s key, b/c we only have 2 months for this topic. C TJFs first because they assume the framework being good for debate 2 Death is bad and outweighs – a) agents can’t act if they fear for their bodily security which constrains every ethical theory, b) it destroys the subject itself – kills any ability to achieve value in ethics since life is a prerequisite which means it’s a side constraint since we can’t reach the end goal of ethics without life c) future generations 3 Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically denied.
Underview
Underview Advocacy 1 1AR theory is legit – anything else means infinite abuse – drop the debater, competing interps, no rvis and the highest layer of the round – 1AR is too short to make up for the time trade-off – no RVIs or 2NR theory and paradigm issues– 6 min 2NR means they can brute force me every time. 2 Assume I-meets to spec shells since they are infinitely regressive-- the neg can always say I didn't spec enough no matter how much I spec’d
3 PICs affirm – they don’t disprove the resolution as a general principle. For example, I can say that dogs have 4 legs, and a dog with 3 legs wouldn’t disprove that statement.
4 Give me new 2AR weighing and arguments - I only know what arguments I have to weigh against in the 2NR, but they know in the 1AR. 5 No new 2NR theory arguments – or else they can flood the 2ar with theory and win because the 2ar is too short
10/16/21
SEPTOCT-Stock V2
Tournament: Loyola | Round: 4 | Opponent: Byram Hills AK | Judge: James Struckert 1rst adv is Econ
Vaccines will not cover LMICS until at least 2023—fortunately there is massive room for supply increase Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., RJP, DebateDrills.
Since consequentialist justifications AND of its vaccine?’18
Unequal vaccine distribution has massive economic costs even with conservative estimates that don’t account for the Delta variant Çakmakli 21-- Çakmakli, Cem Assistant Professor at Koç University. PhD: Pennsylvania State University et al. The economic case for global vaccinations: An epidemiological model with international production networks. No. w28395. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021. (AG DebateDrills)
Economic Collapse goes Nuclear. Tønnesson 15, Stein. "Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace." International Area Studies Review 18.3 (2015): 297-311. (the Department of Peace and Conflict, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Peace research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway)
Several recent works AND Beijing to intervene.
2nd adv- is Disease
The plan sets a precedent to seamlessly shift to a direct support model during pandemics--that solves future pandemics but avoids the innovation DA.
Solvency Plan: Member nations of the WTO ought to grant a TRIPS waiver for novel pandemics
-the TRIPS waiver will be triggered by conditions modified from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology: Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC 19). Center for Disease Control sub-branch.https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/outbreaks-epidemics-and-pandemics-what-you-need-to-know/ January 2nd,2019 The geographical area is world wide. It rapidly infects people at an elevated stage above epidemic is often caused by a new strain that has not circulated among people for a long time. Humans usually have little to no immunity against it. The illness spreads quickly from person-to-person worldwide. causes an elevated rate of death compared to a well known counterpart (IE. swine flu vs common flu) often creates social disruption, economic loss, and general hardship. India and South Africa have signaled ability to increase vaccine production after a TRIPS waiver—this is also our solvency advocate Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., AG, DebateDrills
Framing Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valueable and disvalueable – everything else regresses. Evolutionary knowledge is reliable – broad consensus and robust neuroscience prove. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S.
Pleasure is not addiction or RDS.
Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being or act hedonistic util. Prefer additionally –
1 Outweighs – A Predictability – most authors assume util when discussing the cost/benefit tradeoffs of voting B topic ed – other frameworks don’t engage with key questions of implemented policy impacts – that’s key, b/c we only have 2 months for this topic. C TJFs first because they assume the framework being good for debate 2 Death is bad and outweighs – a) agents can’t act if they fear for their bodily security which constrains every ethical theory, b) it destroys the subject itself – kills any ability to achieve value in ethics since life is a prerequisite which means it’s a side constraint since we can’t reach the end goal of ethics without life c) future generations 3 Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically denied.
Underview
Underview Advocacy 1 1AR theory is legit – anything else means infinite abuse – drop the debater, competing interps, no rvis and the highest layer of the round – 1AR is too short to make up for the time trade-off – no RVIs or 2NR theory and paradigm issues– 6 min 2NR means they can brute force me every time. 2 Assume I-meets to spec shells since they are infinitely regressive-- the neg can always say I didn't spec enough no matter how much I spec’d
3 PICs affirm – they don’t disprove the resolution as a general principle. For example, I can say that dogs have 4 legs, and a dog with 3 legs wouldn’t disprove that statement.
4 Give me new 2AR weighing and arguments - I only know what arguments I have to weigh against in the 2NR, but they know in the 1AR. 5 No new 2NR theory arguments – or else they can flood the 2ar with theory and win because the 2ar is too short
10/16/21
SEPTOCT-Stock V3
Tournament: Nano Nagle Voices | Round: 2 | Opponent: Monta Vista Kr | Judge: Christopher Perez 1rst adv is Econ
Vaccines will not cover LMICS until at least 2023—fortunately there is massive room for supply increase Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., RJP, DebateDrills.
Since consequentialist justifications treat the value of IP as purely instrumental, they are also vulnerable to counterarguments showing that a sought-after goal is not the sole or most important end. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we submit that the vaccinating the world is an overriding goal. With existing IP protections intact, the world has fallen well short of this goal. Current forecasts show that at the current pace, there will not be enough vaccines to cover the world’s population until 2023 or 2024.15 IP protections further frustrate the goal of universal access to vaccines by limiting who can manufacturer them. The WHO reports that 80 of global sales for COVID-19 vaccines come from five large multinational corporations.16 Increasing the number of manufacturers globally would not only increase supply, but reduce prices, making vaccines more affordable to LMICS Low and Middle Income Countries. It would stabilise supply, minimising disruptions of the kind that occurred when India halted vaccine exports amidst a surge of COVID-19 cases. It might be objected that waiving IP protections will not increase supply, because it takes years to establish manufacturing capacity. However, since the pandemic began, we have learnt it takes less time. Repurposing facilities and vetting them for safety and quality can often happen in 6 or 7months, about half the time previously thought.17 Since COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic humanity faces, expanding manufacturing capacity is also necessary preparation for future pandemics. Nkengasong, Director of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, put the point bluntly, ‘Can a continent of 1.2billion people—projected to be 2.4billion in 30 years, where one in four people in the world will be African—continue to import 99 of its vaccine?’18 Unequal vaccine distribution has massive economic costs even with conservative estimates that don’t account for the Delta variant Çakmakli 21-- Çakmakli, Cem Assistant Professor at Koç University. PhD: Pennsylvania State University et al. The economic case for global vaccinations: An epidemiological model with international production networks. No. w28395. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021. (AG DebateDrills)
To estimate the costs of inequitable vaccine distribution, we develop a global SIR-multi-sectormacro framework and calibrate it to 65 countries-35 sectors. We incorporate sectoral heterogeneity in infections together with inter-industry and international trade and production linkages. Once we account for this economic interdependence of the economies, we reveal the substantial costs, up to 3 percent of advanced countries pre-pandemic GDPs, that will be borne by the vaccinated countries through their trade relationships with unvaccinated countries.36 Our framework captures the short run. We find that AEs may bear somewhere from 13 percent to 49 percent of the global losses arising from an inequitable distribution of vaccines in 2021. Globalization might have amplified the effects of the pandemic but it is also imperative for an equitable distribution of the vaccines because this is the only way for open economies with international linkages to have a robust recovery. There are substantial uncertainties ahead of us regarding the course of vaccine distribution. Our estimates are based on the available information about the pandemic. For example, we did not incorporate the recent developments on the variants into our analysis. To the extent that these variants threaten the efficacy of the current vaccines, there is even more urgency to make the existing vaccines globally available as soon as possible. Mutations that risk a prolonged pandemic would not only have further health costs but also escalate the economic costs that we estimated in our analysis.
Economic loss and slow supply recovery causes inflation deanchoring and econ collapse in advanced economies as well as extreme poverty in EMDEs World Bank 6-21 – World Bank Prospects Group; June 2021 Global Economic Prospects; https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/35647/9781464816659.pdf (AG DebateDrills) Since May 2020, however, inflation has gradually picked up. By April 2021, inflation had risen above pre-pandemic levels, in both advanced economies and EMDEs. The inflation pickup was broad-based and present in about four-fifths of countries, although the change in inflation varied widely, especially in EMDEs. The 2020 global recession featured the most muted inflation decline and fastest subsequent inflation upturn of the five global recession episodes of the past 50 years (box 4.1). While this behavior partly reflects lower levels of inflation at the beginning of 2020, purchasing managers report growing pressures on input as well as output prices in 2021 (figure 4.1). Looking ahead, as the global economy gradually reopens, monetary and fiscal policies continue to be accommodative to support the global recovery, and pent-up demand may be about to be unleashed in advanced economies.1 For major advanced economies, some have raised concerns that this confluence of factors may generate significant inflationary pressures (Blanchard and Pisani-Ferry 2020; Goodhart and Pradhan 2020; Landau 2021). Others, in contrast, see little reason for concern, at least for many advanced economies, because of the temporary nature of price pressures over the short-term as well as wellanchored inflation expectations and structural factors still depressing inflation (Ball et al. 2021; Gopinath 2021). If growing inflationary pressures cause financial market participants to become concerned about persistently higher inflation in advanced economies, they may reassess prospects for continued accommodative monetary policies by major central banks. This could trigger a significant rise in risk premia and borrowing costs. EMDEs are particularly vulnerable to such financial market disruptions because of their record high debt and a lagging economic recovery from the pandemic (chapter 1). In the event of financial market stress, sharp exchange rate depreciations and capital outflows may force them to abruptly tighten policies in a manner that could throttle their recoveries. Even in the absence of dislocating financial market stress, EMDES Emerging Market Developing Economies may face rising inflation as global price pressures feed into domestic inflation through input prices and exchange rate movements. A temporary increase in inflation may not warrant a monetary policy response. Again, if rapidly rising price pressures risk de-anchoring inflation expectations, EMDE central banks may be forced to tighten monetary policy before the recovery is fully entrenched. Persistently higher inflation would erode discretionary incomes of the poorest households and may tip some back into poverty (Ha, Kose, and Ohnsorge 2019). This is a particularly serious risk for LMICS low-income countries (LICs; box 4.2). Since food accounts for a substantial share of consumption in these countries, recent increase in food prices have led to higher inflation and compounded the challenges confronting the poor during the pandemic. Economic Collapse goes Nuclear. Tønnesson 15, Stein. "Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace." International Area Studies Review 18.3 (2015): 297-311. (the Department of Peace and Conflict, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Peace research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway) Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene.
Adv 2 – WTO Legitimacy WTO credibility is fragile right now– Baschuk 21 Bryce Baschuk, “WTO Chief Pursues a ‘Hectic’ Agenda to Fix World Trade’s Referee”, April 27 2021 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/wto-chief-pursues-a-hectic-agenda-to-fix-world-trade-s-referee The head of the WTO world Trade Organization raised an alarm about the credibility of the multilateral trading system, urging leaders to act fast to bolster the global economy with steps like fairer vaccine distribution and cooperate to resolve longer-term problems like overfishing. During her first two months, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has met with trade ministers around the globe to communicate a message that the WTO is important, it needs to be reformed and it needs to deliver results. So far, she says the reception from world leaders has been positive, but quickly translating that goodwill into substantive outcomes during a global pandemic is just as daunting as she anticipated. “The word I would use to describe it is absolutely hectic,” Okonjo-Iweala said in a phone interview on Tuesday when asked about her first few months in the job. “The challenges we thought were there are there and getting an agreement is not as easy because of longstanding ways of negotiating business positions.” Countries need to move past the notion that one country’s gain in international commerce is another’s loss, she said. “We need to break out of the zero-sum deadlock,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We need to remind the countries and members that the WTO is here to deliver for people. We can’t take 20 years to negotiate something.” Okonjo-Iweala said her top priority is to use trade to alleviate the pandemic and said her recent meeting with trade ministers and vaccine manufacturers provided a positive step in the right direction. More Pragmatism “That meeting yielded quite a lot,” she said. “I see more pragmatism on both sides.” An important component of the WTO’s trade and health agenda is a proposal from India and South Africa that seeks to temporarily waive enforcement of the WTO’s rules governing IP intellectual property for vaccines and other essential medical products. As of this week there are fresh signals that the Biden administration, which currently opposes a waiver to the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, wants vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to help ramp up U.S. pandemic assistance to the rest of the world. “There is movement,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “Are we there yet? No, but there is a little bit of change in the air among members. I think hopefully we will be able to come to some sort of a framework for the WTO ministers to bless.” “We don’t have time,” she added. “People are dying.” Okonjo-Iweala said this month’s vaccine meeting also revealed areas where the developing world can increase its capacity to produce more doses rather than waiting for rich countries to send them their excess supplies. She said various emerging markets such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, Indonesia and Egypt already have some capacity to begin producing vaccines for people living in developing economies.
A TRIPPS waiver is necessary to maintain WTO credibility – Meyer 21 Meyer, David, “The WTO’s survival hinges on the COVID-19 vaccine patent debate, waiver advocates warn”, June 18, 2021 https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/ The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform.
WTO is necessary for good US-China relations, which solves a bunch of existential threats – Shaffer 21 Shaffer, Gregory, “The US must engage with China — even when countering China”, June 21, 2021 https://thehill.com/opinion/international/559049-the-us-must-engage-with-china-even-when-countering-china A policy statement heard around the world is that U.S. engagement with China “has come to an end.” It suggests that the Biden administration is taking a hawkish approach toward China. That stance seemed clear as the U.S. worked the G7 and NATO communiqués to confront China with an “alliance of democracies.” Yet, peeling the layers, one comes to the necessity for a much more complex U.S. approach to China. Rather than ending engagement, the U.S. should be thinking about engagement’s different dimensions. Indeed, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, who made the remark, implicitly addressed three necessary forms of engagement that have been lacking. First, even when the United States aims to counter China, engagement remains essential. The U.S. will most effectively counter Chinese actions in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, along the border with India, and against allies’ economies, if the U.S. works closely with others. The Trump administration was notoriously unreliable and antagonistic towards allies. The United States and its allies will bolster their position in relation to China if they coordinate — an approach underscored at the recent G7 and NATO summits.
Yet, even in high-conflict situations, diplomacy and bargaining with China also will be important. Trade and technology policies are rife with rivalry and competition. These policies can trigger harmful tit-for-tat escalations if they are not grounded in agreed rules and understandings. These risks become particularly salient when economic and financial crises strike. Third-party institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) can help parties manage their conflicts so that they are not mutually destructive. China will be indispensable in any U.S. effort to update and “reform” WTO rules. Second, the US United States needs to work with China to effectively address common global, existential challenges. Campbell mentioned three: climate change, global pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. A signal success of the Obama administration was getting China to make commitments for the first time on emissions, which gave rise to the Paris Agreement. The U.S. also worked with China to stem Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It needs to do the same regarding North Korea’s nuclear program. Even in these areas of mutual concern, competition and rivalry are present. Yet such competition also can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, such as to provide vaccines globally and to develop green technologies. Third, Campbell stressed the critical importance of bipartisan engagement within the U.S. As politics in America degrades, the U.S. position against China weakens — and China knows this. The U.S. domestic inability to cooperate bolsters Chinese claims that the U.S. is declining and China is rising because China’s authoritarian model is superior to U.S. democracy. Unfortunately, bipartisan engagement to productively respond to China’s challenge — from the building of infrastructure, the support of science and education, and the defense of democracy — might be the most difficult to achieve. But it is critical.
Thus Plan: Member nations of the WTO ought to grant a TRIPS waiver for novel pandemics
Solvency -the TRIPS waiver will be triggered by conditions modified from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology:
Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC 19). Center for Disease Control sub-branch.https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/outbreaks-epidemics-and-pandemics-what-you-need-to-know/ January 2nd,2019 The geographical area is world wide. It rapidly infects people at an elevated stage above epidemic is often caused by a new strain that has not circulated among people for a long time. Humans usually have little to no immunity against it. The illness spreads quickly from person-to-person worldwide. causes an elevated rate of death compared to a well known counterpart (IE. swine flu vs common flu) often creates social disruption, economic loss, and general hardship.
Developing nations benefit from a TRIPS waiver—this is also our solvency advocate Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., AG, DebateDrills. This view has come under increasing fire. Two competing positions have emerged. First, India and South Africa petitioned the WTO for a temporary waiver of IP rights for medical products pertaining to preventing, containing or treating COVID19.2 The wavier would apply to all WTO members and lift restrictions in four TRIPS sections: copyright and related rights, industrial designs, patents and protection of undisclosed information. It would be annually reviewed and last for a set length, determined by the WTO Council. Proponents of the proposal argue that IP protections have ‘hindered urgent scale-up of vaccine production and that ‘many countries—especially LMICs countries—may face institutional and legal difficulties when using TRIPS flexibilities’.12 To break the divide, WTO Director General, Okonjo-Iweala, proposed ‘a third way’ in which ‘we… license manufacturing to countries so that we can have adequate supplies while still making sure that IP issues are taken care of.’13 This approach permits companies to retain ownership while licensing other companies to manufacture their vaccines. The plan is also a prerequisite to starting the WHO technology transfer hub WHO 4/21—WHO, 4-21-2021, “Establishment of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub to scale up global manufacturing,” https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/establishment-of-a-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-technology-transfer-hub-to-scale-up-global-manufacturing. (AG DebateDrills) WHO and its partners are seeking to expand the capacity of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to produce COVID-19 vaccines and scale up manufacturing to increase global access to these critical tools to bring the pandemic under control.
WHO will facilitate the establishment of one (or more, as appropriate) technology transfer hub(s) that will use a hub and spoke model (REF) to transfer a comprehensive technology package and provide appropriate training to interested manufacturers in LMICs. This initiative will initially prioritize the mRNA-vaccine technology2 but could expand to other technologies in the future. The intention is for these hubs to enable the establishment of production process at an industrial or semi-industrial level permitting training and provision of all necessary standard operating procedures for production and quality control. It is essential that the technology used is either free of IP intellectual property constraints in LMICs, or that such rights are made available to the technology hub and the future recipients of the technology through non-exclusive licenses to produce, export and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine in LMICs, including through the COVAX facility. Preference will be given to applicants who have already generated clinical data in humans, as such clinical data will contribute to accelerated approval of the vaccines in LMICs. It is anticipated that WHO will work with funders and donors to mobilize financial support to establish the hubs and, as they are being established, to support the transfer of technology to selected manufacturers in LMICs, taking into consideration the need to establish permanent vaccine production capacity in regions where this is currently mostly absent. This broader objective will ensure that all WHO regions will be able to produce vaccines as essential preparedness measures against future infectious threats Other countries have capacity to produce millions of doses Meldrum and Cheng 21-- ANDREW MELDRUM and MARIA CHENG, AP News, “Vaccine technology transfer center to open in South Africa,” 6/21/2021, https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-south-africa-africa-technology-coronavirus-vaccine-3cbdee395502802b55db2b5c81e6becd. (AG, DebateDrills) Poor countries in Africa and elsewhere are facing dire shortages of COVID-19 jabs despite some countries having the ability to produce vaccines, lamented Lara Dovifat, a campaign and advocacy adviser for Doctors Without Borders. “The faster companies share the know-how, the faster we can put an end to this pandemic,” she said in a statement. Numerous factories in Canada, Bangladesh, Denmark and elsewhere have previously called for companies to immediately share their technology, saying their idle production lines could be churning out millions of doses if they weren’t hampered by IP intellectual property and other restrictions. More than 1 billion coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally, but fewer than 1 have been in poor countries. South Africa accounts for nearly 40 of Africa’s total recorded COVID-19 infections and is currently suffering a rapid surge, but vaccine rollout has been slow, marked by delayed deliveries among other factors. South Africa currently does not manufacture any COVID-19 vaccines from scratch, but its Aspen Pharmacare assembles the JJ Johnson and Johnson shot by blending large batches of the ingredients sent by JandJ and then putting the product in vials and packaging them, a process known as fill and finish. Earlier this month the company had to discard 2 million doses because they had ingredients produced in the U.S. in a factory under suspect conditions. The plan sets a precedent to seamlessly shift to a direct support model during pandemics--that solves future pandemics but avoids the innovation DA. Brink Lindsey 21. Vice President, Niskanen Center; Writes for Brookings, “Why Intellectual Property and Pandemics Don’t Mix,” Brookings, June 3, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/, RJP, DebateDrills. PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCIES AND DIRECT GOVERNMENT SUPPORT For pandemics and other public health emergencies, patents’ mix of costs and benefits is misaligned with what is needed for an effective policy response. The basic patent bargain, even when well struck, is to pay for more innovation down the road with slower diffusion of innovation today. In the context of a pandemic, that bargain is a bad one and should be rejected entirely. Here the imperative is to accelerate the diffusion of vaccines and other treatments, not slow it down. Giving drug companies the power to hold things up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. What approach to encouraging innovation should we take instead? How do we incentivize drug makers to undertake the hefty RandD costs to develop new vaccines without giving them exclusive rights over their production and sale? The most effective approach during a public health crisis is direct government support: public funding of RandD, advance purchase commitments by the government to buy large numbers of doses at set prices, and other, related payouts. And when we pay drug makers, we should not hesitate to pay generously, even extravagantly: we want to offer drug companies big profits so that they prioritize this work above everything else, and so that they are ready and eager to come to the rescue again the next time there’s a crisis.It was direct support via Operation Warp Speed that made possible the astonishingly rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and then facilitated a relatively rapid rollout of vaccine distribution (relative, that is, to most of the rest of the world). And it’s worth noting that a major reason for the faster rollout here and in the United Kingdom compared to the European Union was the latter’s misguided penny-pinching. The EU bargained hard with firms to keep vaccine prices low, and as a result their citizens ended up in the back of the queue as various supply line kinks were being ironed out. This is particularly ironic since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was developed in Germany. As this fact underscores, the chief advantage of direct support isn’t to “get tough” with drug firms and keep a lid on their profits. Instead, it is to accelerate the end of the public health emergency by making sure drug makers profit handsomely from doing the right thing.Patent law and direct support should be seen not as either-or alternatives but as complements that apply different incentives to different circumstances and time horizons. Patent law provides a decentralized system for encouraging innovation. The government doesn’t presume to tell the industry which new drugs are needed; it simply incentivizes the development of whatever new drugs that pharmaceutical firms can come up with by offering them a temporary monopoly. It is important to note that patent law’s incentives offer no commercial guarantees. Yes, you can block other competitors for a number of years, but that still doesn’t ensure enough consumer demand for the new product to make it profitable. DIRECT SUPPORT MAKES PATENTS REDUNDANT The situation is different in a pandemic. Here the government knows exactly what it wants to incentivize: the creation of vaccines to prevent the spread of a specific virus and other drugs to treat that virus. Under these circumstances, the decentralized approach isn’t good enough. There is no time to sit back and let drug makers take the initiative on their own timeline. Instead, the government needs to be more involved to incentivize specific innovations now. As recompense for letting it call the shots (pardon the pun), the government sweetens the deal for drug companies by insulating them from commercial risk. If pharmaceutical firms develop effective vaccines and therapies, the government will buy large, predetermined quantities at prices set high enough to guarantee a healthy return. For the pharmaceutical industry, it is useful to conceive of patent law as the default regime for innovation promotion. It improves pharmaceutical companies’ incentives to develop new drugs while leaving them free to decide which new drugs to pursue – and also leaving them to bear all commercial risk. In a pandemic or other emergency, however, it is appropriate to shift to the direct support regime, in which the government focuses efforts on one disease. In this regime, it is important to note, the government provides qualitatively superior incentives to those offered under patent law. Not only does it offer public funding to cover the up-front costs of drug development, but it also provides advance purchase commitments that guarantee a healthy return. It should therefore be clear that the pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate basis for objecting to a TRIPS waiver. Since, because of the public health crisis, drug makers now qualify for the superior benefits of direct government support, they no longer need the default benefits of patent support. Arguments that a TRIPS waiver would deprive drug makers of the incentives they need to keep developing new drugs, when they are presently receiving the most favorable incentives available, can be dismissed as the worst sort of special pleading. That said, it is a serious mistake to try to cast the current crisis as a morality play in which drug makers wear the black hats and the choice at hand is between private profits and public health. We would have no chance of beating this virus without the formidable organizational capabilities of the pharmaceutical industry, and providing the appropriate incentives is essential to ensure that the industry plays its necessary and vital role. It is misguided to lament that private companies are profiting in the current crisis: those profits are a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering cost of this pandemic in lives and economic damage. What matters isn’t the existence or size of the profits, but how they are earned. We have good reason to want drug makers to profit from vaccinating the world: the comparative price is minuscule, and the incentive effects are a vital safeguard of public health in the event of future crises. What we want to avoid at all costs is putting drug makers in the position where drug companies can profit from standing in the way of rapid global vaccination. That is why intellectual property rights need to be taken out of the equation. Vaccinating the world in any kind of reasonable time frame will require large-scale technology transfer to drug firms in other countries and rapid expansion of their production capacity. And looking beyond the current pandemic to the longer term, we need ample, redundant global vaccine production capacity that is widely distributed around the planet. To achieve these goals as rapidly as possible will require the active cooperation of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, which is why the direct support model now needs to be extended. What is needed now is an Operation Warp Speed for the world, in which we make it worth current vaccine producers’ while to share their know-how broadly and ramp up global capacity. Here again, we must recognize that the choice isn’t between people on the one hand and profits on the other. Rather, the key to good pandemic response policy is ensuring that incentives are structured so that drug company profit-seeking and global public health are well aligned. That means opting out of the default, decentralized patent bargain in favor of generous but well-focused direct government support. Framing Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valueable and disvalueable – everything else regresses. Evolutionary knowledge is reliable – broad consensus and robust neuroscience prove. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events, situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable 10. Pleasure is a passive reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends. However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure 14. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction, homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in their pursuit. 15. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers 16 which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons 17–19 despite the notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO Charles Darwin and other biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness; yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact, Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life 20. Only genes that lead to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate, distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral reward functions have evolved to help individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will ultimately result in evolutionary advantage 21, additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment. Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence, under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine 22. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms may play a role 23. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these systems promoting hypodopaminergia 24. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce healthy behavioral changes, including stress management 25. The work of Esch and Stefano 26 concerning the link between compassion and love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades 26–37, but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends 38. However, it is not entirely clear exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear 39. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of pleasure 40. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum (VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good” response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade” that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors 3,6,41. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to optimism as a dopaminergic response 42. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions like panic and fear, as discussed above 43. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” 3. That is, dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli 44. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards 45. Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy, disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation 46. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease 47. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions 48. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. 48 suggested based on review that whereas the gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) 49. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence for our concerns was discovered 50 In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa et al. 50 small case found various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers examined 247 specimens of neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably, abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work for things that have no apparent short-term benefit 51. In similar work, Volkow and Bale 52 proposed a model in which dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS. Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being or act hedonistic util. Prefer additionally –
1 Outweighs – A Predictability – most authors assume util when discussing the cost/benefit tradeoffs of policy B topic ed – other frameworks don’t engage with key questions of implemented policy impacts – that’s key, b/c we only have 2 months for this topic. C TJFs first because they assume the framework being good for debate 2 Death is bad and outweighs – a) agents can’t act if they fear for their bodily security which constrains every ethical theory, b) it destroys the subject itself – kills any ability to achieve value in ethics since life is a prerequisite which means it’s a side constraint since we can’t reach the end goal of ethics without life c) the loss of all future genertaiosn would be trillions of lives o/w on magnitude 3 Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically denied.
10/16/21
SEPTOCT-Stock V4
Tournament: Nano Nagle Voices | Round: 3 | Opponent: Immaculate Heart RR | Judge: Nick Fleming 1rst adv is Econ
Vaccines will not cover LMICS until at least 2023—fortunately there is massive room for supply increase Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., RJP, DebateDrills.
Since consequentialist justifications treat the value of IP as purely instrumental, they are also vulnerable to counterarguments showing that a sought-after goal is not the sole or most important end. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we submit that the vaccinating the world is an overriding goal. With existing IP protections intact, the world has fallen well short of this goal. Current forecasts show that at the current pace, there will not be enough vaccines to cover the world’s population until 2023 or 2024.15 IP protections further frustrate the goal of universal access to vaccines by limiting who can manufacturer them. The WHO reports that 80 of global sales for COVID-19 vaccines come from five large multinational corporations.16 Increasing the number of manufacturers globally would not only increase supply, but reduce prices, making vaccines more affordable to LMICS Low and Middle Income Countries. It would stabilise supply, minimising disruptions of the kind that occurred when India halted vaccine exports amidst a surge of COVID-19 cases. It might be objected that waiving IP protections will not increase supply, because it takes years to establish manufacturing capacity. However, since the pandemic began, we have learnt it takes less time. Repurposing facilities and vetting them for safety and quality can often happen in 6 or 7months, about half the time previously thought.17 Since COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic humanity faces, expanding manufacturing capacity is also necessary preparation for future pandemics. Nkengasong, Director of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, put the point bluntly, ‘Can a continent of 1.2billion people—projected to be 2.4billion in 30 years, where one in four people in the world will be African—continue to import 99 of its vaccine?’18 Unequal vaccine distribution has massive economic costs even with conservative estimates that don’t account for the Delta variant Çakmakli 21-- Çakmakli, Cem Assistant Professor at Koç University. PhD: Pennsylvania State University et al. The economic case for global vaccinations: An epidemiological model with international production networks. No. w28395. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021. (AG DebateDrills)
To estimate the costs of inequitable vaccine distribution, we develop a global SIR-multi-sectormacro framework and calibrate it to 65 countries-35 sectors. We incorporate sectoral heterogeneity in infections together with inter-industry and international trade and production linkages. Once we account for this economic interdependence of the economies, we reveal the substantial costs, up to 3 percent of advanced countries pre-pandemic GDPs, that will be borne by the vaccinated countries through their trade relationships with unvaccinated countries.36 Our framework captures the short run. We find that AEs may bear somewhere from 13 percent to 49 percent of the global losses arising from an inequitable distribution of vaccines in 2021. Globalization might have amplified the effects of the pandemic but it is also imperative for an equitable distribution of the vaccines because this is the only way for open economies with international linkages to have a robust recovery. There are substantial uncertainties ahead of us regarding the course of vaccine distribution. Our estimates are based on the available information about the pandemic. For example, we did not incorporate the recent developments on the variants into our analysis. To the extent that these variants threaten the efficacy of the current vaccines, there is even more urgency to make the existing vaccines globally available as soon as possible. Mutations that risk a prolonged pandemic would not only have further health costs but also escalate the economic costs that we estimated in our analysis.
Economic loss and slow supply recovery causes inflation deanchoring and econ collapse in advanced economies as well as extreme poverty in EMDEs World Bank 6-21 – World Bank Prospects Group; June 2021 Global Economic Prospects; https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/35647/9781464816659.pdf (AG DebateDrills) Since May 2020, however, inflation has gradually picked up. By April 2021, inflation had risen above pre-pandemic levels, in both advanced economies and EMDEs. The inflation pickup was broad-based and present in about four-fifths of countries, although the change in inflation varied widely, especially in EMDEs. The 2020 global recession featured the most muted inflation decline and fastest subsequent inflation upturn of the five global recession episodes of the past 50 years (box 4.1). While this behavior partly reflects lower levels of inflation at the beginning of 2020, purchasing managers report growing pressures on input as well as output prices in 2021 (figure 4.1). Looking ahead, as the global economy gradually reopens, monetary and fiscal policies continue to be accommodative to support the global recovery, and pent-up demand may be about to be unleashed in advanced economies.1 For major advanced economies, some have raised concerns that this confluence of factors may generate significant inflationary pressures (Blanchard and Pisani-Ferry 2020; Goodhart and Pradhan 2020; Landau 2021). Others, in contrast, see little reason for concern, at least for many advanced economies, because of the temporary nature of price pressures over the short-term as well as wellanchored inflation expectations and structural factors still depressing inflation (Ball et al. 2021; Gopinath 2021). If growing inflationary pressures cause financial market participants to become concerned about persistently higher inflation in advanced economies, they may reassess prospects for continued accommodative monetary policies by major central banks. This could trigger a significant rise in risk premia and borrowing costs. EMDEs are particularly vulnerable to such financial market disruptions because of their record high debt and a lagging economic recovery from the pandemic (chapter 1). In the event of financial market stress, sharp exchange rate depreciations and capital outflows may force them to abruptly tighten policies in a manner that could throttle their recoveries. Even in the absence of dislocating financial market stress, EMDES Emerging Market Developing Economies may face rising inflation as global price pressures feed into domestic inflation through input prices and exchange rate movements. A temporary increase in inflation may not warrant a monetary policy response. Again, if rapidly rising price pressures risk de-anchoring inflation expectations, EMDE central banks may be forced to tighten monetary policy before the recovery is fully entrenched. Persistently higher inflation would erode discretionary incomes of the poorest households and may tip some back into poverty (Ha, Kose, and Ohnsorge 2019). This is a particularly serious risk for LMICS low-income countries (LICs; box 4.2). Since food accounts for a substantial share of consumption in these countries, recent increase in food prices have led to higher inflation and compounded the challenges confronting the poor during the pandemic. Economic Collapse goes Nuclear. Tønnesson 15, Stein. "Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace." International Area Studies Review 18.3 (2015): 297-311. (the Department of Peace and Conflict, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Peace research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway) Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene.
Adv 2 – WTO Legitimacy WTO credibility is fragile right now– Baschuk 21 Bryce Baschuk, “WTO Chief Pursues a ‘Hectic’ Agenda to Fix World Trade’s Referee”, April 27 2021 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/wto-chief-pursues-a-hectic-agenda-to-fix-world-trade-s-referee The head of the WTO world Trade Organization raised an alarm about the credibility of the multilateral trading system, urging leaders to act fast to bolster the global economy with steps like fairer vaccine distribution and cooperate to resolve longer-term problems like overfishing. During her first two months, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has met with trade ministers around the globe to communicate a message that the WTO is important, it needs to be reformed and it needs to deliver results. So far, she says the reception from world leaders has been positive, but quickly translating that goodwill into substantive outcomes during a global pandemic is just as daunting as she anticipated. “The word I would use to describe it is absolutely hectic,” Okonjo-Iweala said in a phone interview on Tuesday when asked about her first few months in the job. “The challenges we thought were there are there and getting an agreement is not as easy because of longstanding ways of negotiating business positions.” Countries need to move past the notion that one country’s gain in international commerce is another’s loss, she said. “We need to break out of the zero-sum deadlock,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We need to remind the countries and members that the WTO is here to deliver for people. We can’t take 20 years to negotiate something.” Okonjo-Iweala said her top priority is to use trade to alleviate the pandemic and said her recent meeting with trade ministers and vaccine manufacturers provided a positive step in the right direction. More Pragmatism “That meeting yielded quite a lot,” she said. “I see more pragmatism on both sides.” An important component of the WTO’s trade and health agenda is a proposal from India and South Africa that seeks to temporarily waive enforcement of the WTO’s rules governing IP intellectual property for vaccines and other essential medical products. As of this week there are fresh signals that the Biden administration, which currently opposes a waiver to the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, wants vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to help ramp up U.S. pandemic assistance to the rest of the world. “There is movement,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “Are we there yet? No, but there is a little bit of change in the air among members. I think hopefully we will be able to come to some sort of a framework for the WTO ministers to bless.” “We don’t have time,” she added. “People are dying.” Okonjo-Iweala said this month’s vaccine meeting also revealed areas where the developing world can increase its capacity to produce more doses rather than waiting for rich countries to send them their excess supplies. She said various emerging markets such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, Indonesia and Egypt already have some capacity to begin producing vaccines for people living in developing economies.
A TRIPPS waiver is necessary to maintain WTO credibility – Meyer 21 Meyer, David, “The WTO’s survival hinges on the COVID-19 vaccine patent debate, waiver advocates warn”, June 18, 2021 https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/ The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform.
WTO is necessary for good US-China relations, which solves a bunch of existential threats – Shaffer 21 Shaffer, Gregory, “The US must engage with China — even when countering China”, June 21, 2021 https://thehill.com/opinion/international/559049-the-us-must-engage-with-china-even-when-countering-china A policy statement heard around the world is that U.S. engagement with China “has come to an end.” It suggests that the Biden administration is taking a hawkish approach toward China. That stance seemed clear as the U.S. worked the G7 and NATO communiqués to confront China with an “alliance of democracies.” Yet, peeling the layers, one comes to the necessity for a much more complex U.S. approach to China. Rather than ending engagement, the U.S. should be thinking about engagement’s different dimensions. Indeed, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, who made the remark, implicitly addressed three necessary forms of engagement that have been lacking. First, even when the United States aims to counter China, engagement remains essential. The U.S. will most effectively counter Chinese actions in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, along the border with India, and against allies’ economies, if the U.S. works closely with others. The Trump administration was notoriously unreliable and antagonistic towards allies. The United States and its allies will bolster their position in relation to China if they coordinate — an approach underscored at the recent G7 and NATO summits.
Yet, even in high-conflict situations, diplomacy and bargaining with China also will be important. Trade and technology policies are rife with rivalry and competition. These policies can trigger harmful tit-for-tat escalations if they are not grounded in agreed rules and understandings. These risks become particularly salient when economic and financial crises strike. Third-party institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) can help parties manage their conflicts so that they are not mutually destructive. China will be indispensable in any U.S. effort to update and “reform” WTO rules. Second, the US United States needs to work with China to effectively address common global, existential challenges. Campbell mentioned three: climate change, global pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. A signal success of the Obama administration was getting China to make commitments for the first time on emissions, which gave rise to the Paris Agreement. The U.S. also worked with China to stem Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It needs to do the same regarding North Korea’s nuclear program. Even in these areas of mutual concern, competition and rivalry are present. Yet such competition also can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, such as to provide vaccines globally and to develop green technologies. Third, Campbell stressed the critical importance of bipartisan engagement within the U.S. As politics in America degrades, the U.S. position against China weakens — and China knows this. The U.S. domestic inability to cooperate bolsters Chinese claims that the U.S. is declining and China is rising because China’s authoritarian model is superior to U.S. democracy. Unfortunately, bipartisan engagement to productively respond to China’s challenge — from the building of infrastructure, the support of science and education, and the defense of democracy — might be the most difficult to achieve. But it is critical.
Thus Plan: Member nations of the WTO ought to grant a TRIPS waiver for novel pandemics
Solvency -the TRIPS waiver will be triggered by conditions modified from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology:
Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC 19). Center for Disease Control sub-branch.https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/outbreaks-epidemics-and-pandemics-what-you-need-to-know/ January 2nd,2019 The geographical area is world wide. It rapidly infects people at an elevated stage above epidemic is often caused by a new strain that has not circulated among people for a long time. Humans usually have little to no immunity against it. The illness spreads quickly from person-to-person worldwide. causes an elevated rate of death compared to a well known counterpart (IE. swine flu vs common flu) often creates social disruption, economic loss, and general hardship.
Developing nations benefit from a TRIPS waiver—this is also our solvency advocate Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., AG, DebateDrills. This view has come under increasing fire. Two competing positions have emerged. First, India and South Africa petitioned the WTO for a temporary waiver of IP rights for medical products pertaining to preventing, containing or treating COVID19.2 The wavier would apply to all WTO members and lift restrictions in four TRIPS sections: copyright and related rights, industrial designs, patents and protection of undisclosed information. It would be annually reviewed and last for a set length, determined by the WTO Council. Proponents of the proposal argue that IP protections have ‘hindered urgent scale-up of vaccine production and that ‘many countries—especially LMICs countries—may face institutional and legal difficulties when using TRIPS flexibilities’.12 To break the divide, WTO Director General, Okonjo-Iweala, proposed ‘a third way’ in which ‘we… license manufacturing to countries so that we can have adequate supplies while still making sure that IP issues are taken care of.’13 This approach permits companies to retain ownership while licensing other companies to manufacture their vaccines. The plan is also a prerequisite to starting the WHO technology transfer hub WHO 4/21—WHO, 4-21-2021, “Establishment of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub to scale up global manufacturing,” https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/establishment-of-a-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-technology-transfer-hub-to-scale-up-global-manufacturing. (AG DebateDrills) WHO and its partners are seeking to expand the capacity of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to produce COVID-19 vaccines and scale up manufacturing to increase global access to these critical tools to bring the pandemic under control.
WHO will facilitate the establishment of one (or more, as appropriate) technology transfer hub(s) that will use a hub and spoke model (REF) to transfer a comprehensive technology package and provide appropriate training to interested manufacturers in LMICs. This initiative will initially prioritize the mRNA-vaccine technology2 but could expand to other technologies in the future. The intention is for these hubs to enable the establishment of production process at an industrial or semi-industrial level permitting training and provision of all necessary standard operating procedures for production and quality control. It is essential that the technology used is either free of IP intellectual property constraints in LMICs, or that such rights are made available to the technology hub and the future recipients of the technology through non-exclusive licenses to produce, export and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine in LMICs, including through the COVAX facility. Preference will be given to applicants who have already generated clinical data in humans, as such clinical data will contribute to accelerated approval of the vaccines in LMICs. It is anticipated that WHO will work with funders and donors to mobilize financial support to establish the hubs and, as they are being established, to support the transfer of technology to selected manufacturers in LMICs, taking into consideration the need to establish permanent vaccine production capacity in regions where this is currently mostly absent. This broader objective will ensure that all WHO regions will be able to produce vaccines as essential preparedness measures against future infectious threats Other countries have capacity to produce millions of doses Meldrum and Cheng 21-- ANDREW MELDRUM and MARIA CHENG, AP News, “Vaccine technology transfer center to open in South Africa,” 6/21/2021, https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-south-africa-africa-technology-coronavirus-vaccine-3cbdee395502802b55db2b5c81e6becd. (AG, DebateDrills) Poor countries in Africa and elsewhere are facing dire shortages of COVID-19 jabs despite some countries having the ability to produce vaccines, lamented Lara Dovifat, a campaign and advocacy adviser for Doctors Without Borders. “The faster companies share the know-how, the faster we can put an end to this pandemic,” she said in a statement. Numerous factories in Canada, Bangladesh, Denmark and elsewhere have previously called for companies to immediately share their technology, saying their idle production lines could be churning out millions of doses if they weren’t hampered by IP intellectual property and other restrictions. More than 1 billion coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally, but fewer than 1 have been in poor countries. South Africa accounts for nearly 40 of Africa’s total recorded COVID-19 infections and is currently suffering a rapid surge, but vaccine rollout has been slow, marked by delayed deliveries among other factors. South Africa currently does not manufacture any COVID-19 vaccines from scratch, but its Aspen Pharmacare assembles the JJ Johnson and Johnson shot by blending large batches of the ingredients sent by JandJ and then putting the product in vials and packaging them, a process known as fill and finish. Earlier this month the company had to discard 2 million doses because they had ingredients produced in the U.S. in a factory under suspect conditions. The plan sets a precedent to seamlessly shift to a direct support model during pandemics--that solves future pandemics but avoids the innovation DA. Brink Lindsey 21. Vice President, Niskanen Center; Writes for Brookings, “Why Intellectual Property and Pandemics Don’t Mix,” Brookings, June 3, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/, RJP, DebateDrills. PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCIES AND DIRECT GOVERNMENT SUPPORT For pandemics and other public health emergencies, patents’ mix of costs and benefits is misaligned with what is needed for an effective policy response. The basic patent bargain, even when well struck, is to pay for more innovation down the road with slower diffusion of innovation today. In the context of a pandemic, that bargain is a bad one and should be rejected entirely. Here the imperative is to accelerate the diffusion of vaccines and other treatments, not slow it down. Giving drug companies the power to hold things up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. What approach to encouraging innovation should we take instead? How do we incentivize drug makers to undertake the hefty RandD costs to develop new vaccines without giving them exclusive rights over their production and sale? The most effective approach during a public health crisis is direct government support: public funding of RandD, advance purchase commitments by the government to buy large numbers of doses at set prices, and other, related payouts. And when we pay drug makers, we should not hesitate to pay generously, even extravagantly: we want to offer drug companies big profits so that they prioritize this work above everything else, and so that they are ready and eager to come to the rescue again the next time there’s a crisis.It was direct support via Operation Warp Speed that made possible the astonishingly rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and then facilitated a relatively rapid rollout of vaccine distribution (relative, that is, to most of the rest of the world). And it’s worth noting that a major reason for the faster rollout here and in the United Kingdom compared to the European Union was the latter’s misguided penny-pinching. The EU bargained hard with firms to keep vaccine prices low, and as a result their citizens ended up in the back of the queue as various supply line kinks were being ironed out. This is particularly ironic since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was developed in Germany. As this fact underscores, the chief advantage of direct support isn’t to “get tough” with drug firms and keep a lid on their profits. Instead, it is to accelerate the end of the public health emergency by making sure drug makers profit handsomely from doing the right thing.Patent law and direct support should be seen not as either-or alternatives but as complements that apply different incentives to different circumstances and time horizons. Patent law provides a decentralized system for encouraging innovation. The government doesn’t presume to tell the industry which new drugs are needed; it simply incentivizes the development of whatever new drugs that pharmaceutical firms can come up with by offering them a temporary monopoly. It is important to note that patent law’s incentives offer no commercial guarantees. Yes, you can block other competitors for a number of years, but that still doesn’t ensure enough consumer demand for the new product to make it profitable. DIRECT SUPPORT MAKES PATENTS REDUNDANT The situation is different in a pandemic. Here the government knows exactly what it wants to incentivize: the creation of vaccines to prevent the spread of a specific virus and other drugs to treat that virus. Under these circumstances, the decentralized approach isn’t good enough. There is no time to sit back and let drug makers take the initiative on their own timeline. Instead, the government needs to be more involved to incentivize specific innovations now. As recompense for letting it call the shots (pardon the pun), the government sweetens the deal for drug companies by insulating them from commercial risk. If pharmaceutical firms develop effective vaccines and therapies, the government will buy large, predetermined quantities at prices set high enough to guarantee a healthy return. For the pharmaceutical industry, it is useful to conceive of patent law as the default regime for innovation promotion. It improves pharmaceutical companies’ incentives to develop new drugs while leaving them free to decide which new drugs to pursue – and also leaving them to bear all commercial risk. In a pandemic or other emergency, however, it is appropriate to shift to the direct support regime, in which the government focuses efforts on one disease. In this regime, it is important to note, the government provides qualitatively superior incentives to those offered under patent law. Not only does it offer public funding to cover the up-front costs of drug development, but it also provides advance purchase commitments that guarantee a healthy return. It should therefore be clear that the pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate basis for objecting to a TRIPS waiver. Since, because of the public health crisis, drug makers now qualify for the superior benefits of direct government support, they no longer need the default benefits of patent support. Arguments that a TRIPS waiver would deprive drug makers of the incentives they need to keep developing new drugs, when they are presently receiving the most favorable incentives available, can be dismissed as the worst sort of special pleading. That said, it is a serious mistake to try to cast the current crisis as a morality play in which drug makers wear the black hats and the choice at hand is between private profits and public health. We would have no chance of beating this virus without the formidable organizational capabilities of the pharmaceutical industry, and providing the appropriate incentives is essential to ensure that the industry plays its necessary and vital role. It is misguided to lament that private companies are profiting in the current crisis: those profits are a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering cost of this pandemic in lives and economic damage. What matters isn’t the existence or size of the profits, but how they are earned. We have good reason to want drug makers to profit from vaccinating the world: the comparative price is minuscule, and the incentive effects are a vital safeguard of public health in the event of future crises. What we want to avoid at all costs is putting drug makers in the position where drug companies can profit from standing in the way of rapid global vaccination. That is why intellectual property rights need to be taken out of the equation. Vaccinating the world in any kind of reasonable time frame will require large-scale technology transfer to drug firms in other countries and rapid expansion of their production capacity. And looking beyond the current pandemic to the longer term, we need ample, redundant global vaccine production capacity that is widely distributed around the planet. To achieve these goals as rapidly as possible will require the active cooperation of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, which is why the direct support model now needs to be extended. What is needed now is an Operation Warp Speed for the world, in which we make it worth current vaccine producers’ while to share their know-how broadly and ramp up global capacity. Here again, we must recognize that the choice isn’t between people on the one hand and profits on the other. Rather, the key to good pandemic response policy is ensuring that incentives are structured so that drug company profit-seeking and global public health are well aligned. That means opting out of the default, decentralized patent bargain in favor of generous but well-focused direct government support. Framing Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valueable and disvalueable – everything else regresses. Evolutionary knowledge is reliable – broad consensus and robust neuroscience prove. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events, situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable 10. Pleasure is a passive reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends. However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure 14. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction, homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in their pursuit. 15. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers 16 which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons 17–19 despite the notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO Charles Darwin and other biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness; yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact, Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life 20. Only genes that lead to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate, distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral reward functions have evolved to help individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will ultimately result in evolutionary advantage 21, additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment. Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence, under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine 22. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms may play a role 23. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these systems promoting hypodopaminergia 24. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce healthy behavioral changes, including stress management 25. The work of Esch and Stefano 26 concerning the link between compassion and love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades 26–37, but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends 38. However, it is not entirely clear exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear 39. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of pleasure 40. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum (VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good” response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade” that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors 3,6,41. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to optimism as a dopaminergic response 42. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions like panic and fear, as discussed above 43. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” 3. That is, dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli 44. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards 45. Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy, disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation 46. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease 47. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions 48. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. 48 suggested based on review that whereas the gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) 49. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence for our concerns was discovered 50 In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa et al. 50 small case found various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers examined 247 specimens of neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably, abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work for things that have no apparent short-term benefit 51. In similar work, Volkow and Bale 52 proposed a model in which dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS. Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being or act hedonistic util. Prefer additionally –
1 Outweighs – A Predictability – most authors assume util when discussing the cost/benefit tradeoffs of policy B topic ed – other frameworks don’t engage with key questions of implemented policy impacts – that’s key, b/c we only have 2 months for this topic. C TJFs first because they assume the framework being good for debate 2 Death is bad and outweighs – a) agents can’t act if they fear for their bodily security which constrains every ethical theory, b) it destroys the subject itself – kills any ability to achieve value in ethics since life is a prerequisite which means it’s a side constraint since we can’t reach the end goal of ethics without life c) the loss of all future genertaiosn would be trillions of lives o/w on magnitude 3 Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically denied.
Vaccines will not cover LMICS until at least 2023—fortunately there is massive room for supply increase Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., RJP, DebateDrills.
Since consequentialist justifications treat the value of IP as purely instrumental, they are also vulnerable to counterarguments showing that a sought-after goal is not the sole or most important end. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we submit that the vaccinating the world is an overriding goal. With existing IP protections intact, the world has fallen well short of this goal. Current forecasts show that at the current pace, there will not be enough vaccines to cover the world’s population until 2023 or 2024.15 IP protections further frustrate the goal of universal access to vaccines by limiting who can manufacturer them. The WHO reports that 80 of global sales for COVID-19 vaccines come from five large multinational corporations.16 Increasing the number of manufacturers globally would not only increase supply, but reduce prices, making vaccines more affordable to LMICS Low and Middle Income Countries. It would stabilise supply, minimising disruptions of the kind that occurred when India halted vaccine exports amidst a surge of COVID-19 cases. It might be objected that waiving IP protections will not increase supply, because it takes years to establish manufacturing capacity. However, since the pandemic began, we have learnt it takes less time. Repurposing facilities and vetting them for safety and quality can often happen in 6 or 7months, about half the time previously thought.17 Since COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic humanity faces, expanding manufacturing capacity is also necessary preparation for future pandemics. Nkengasong, Director of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, put the point bluntly, ‘Can a continent of 1.2billion people—projected to be 2.4billion in 30 years, where one in four people in the world will be African—continue to import 99 of its vaccine?’18 Unequal vaccine distribution has massive economic costs even with conservative estimates that don’t account for the Delta variant Çakmakli 21-- Çakmakli, Cem Assistant Professor at Koç University. PhD: Pennsylvania State University et al. The economic case for global vaccinations: An epidemiological model with international production networks. No. w28395. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021. (AG DebateDrills)
To estimate the costs of inequitable vaccine distribution, we develop a global SIR-multi-sectormacro framework and calibrate it to 65 countries-35 sectors. We incorporate sectoral heterogeneity in infections together with inter-industry and international trade and production linkages. Once we account for this economic interdependence of the economies, we reveal the substantial costs, up to 3 percent of advanced countries pre-pandemic GDPs, that will be borne by the vaccinated countries through their trade relationships with unvaccinated countries.36 Our framework captures the short run. We find that AEs may bear somewhere from 13 percent to 49 percent of the global losses arising from an inequitable distribution of vaccines in 2021. Globalization might have amplified the effects of the pandemic but it is also imperative for an equitable distribution of the vaccines because this is the only way for open economies with international linkages to have a robust recovery. There are substantial uncertainties ahead of us regarding the course of vaccine distribution. Our estimates are based on the available information about the pandemic. For example, we did not incorporate the recent developments on the variants into our analysis. To the extent that these variants threaten the efficacy of the current vaccines, there is even more urgency to make the existing vaccines globally available as soon as possible. Mutations that risk a prolonged pandemic would not only have further health costs but also escalate the economic costs that we estimated in our analysis.
Economic loss and slow supply recovery causes inflation deanchoring and econ collapse in advanced economies as well as extreme poverty in EMDEs World Bank 6-21 – World Bank Prospects Group; June 2021 Global Economic Prospects; https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/35647/9781464816659.pdf (AG DebateDrills) Since May 2020, however, inflation has gradually picked up. By April 2021, inflation had risen above pre-pandemic levels, in both advanced economies and EMDEs. The inflation pickup was broad-based and present in about four-fifths of countries, although the change in inflation varied widely, especially in EMDEs. The 2020 global recession featured the most muted inflation decline and fastest subsequent inflation upturn of the five global recession episodes of the past 50 years (box 4.1). While this behavior partly reflects lower levels of inflation at the beginning of 2020, purchasing managers report growing pressures on input as well as output prices in 2021 (figure 4.1). Looking ahead, as the global economy gradually reopens, monetary and fiscal policies continue to be accommodative to support the global recovery, and pent-up demand may be about to be unleashed in advanced economies.1 For major advanced economies, some have raised concerns that this confluence of factors may generate significant inflationary pressures (Blanchard and Pisani-Ferry 2020; Goodhart and Pradhan 2020; Landau 2021). Others, in contrast, see little reason for concern, at least for many advanced economies, because of the temporary nature of price pressures over the short-term as well as wellanchored inflation expectations and structural factors still depressing inflation (Ball et al. 2021; Gopinath 2021). If growing inflationary pressures cause financial market participants to become concerned about persistently higher inflation in advanced economies, they may reassess prospects for continued accommodative monetary policies by major central banks. This could trigger a significant rise in risk premia and borrowing costs. EMDEs are particularly vulnerable to such financial market disruptions because of their record high debt and a lagging economic recovery from the pandemic (chapter 1). In the event of financial market stress, sharp exchange rate depreciations and capital outflows may force them to abruptly tighten policies in a manner that could throttle their recoveries. Even in the absence of dislocating financial market stress, EMDES Emerging Market Developing Economies may face rising inflation as global price pressures feed into domestic inflation through input prices and exchange rate movements. A temporary increase in inflation may not warrant a monetary policy response. Again, if rapidly rising price pressures risk de-anchoring inflation expectations, EMDE central banks may be forced to tighten monetary policy before the recovery is fully entrenched. Persistently higher inflation would erode discretionary incomes of the poorest households and may tip some back into poverty (Ha, Kose, and Ohnsorge 2019). This is a particularly serious risk for LMICS low-income countries (LICs; box 4.2). Since food accounts for a substantial share of consumption in these countries, recent increase in food prices have led to higher inflation and compounded the challenges confronting the poor during the pandemic. Economic Collapse goes Nuclear. Tønnesson 15, Stein. "Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace." International Area Studies Review 18.3 (2015): 297-311. (the Department of Peace and Conflict, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Peace research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway) Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene.
Adv 2 – WTO Legitimacy WTO credibility is fragile right now– Baschuk 21 Bryce Baschuk, “WTO Chief Pursues a ‘Hectic’ Agenda to Fix World Trade’s Referee”, April 27 2021 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/wto-chief-pursues-a-hectic-agenda-to-fix-world-trade-s-referee The head of the WTO world Trade Organization raised an alarm about the credibility of the multilateral trading system, urging leaders to act fast to bolster the global economy with steps like fairer vaccine distribution and cooperate to resolve longer-term problems like overfishing. During her first two months, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has met with trade ministers around the globe to communicate a message that the WTO is important, it needs to be reformed and it needs to deliver results. So far, she says the reception from world leaders has been positive, but quickly translating that goodwill into substantive outcomes during a global pandemic is just as daunting as she anticipated. “The word I would use to describe it is absolutely hectic,” Okonjo-Iweala said in a phone interview on Tuesday when asked about her first few months in the job. “The challenges we thought were there are there and getting an agreement is not as easy because of longstanding ways of negotiating business positions.” Countries need to move past the notion that one country’s gain in international commerce is another’s loss, she said. “We need to break out of the zero-sum deadlock,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We need to remind the countries and members that the WTO is here to deliver for people. We can’t take 20 years to negotiate something.” Okonjo-Iweala said her top priority is to use trade to alleviate the pandemic and said her recent meeting with trade ministers and vaccine manufacturers provided a positive step in the right direction. More Pragmatism “That meeting yielded quite a lot,” she said. “I see more pragmatism on both sides.” An important component of the WTO’s trade and health agenda is a proposal from India and South Africa that seeks to temporarily waive enforcement of the WTO’s rules governing IP intellectual property for vaccines and other essential medical products. As of this week there are fresh signals that the Biden administration, which currently opposes a waiver to the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, wants vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to help ramp up U.S. pandemic assistance to the rest of the world. “There is movement,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “Are we there yet? No, but there is a little bit of change in the air among members. I think hopefully we will be able to come to some sort of a framework for the WTO ministers to bless.” “We don’t have time,” she added. “People are dying.” Okonjo-Iweala said this month’s vaccine meeting also revealed areas where the developing world can increase its capacity to produce more doses rather than waiting for rich countries to send them their excess supplies. She said various emerging markets such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, Indonesia and Egypt already have some capacity to begin producing vaccines for people living in developing economies.
A TRIPPS waiver is necessary to maintain WTO credibility – Meyer 21 Meyer, David, “The WTO’s survival hinges on the COVID-19 vaccine patent debate, waiver advocates warn”, June 18, 2021 https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/ The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform.
WTO is necessary for good US-China relations, which solves a bunch of existential threats – Shaffer 21 Shaffer, Gregory, “The US must engage with China — even when countering China”, June 21, 2021 https://thehill.com/opinion/international/559049-the-us-must-engage-with-china-even-when-countering-china A policy statement heard around the world is that U.S. engagement with China “has come to an end.” It suggests that the Biden administration is taking a hawkish approach toward China. That stance seemed clear as the U.S. worked the G7 and NATO communiqués to confront China with an “alliance of democracies.” Yet, peeling the layers, one comes to the necessity for a much more complex U.S. approach to China. Rather than ending engagement, the U.S. should be thinking about engagement’s different dimensions. Indeed, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, who made the remark, implicitly addressed three necessary forms of engagement that have been lacking. First, even when the United States aims to counter China, engagement remains essential. The U.S. will most effectively counter Chinese actions in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, along the border with India, and against allies’ economies, if the U.S. works closely with others. The Trump administration was notoriously unreliable and antagonistic towards allies. The United States and its allies will bolster their position in relation to China if they coordinate — an approach underscored at the recent G7 and NATO summits.
Yet, even in high-conflict situations, diplomacy and bargaining with China also will be important. Trade and technology policies are rife with rivalry and competition. These policies can trigger harmful tit-for-tat escalations if they are not grounded in agreed rules and understandings. These risks become particularly salient when economic and financial crises strike. Third-party institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) can help parties manage their conflicts so that they are not mutually destructive. China will be indispensable in any U.S. effort to update and “reform” WTO rules. Second, the US United States needs to work with China to effectively address common global, existential challenges. Campbell mentioned three: climate change, global pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. A signal success of the Obama administration was getting China to make commitments for the first time on emissions, which gave rise to the Paris Agreement. The U.S. also worked with China to stem Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It needs to do the same regarding North Korea’s nuclear program. Even in these areas of mutual concern, competition and rivalry are present. Yet such competition also can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, such as to provide vaccines globally and to develop green technologies. Third, Campbell stressed the critical importance of bipartisan engagement within the U.S. As politics in America degrades, the U.S. position against China weakens — and China knows this. The U.S. domestic inability to cooperate bolsters Chinese claims that the U.S. is declining and China is rising because China’s authoritarian model is superior to U.S. democracy. Unfortunately, bipartisan engagement to productively respond to China’s challenge — from the building of infrastructure, the support of science and education, and the defense of democracy — might be the most difficult to achieve. But it is critical.
Thus Plan: Member nations of the WTO ought to grant a TRIPS waiver for novel pandemics
Solvency -the TRIPS waiver will be triggered by conditions modified from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology:
Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC 19). Center for Disease Control sub-branch.https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/outbreaks-epidemics-and-pandemics-what-you-need-to-know/ January 2nd,2019 The geographical area is world wide. It rapidly infects people at an elevated stage above epidemic is often caused by a new strain that has not circulated among people for a long time. Humans usually have little to no immunity against it. The illness spreads quickly from person-to-person worldwide. causes an elevated rate of death compared to a well known counterpart (IE. swine flu vs common flu) often creates social disruption, economic loss, and general hardship.
Developing nations benefit from a TRIPS waiver—this is also our solvency advocate Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., AG, DebateDrills. This view has come under increasing fire. Two competing positions have emerged. First, India and South Africa petitioned the WTO for a temporary waiver of IP rights for medical products pertaining to preventing, containing or treating COVID19.2 The wavier would apply to all WTO members and lift restrictions in four TRIPS sections: copyright and related rights, industrial designs, patents and protection of undisclosed information. It would be annually reviewed and last for a set length, determined by the WTO Council. Proponents of the proposal argue that IP protections have ‘hindered urgent scale-up of vaccine production and that ‘many countries—especially LMICs countries—may face institutional and legal difficulties when using TRIPS flexibilities’.12 To break the divide, WTO Director General, Okonjo-Iweala, proposed ‘a third way’ in which ‘we… license manufacturing to countries so that we can have adequate supplies while still making sure that IP issues are taken care of.’13 This approach permits companies to retain ownership while licensing other companies to manufacture their vaccines. The plan is also a prerequisite to starting the WHO technology transfer hub WHO 4/21—WHO, 4-21-2021, “Establishment of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub to scale up global manufacturing,” https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/establishment-of-a-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-technology-transfer-hub-to-scale-up-global-manufacturing. (AG DebateDrills) WHO and its partners are seeking to expand the capacity of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to produce COVID-19 vaccines and scale up manufacturing to increase global access to these critical tools to bring the pandemic under control.
WHO will facilitate the establishment of one (or more, as appropriate) technology transfer hub(s) that will use a hub and spoke model (REF) to transfer a comprehensive technology package and provide appropriate training to interested manufacturers in LMICs. This initiative will initially prioritize the mRNA-vaccine technology2 but could expand to other technologies in the future. The intention is for these hubs to enable the establishment of production process at an industrial or semi-industrial level permitting training and provision of all necessary standard operating procedures for production and quality control. It is essential that the technology used is either free of IP intellectual property constraints in LMICs, or that such rights are made available to the technology hub and the future recipients of the technology through non-exclusive licenses to produce, export and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine in LMICs, including through the COVAX facility. Preference will be given to applicants who have already generated clinical data in humans, as such clinical data will contribute to accelerated approval of the vaccines in LMICs. It is anticipated that WHO will work with funders and donors to mobilize financial support to establish the hubs and, as they are being established, to support the transfer of technology to selected manufacturers in LMICs, taking into consideration the need to establish permanent vaccine production capacity in regions where this is currently mostly absent. This broader objective will ensure that all WHO regions will be able to produce vaccines as essential preparedness measures against future infectious threats Other countries have capacity to produce millions of doses Meldrum and Cheng 21-- ANDREW MELDRUM and MARIA CHENG, AP News, “Vaccine technology transfer center to open in South Africa,” 6/21/2021, https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-south-africa-africa-technology-coronavirus-vaccine-3cbdee395502802b55db2b5c81e6becd. (AG, DebateDrills) Poor countries in Africa and elsewhere are facing dire shortages of COVID-19 jabs despite some countries having the ability to produce vaccines, lamented Lara Dovifat, a campaign and advocacy adviser for Doctors Without Borders. “The faster companies share the know-how, the faster we can put an end to this pandemic,” she said in a statement. Numerous factories in Canada, Bangladesh, Denmark and elsewhere have previously called for companies to immediately share their technology, saying their idle production lines could be churning out millions of doses if they weren’t hampered by IP intellectual property and other restrictions. More than 1 billion coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally, but fewer than 1 have been in poor countries. South Africa accounts for nearly 40 of Africa’s total recorded COVID-19 infections and is currently suffering a rapid surge, but vaccine rollout has been slow, marked by delayed deliveries among other factors. South Africa currently does not manufacture any COVID-19 vaccines from scratch, but its Aspen Pharmacare assembles the JJ Johnson and Johnson shot by blending large batches of the ingredients sent by JandJ and then putting the product in vials and packaging them, a process known as fill and finish. Earlier this month the company had to discard 2 million doses because they had ingredients produced in the U.S. in a factory under suspect conditions. The plan sets a precedent to seamlessly shift to a direct support model during pandemics--that solves future pandemics but avoids the innovation DA. Brink Lindsey 21. Vice President, Niskanen Center; Writes for Brookings, “Why Intellectual Property and Pandemics Don’t Mix,” Brookings, June 3, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/, RJP, DebateDrills. PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCIES AND DIRECT GOVERNMENT SUPPORT For pandemics and other public health emergencies, patents’ mix of costs and benefits is misaligned with what is needed for an effective policy response. The basic patent bargain, even when well struck, is to pay for more innovation down the road with slower diffusion of innovation today. In the context of a pandemic, that bargain is a bad one and should be rejected entirely. Here the imperative is to accelerate the diffusion of vaccines and other treatments, not slow it down. Giving drug companies the power to hold things up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. What approach to encouraging innovation should we take instead? How do we incentivize drug makers to undertake the hefty RandD costs to develop new vaccines without giving them exclusive rights over their production and sale? The most effective approach during a public health crisis is direct government support: public funding of RandD, advance purchase commitments by the government to buy large numbers of doses at set prices, and other, related payouts. And when we pay drug makers, we should not hesitate to pay generously, even extravagantly: we want to offer drug companies big profits so that they prioritize this work above everything else, and so that they are ready and eager to come to the rescue again the next time there’s a crisis.It was direct support via Operation Warp Speed that made possible the astonishingly rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and then facilitated a relatively rapid rollout of vaccine distribution (relative, that is, to most of the rest of the world). And it’s worth noting that a major reason for the faster rollout here and in the United Kingdom compared to the European Union was the latter’s misguided penny-pinching. The EU bargained hard with firms to keep vaccine prices low, and as a result their citizens ended up in the back of the queue as various supply line kinks were being ironed out. This is particularly ironic since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was developed in Germany. As this fact underscores, the chief advantage of direct support isn’t to “get tough” with drug firms and keep a lid on their profits. Instead, it is to accelerate the end of the public health emergency by making sure drug makers profit handsomely from doing the right thing.Patent law and direct support should be seen not as either-or alternatives but as complements that apply different incentives to different circumstances and time horizons. Patent law provides a decentralized system for encouraging innovation. The government doesn’t presume to tell the industry which new drugs are needed; it simply incentivizes the development of whatever new drugs that pharmaceutical firms can come up with by offering them a temporary monopoly. It is important to note that patent law’s incentives offer no commercial guarantees. Yes, you can block other competitors for a number of years, but that still doesn’t ensure enough consumer demand for the new product to make it profitable. DIRECT SUPPORT MAKES PATENTS REDUNDANT The situation is different in a pandemic. Here the government knows exactly what it wants to incentivize: the creation of vaccines to prevent the spread of a specific virus and other drugs to treat that virus. Under these circumstances, the decentralized approach isn’t good enough. There is no time to sit back and let drug makers take the initiative on their own timeline. Instead, the government needs to be more involved to incentivize specific innovations now. As recompense for letting it call the shots (pardon the pun), the government sweetens the deal for drug companies by insulating them from commercial risk. If pharmaceutical firms develop effective vaccines and therapies, the government will buy large, predetermined quantities at prices set high enough to guarantee a healthy return. For the pharmaceutical industry, it is useful to conceive of patent law as the default regime for innovation promotion. It improves pharmaceutical companies’ incentives to develop new drugs while leaving them free to decide which new drugs to pursue – and also leaving them to bear all commercial risk. In a pandemic or other emergency, however, it is appropriate to shift to the direct support regime, in which the government focuses efforts on one disease. In this regime, it is important to note, the government provides qualitatively superior incentives to those offered under patent law. Not only does it offer public funding to cover the up-front costs of drug development, but it also provides advance purchase commitments that guarantee a healthy return. It should therefore be clear that the pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate basis for objecting to a TRIPS waiver. Since, because of the public health crisis, drug makers now qualify for the superior benefits of direct government support, they no longer need the default benefits of patent support. Arguments that a TRIPS waiver would deprive drug makers of the incentives they need to keep developing new drugs, when they are presently receiving the most favorable incentives available, can be dismissed as the worst sort of special pleading. That said, it is a serious mistake to try to cast the current crisis as a morality play in which drug makers wear the black hats and the choice at hand is between private profits and public health. We would have no chance of beating this virus without the formidable organizational capabilities of the pharmaceutical industry, and providing the appropriate incentives is essential to ensure that the industry plays its necessary and vital role. It is misguided to lament that private companies are profiting in the current crisis: those profits are a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering cost of this pandemic in lives and economic damage. What matters isn’t the existence or size of the profits, but how they are earned. We have good reason to want drug makers to profit from vaccinating the world: the comparative price is minuscule, and the incentive effects are a vital safeguard of public health in the event of future crises. What we want to avoid at all costs is putting drug makers in the position where drug companies can profit from standing in the way of rapid global vaccination. That is why intellectual property rights need to be taken out of the equation. Vaccinating the world in any kind of reasonable time frame will require large-scale technology transfer to drug firms in other countries and rapid expansion of their production capacity. And looking beyond the current pandemic to the longer term, we need ample, redundant global vaccine production capacity that is widely distributed around the planet. To achieve these goals as rapidly as possible will require the active cooperation of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, which is why the direct support model now needs to be extended. What is needed now is an Operation Warp Speed for the world, in which we make it worth current vaccine producers’ while to share their know-how broadly and ramp up global capacity. Here again, we must recognize that the choice isn’t between people on the one hand and profits on the other. Rather, the key to good pandemic response policy is ensuring that incentives are structured so that drug company profit-seeking and global public health are well aligned. That means opting out of the default, decentralized patent bargain in favor of generous but well-focused direct government support. Framing Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valueable and disvalueable – everything else regresses. Evolutionary knowledge is reliable – broad consensus and robust neuroscience prove. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events, situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable 10. Pleasure is a passive reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends. However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure 14. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction, homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in their pursuit. 15. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers 16 which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons 17–19 despite the notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO Charles Darwin and other biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness; yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact, Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life 20. Only genes that lead to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate, distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral reward functions have evolved to help individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will ultimately result in evolutionary advantage 21, additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment. Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence, under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine 22. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms may play a role 23. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these systems promoting hypodopaminergia 24. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce healthy behavioral changes, including stress management 25. The work of Esch and Stefano 26 concerning the link between compassion and love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades 26–37, but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends 38. However, it is not entirely clear exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear 39. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of pleasure 40. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum (VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good” response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade” that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors 3,6,41. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to optimism as a dopaminergic response 42. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions like panic and fear, as discussed above 43. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” 3. That is, dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli 44. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards 45. Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy, disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation 46. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease 47. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions 48. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. 48 suggested based on review that whereas the gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) 49. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence for our concerns was discovered 50 In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa et al. 50 small case found various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers examined 247 specimens of neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably, abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work for things that have no apparent short-term benefit 51. In similar work, Volkow and Bale 52 proposed a model in which dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS. Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being or act hedonistic util. Prefer additionally –
1 Outweighs – A Predictability – most authors assume util when discussing the cost/benefit tradeoffs of policy B topic ed – other frameworks don’t engage with key questions of implemented policy impacts – that’s key, b/c we only have 2 months for this topic. C TJFs first because they assume the framework being good for debate 2 Death is bad and outweighs – a) agents can’t act if they fear for their bodily security which constrains every ethical theory, b) it destroys the subject itself – kills any ability to achieve value in ethics since life is a prerequisite which means it’s a side constraint since we can’t reach the end goal of ethics without life c) the loss of all future genertaiosn would be trillions of lives o/w on magnitude 3 Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically denied. Underview
Underview 1 1AR theory is legit – anything else means infinite abuse – drop the debater, competing interps, no rvis and the highest layer of the round – 1AR is too short to make up for the time trade-off – no RVIs or 2NR theory and paradigm issues– 6 min 2NR means they can brute force me every time. 2 Assume I-meets to spec shells since bidirectional shells and infinite regress prove abuse is inescapable 3 Give me new 2AR weighing and arguments - I only know what arguments I have to weigh against in the 2NR, but they know in the 1AR.
10/16/21
SEPTOCT-Stock V6
Tournament: Heart of Texas | Round: 2 | Opponent: Harvard Westlake JH | Judge: Annabelle Long 1rst adv is Econ
Vaccines will not cover LMICS until at least 2023—fortunately there is massive room for supply increase Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., RJP, DebateDrills.
Since consequentialist justifications treat the value of IP as purely instrumental, they are also vulnerable to counterarguments showing that a sought-after goal is not the sole or most important end. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we submit that the vaccinating the world is an overriding goal. With existing IP protections intact, the world has fallen well short of this goal. Current forecasts show that at the current pace, there will not be enough vaccines to cover the world’s population until 2023 or 2024.15 IP protections further frustrate the goal of universal access to vaccines by limiting who can manufacturer them. The WHO reports that 80 of global sales for COVID-19 vaccines come from five large multinational corporations.16 Increasing the number of manufacturers globally would not only increase supply, but reduce prices, making vaccines more affordable to LMICS Low and Middle Income Countries. It would stabilise supply, minimising disruptions of the kind that occurred when India halted vaccine exports amidst a surge of COVID-19 cases. It might be objected that waiving IP protections will not increase supply, because it takes years to establish manufacturing capacity. However, since the pandemic began, we have learnt it takes less time. Repurposing facilities and vetting them for safety and quality can often happen in 6 or 7months, about half the time previously thought.17 Since COVID-19 will not be the last pandemic humanity faces, expanding manufacturing capacity is also necessary preparation for future pandemics. Nkengasong, Director of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, put the point bluntly, ‘Can a continent of 1.2billion people—projected to be 2.4billion in 30 years, where one in four people in the world will be African—continue to import 99 of its vaccine?’18 Unequal vaccine distribution has massive economic costs even with conservative estimates that don’t account for the Delta variant Çakmakli 21-- Çakmakli, Cem Assistant Professor at Koç University. PhD: Pennsylvania State University et al. The economic case for global vaccinations: An epidemiological model with international production networks. No. w28395. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2021. (AG DebateDrills)
To estimate the costs of inequitable vaccine distribution, we develop a global SIR-multi-sectormacro framework and calibrate it to 65 countries-35 sectors. We incorporate sectoral heterogeneity in infections together with inter-industry and international trade and production linkages. Once we account for this economic interdependence of the economies, we reveal the substantial costs, up to 3 percent of advanced countries pre-pandemic GDPs, that will be borne by the vaccinated countries through their trade relationships with unvaccinated countries.36 Our framework captures the short run. We find that AEs may bear somewhere from 13 percent to 49 percent of the global losses arising from an inequitable distribution of vaccines in 2021. Globalization might have amplified the effects of the pandemic but it is also imperative for an equitable distribution of the vaccines because this is the only way for open economies with international linkages to have a robust recovery. There are substantial uncertainties ahead of us regarding the course of vaccine distribution. Our estimates are based on the available information about the pandemic. For example, we did not incorporate the recent developments on the variants into our analysis. To the extent that these variants threaten the efficacy of the current vaccines, there is even more urgency to make the existing vaccines globally available as soon as possible. Mutations that risk a prolonged pandemic would not only have further health costs but also escalate the economic costs that we estimated in our analysis.
Economic loss and slow supply recovery causes inflation deanchoring and econ collapse in advanced economies as well as extreme poverty in EMDEs World Bank 6-21 – World Bank Prospects Group; June 2021 Global Economic Prospects; https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/35647/9781464816659.pdf (AG DebateDrills) Since May 2020, however, inflation has gradually picked up. By April 2021, inflation had risen above pre-pandemic levels, in both advanced economies and EMDEs. The inflation pickup was broad-based and present in about four-fifths of countries, although the change in inflation varied widely, especially in EMDEs. The 2020 global recession featured the most muted inflation decline and fastest subsequent inflation upturn of the five global recession episodes of the past 50 years (box 4.1). While this behavior partly reflects lower levels of inflation at the beginning of 2020, purchasing managers report growing pressures on input as well as output prices in 2021 (figure 4.1). Looking ahead, as the global economy gradually reopens, monetary and fiscal policies continue to be accommodative to support the global recovery, and pent-up demand may be about to be unleashed in advanced economies.1 For major advanced economies, some have raised concerns that this confluence of factors may generate significant inflationary pressures (Blanchard and Pisani-Ferry 2020; Goodhart and Pradhan 2020; Landau 2021). Others, in contrast, see little reason for concern, at least for many advanced economies, because of the temporary nature of price pressures over the short-term as well as wellanchored inflation expectations and structural factors still depressing inflation (Ball et al. 2021; Gopinath 2021). If growing inflationary pressures cause financial market participants to become concerned about persistently higher inflation in advanced economies, they may reassess prospects for continued accommodative monetary policies by major central banks. This could trigger a significant rise in risk premia and borrowing costs. EMDEs are particularly vulnerable to such financial market disruptions because of their record high debt and a lagging economic recovery from the pandemic (chapter 1). In the event of financial market stress, sharp exchange rate depreciations and capital outflows may force them to abruptly tighten policies in a manner that could throttle their recoveries. Even in the absence of dislocating financial market stress, EMDES Emerging Market Developing Economies may face rising inflation as global price pressures feed into domestic inflation through input prices and exchange rate movements. A temporary increase in inflation may not warrant a monetary policy response. Again, if rapidly rising price pressures risk de-anchoring inflation expectations, EMDE central banks may be forced to tighten monetary policy before the recovery is fully entrenched. Persistently higher inflation would erode discretionary incomes of the poorest households and may tip some back into poverty (Ha, Kose, and Ohnsorge 2019). This is a particularly serious risk for LMICS low-income countries (LICs; box 4.2). Since food accounts for a substantial share of consumption in these countries, recent increase in food prices have led to higher inflation and compounded the challenges confronting the poor during the pandemic. Economic Collapse goes Nuclear. Tønnesson 15, Stein. "Deterrence, interdependence and Sino–US peace." International Area Studies Review 18.3 (2015): 297-311. (the Department of Peace and Conflict, Uppsala University, Sweden, and Peace research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway) Several recent works on China and Sino–US relations have made substantial contributions to the current understanding of how and under what circumstances a combination of nuclear deterrence and economic interdependence may reduce the risk of war between major powers. At least four conclusions can be drawn from the review above: first, those who say that interdependence may both inhibit and drive conflict are right. Interdependence raises the cost of conflict for all sides but asymmetrical or unbalanced dependencies and negative trade expectations may generate tensions leading to trade wars among inter-dependent states that in turn increase the risk of military conflict (Copeland, 2015: 1, 14, 437; Roach, 2014). The risk may increase if one of the interdependent countries is governed by an inward-looking socio-economic coalition (Solingen, 2015); second, the risk of war between China and the US should not just be analysed bilaterally but include their allies and partners. Third party countries could drag China or the US into confrontation; third, in this context it is of some comfort that the three main economic powers in Northeast Asia (China, Japan and South Korea) are all deeply integrated economically through production networks within a global system of trade and finance (Ravenhill, 2014; Yoshimatsu, 2014: 576); and fourth, decisions for war and peace are taken by very few people, who act on the basis of their future expectations. International relations theory must be supplemented by foreign policy analysis in order to assess the value attributed by national decision-makers to economic development and their assessments of risks and opportunities. If leaders on either side of the Atlantic begin to seriously fear or anticipate their own nation’s decline then they may blame this on external dependence, appeal to anti-foreign sentiments, contemplate the use of force to gain respect or credibility, adopt protectionist policies, and ultimately refuse to be deterred by either nuclear arms or prospects of socioeconomic calamities. Such a dangerous shift could happen abruptly, i.e. under the instigation of actions by a third party – or against a third party. Yet as long as there is both nuclear deterrence and interdependence, the tensions in East Asia are unlikely to escalate to war. As Chan (2013) says, all states in the region are aware that they cannot count on support from either China or the US if they make provocative moves. The greatest risk is not that a territorial dispute leads to war under present circumstances but that changes in the world economy alter those circumstances in ways that render inter-state peace more precarious. If China and the US fail to rebalance their financial and trading relations (Roach, 2014) then a trade war could result, interrupting transnational production networks, provoking social distress, and exacerbating nationalist emotions. This could have unforeseen consequences in the field of security, with nuclear deterrence remaining the only factor to protect the world from Armageddon, and unreliably so. Deterrence could lose its credibility: one of the two great powers might gamble that the other yield in a cyber-war or conventional limited war, or third party countries might engage in conflict with each other, with a view to obliging Washington or Beijing to intervene.
Adv 2 – WTO Legitimacy WTO credibility is fragile right now– Baschuk 21 Bryce Baschuk, “WTO Chief Pursues a ‘Hectic’ Agenda to Fix World Trade’s Referee”, April 27 2021 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-27/wto-chief-pursues-a-hectic-agenda-to-fix-world-trade-s-referee The head of the WTO world Trade Organization raised an alarm about the credibility of the multilateral trading system, urging leaders to act fast to bolster the global economy with steps like fairer vaccine distribution and cooperate to resolve longer-term problems like overfishing. During her first two months, WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has met with trade ministers around the globe to communicate a message that the WTO is important, it needs to be reformed and it needs to deliver results. So far, she says the reception from world leaders has been positive, but quickly translating that goodwill into substantive outcomes during a global pandemic is just as daunting as she anticipated. “The word I would use to describe it is absolutely hectic,” Okonjo-Iweala said in a phone interview on Tuesday when asked about her first few months in the job. “The challenges we thought were there are there and getting an agreement is not as easy because of longstanding ways of negotiating business positions.” Countries need to move past the notion that one country’s gain in international commerce is another’s loss, she said. “We need to break out of the zero-sum deadlock,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “We need to remind the countries and members that the WTO is here to deliver for people. We can’t take 20 years to negotiate something.” Okonjo-Iweala said her top priority is to use trade to alleviate the pandemic and said her recent meeting with trade ministers and vaccine manufacturers provided a positive step in the right direction. More Pragmatism “That meeting yielded quite a lot,” she said. “I see more pragmatism on both sides.” An important component of the WTO’s trade and health agenda is a proposal from India and South Africa that seeks to temporarily waive enforcement of the WTO’s rules governing IP intellectual property for vaccines and other essential medical products. As of this week there are fresh signals that the Biden administration, which currently opposes a waiver to the WTO agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, wants vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc to help ramp up U.S. pandemic assistance to the rest of the world. “There is movement,” Okonjo-Iweala said. “Are we there yet? No, but there is a little bit of change in the air among members. I think hopefully we will be able to come to some sort of a framework for the WTO ministers to bless.” “We don’t have time,” she added. “People are dying.” Okonjo-Iweala said this month’s vaccine meeting also revealed areas where the developing world can increase its capacity to produce more doses rather than waiting for rich countries to send them their excess supplies. She said various emerging markets such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, Indonesia and Egypt already have some capacity to begin producing vaccines for people living in developing economies.
A TRIPPS waiver is necessary to maintain WTO credibility – Meyer 21 Meyer, David, “The WTO’s survival hinges on the COVID-19 vaccine patent debate, waiver advocates warn”, June 18, 2021 https://fortune.com/2021/06/18/wto-covid-vaccines-patents-waiver-south-africa-trips/ The World Trade Organization knows all about crises. Former U.S. President Donald Trump threw a wrench into its core function of resolving trade disputes—a blocker that President Joe Biden has not yet removed—and there is widespread dissatisfaction over the fairness of the global trade rulebook. The 164-country organization, under the fresh leadership of Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has a lot to fix. However, one crisis is more pressing than the others: the battle over COVID-19 vaccines, and whether the protection of their patents and other intellectual property should be temporarily lifted to boost production and end the pandemic sooner rather than later. According to some of those pushing for the waiver—which was originally proposed last year by India and South Africa—the WTO's future rests on what happens next. "The credibility of the WTO will depend on its ability to find a meaningful outcome on this issue that truly ramps-up and diversifies production," says Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, South Africa's ambassador to the WTO. "Final nail in the coffin" The Geneva-based WTO isn't an organization with power, as such—it's a framework within which countries make big decisions about trade, generally by consensus. It's supposed to be the forum where disputes get settled, because all its members have signed up to the same rules. And one of its most important rulebooks is the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, which sprang to life alongside the WTO in 1995. The WTO's founding agreement allows for rules to be waived in exceptional circumstances, and indeed this has happened before: its members agreed in 2003 to waive TRIPS obligations that were blocking the importation of cheap, generic drugs into developing countries that lack manufacturing capacity. (That waiver was effectively made permanent in 2017.) Consensus is the key here. Although the failure to reach consensus on a waiver could be overcome with a 75 supermajority vote by the WTO's membership, this would be an unprecedented and seismic event. In the case of the COVID-19 vaccine IP waiver, it would mean standing up to the European Union, and Germany in particular, as well as countries such as Canada and the U.K.—the U.S. recently flipped from opposing the idea of a waiver to supporting it, as did France. It's a dispute between countries, but the result will be on the WTO as a whole, say waiver advocates. "If, in the face of one of humanity's greatest challenges in a century, the WTO functionally becomes an obstacle as in contrast to part of the solution, I think it could be the final nail in the coffin" for the organization, says Lori Wallach, the founder of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, a U.S. campaigning group that focuses on the WTO and trade agreements. "If the TRIPS waiver is successful, and people see the WTO as being part of the solution—saving lives and livelihoods—it could create goodwill and momentum to address what are still daunting structural problems." Those problems are legion. Reform needs Top of the list is the WTO's Appellate Body, which hears appeals in members' trade disputes. It's a pivotal part of the international trade system, but Trump—incensed at decisions taken against the U.S. —blocked appointments to its seven-strong panel as judges retired. The body became completely paralyzed at the end of 2019, when two judges' terms ended and the panel no longer had the three-judge quorum it needs to rule on appeals. Anyone who hoped the advent of the Biden administration would change matters was disappointed earlier this year when the U.S. rejected a European proposal to fill the vacancies. "The United States continues to have systemic concerns with the appellate body," it said. "As members know, the United States has raised and explained its systemic concerns for more than 16 years and across multiple U.S. administrations." At her confirmation hearing in February, current U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai reiterated those concerns—she said the appellate body had "overstepped its authority and erred in interpreting WTO agreements in a number of cases, to the detriment of the United States and other WTO members," and accused it of dragging its heels in settling disputes. "Reforms are needed to ensure that the underlying causes of such problems do not resurface," Tai said. "While the U.S. has been engaging with the WTO it hasn't indicated it would move quickly on allowing appointments to the Appellate Body," says Bryan Mercurio, an economic-law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who opposes the vaccine waiver. "This is not a good sign. In terms of WTO governance, it's a much more important step than supporting negotiations on an intellectual property waiver." It's not just the U.S. that wants to see reform at the WTO. In a major policy document published in February, the EU said negotiations had failed to modernize the organization's rules, the dispute-resolution system was broken, the monitoring of countries' trade policies was ineffective, and—crucially—"the trade relationship between the U.S. and China, two of the three largest WTO members, is currently largely managed outside WTO disciplines." China is one of the key problems here. It became a WTO member in 2001 but, although this entailed significant liberalization of the Chinese economy, it did not become a full market economy. As the European Commission put it in February: "The level at which China has opened its markets does not correspond to its weight in the global economy, and the state continues to exert a decisive influence on China's economic environment with consequent competitive distortions that cannot be sufficiently addressed by current WTO rules." "China is operating from what it sees as a position of strength, so it will not be bullied into agreeing to changes which it sees as not in its interests," says Mercurio. China is at loggerheads with the U.S., the EU and others over numerous trade-related issues. Its rivals don't like its policy of demanding that Chinese citizens' data is stored on Chinese soil, nor do they approve of how foreign investors often have to partner with Chinese firms to access the country's market, in a way that leads to the transfer of technological knowhow. They also oppose China's industrial subsidies. Mercurio thinks China may agree to reforms on some of these issues, particularly regarding subsidies, but "only if it is offered something in return." All these problems won't go away if the WTO manages to come up with a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies, Wallach concedes. "But," she adds, "the will and the good faith to tackle these challenges is increased enormously if the WTO has the experience of being part of the solution, not just an obstacle." Wallach points to a statement released earlier this month by Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade ministers, which called for urgent discussions on the waiver. "The WTO must demonstrate that global trade rules can help address the human catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic and facilitate the recovery," the statement read in its section about WTO reform.
WTO is necessary for good US-China relations, which solves a bunch of existential threats – Shaffer 21 Shaffer, Gregory, “The US must engage with China — even when countering China”, June 21, 2021 https://thehill.com/opinion/international/559049-the-us-must-engage-with-china-even-when-countering-china A policy statement heard around the world is that U.S. engagement with China “has come to an end.” It suggests that the Biden administration is taking a hawkish approach toward China. That stance seemed clear as the U.S. worked the G7 and NATO communiqués to confront China with an “alliance of democracies.” Yet, peeling the layers, one comes to the necessity for a much more complex U.S. approach to China. Rather than ending engagement, the U.S. should be thinking about engagement’s different dimensions. Indeed, Kurt Campbell, coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs on the National Security Council, who made the remark, implicitly addressed three necessary forms of engagement that have been lacking. First, even when the United States aims to counter China, engagement remains essential. The U.S. will most effectively counter Chinese actions in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, along the border with India, and against allies’ economies, if the U.S. works closely with others. The Trump administration was notoriously unreliable and antagonistic towards allies. The United States and its allies will bolster their position in relation to China if they coordinate — an approach underscored at the recent G7 and NATO summits.
Yet, even in high-conflict situations, diplomacy and bargaining with China also will be important. Trade and technology policies are rife with rivalry and competition. These policies can trigger harmful tit-for-tat escalations if they are not grounded in agreed rules and understandings. These risks become particularly salient when economic and financial crises strike. Third-party institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) can help parties manage their conflicts so that they are not mutually destructive. China will be indispensable in any U.S. effort to update and “reform” WTO rules. Second, the US United States needs to work with China to effectively address common global, existential challenges. Campbell mentioned three: climate change, global pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. A signal success of the Obama administration was getting China to make commitments for the first time on emissions, which gave rise to the Paris Agreement. The U.S. also worked with China to stem Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. It needs to do the same regarding North Korea’s nuclear program. Even in these areas of mutual concern, competition and rivalry are present. Yet such competition also can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, such as to provide vaccines globally and to develop green technologies. Third, Campbell stressed the critical importance of bipartisan engagement within the U.S. As politics in America degrades, the U.S. position against China weakens — and China knows this. The U.S. domestic inability to cooperate bolsters Chinese claims that the U.S. is declining and China is rising because China’s authoritarian model is superior to U.S. democracy. Unfortunately, bipartisan engagement to productively respond to China’s challenge — from the building of infrastructure, the support of science and education, and the defense of democracy — might be the most difficult to achieve. But it is critical.
Thus Plan: Member nations of the WTO ought to grant a TRIPS waiver for novel pandemics
Solvency -the TRIPS waiver will be triggered by conditions modified from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology:
Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC 19). Center for Disease Control sub-branch.https://apic.org/monthly_alerts/outbreaks-epidemics-and-pandemics-what-you-need-to-know/ January 2nd,2019 The geographical area is world wide. It rapidly infects people at an elevated stage above epidemic is often caused by a new strain that has not circulated among people for a long time. Humans usually have little to no immunity against it. The illness spreads quickly from person-to-person worldwide. causes an elevated rate of death compared to a well known counterpart (IE. swine flu vs common flu) often creates social disruption, economic loss, and general hardship.
Developing nations benefit from a TRIPS waiver—this is also our solvency advocate Nancy S. Jecker and Caesar A. Atuire 21. *Department of Bioethics and Humanities, University of Washington School of Medicine, Department of Philosophy, University of Johannesburg, Auckland Park, Gauteng, South Africa, “What’s yours is ours: waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Journal of Medical Ethics, July 6, 2021, https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/early/2021/07/06/medethics-2021-107555.full.pdf., AG, DebateDrills. This view has come under increasing fire. Two competing positions have emerged. First, India and South Africa petitioned the WTO for a temporary waiver of IP rights for medical products pertaining to preventing, containing or treating COVID19.2 The wavier would apply to all WTO members and lift restrictions in four TRIPS sections: copyright and related rights, industrial designs, patents and protection of undisclosed information. It would be annually reviewed and last for a set length, determined by the WTO Council. Proponents of the proposal argue that IP protections have ‘hindered urgent scale-up of vaccine production and that ‘many countries—especially LMICs countries—may face institutional and legal difficulties when using TRIPS flexibilities’.12 To break the divide, WTO Director General, Okonjo-Iweala, proposed ‘a third way’ in which ‘we… license manufacturing to countries so that we can have adequate supplies while still making sure that IP issues are taken care of.’13 This approach permits companies to retain ownership while licensing other companies to manufacture their vaccines. The plan is also a prerequisite to starting the WHO technology transfer hub WHO 4/21—WHO, 4-21-2021, “Establishment of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub to scale up global manufacturing,” https://www.who.int/news-room/articles-detail/establishment-of-a-covid-19-mrna-vaccine-technology-transfer-hub-to-scale-up-global-manufacturing. (AG DebateDrills) WHO and its partners are seeking to expand the capacity of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to produce COVID-19 vaccines and scale up manufacturing to increase global access to these critical tools to bring the pandemic under control.
WHO will facilitate the establishment of one (or more, as appropriate) technology transfer hub(s) that will use a hub and spoke model (REF) to transfer a comprehensive technology package and provide appropriate training to interested manufacturers in LMICs. This initiative will initially prioritize the mRNA-vaccine technology2 but could expand to other technologies in the future. The intention is for these hubs to enable the establishment of production process at an industrial or semi-industrial level permitting training and provision of all necessary standard operating procedures for production and quality control. It is essential that the technology used is either free of IP intellectual property constraints in LMICs, or that such rights are made available to the technology hub and the future recipients of the technology through non-exclusive licenses to produce, export and distribute the COVID-19 vaccine in LMICs, including through the COVAX facility. Preference will be given to applicants who have already generated clinical data in humans, as such clinical data will contribute to accelerated approval of the vaccines in LMICs. It is anticipated that WHO will work with funders and donors to mobilize financial support to establish the hubs and, as they are being established, to support the transfer of technology to selected manufacturers in LMICs, taking into consideration the need to establish permanent vaccine production capacity in regions where this is currently mostly absent. This broader objective will ensure that all WHO regions will be able to produce vaccines as essential preparedness measures against future infectious threats Other countries have capacity to produce millions of doses Meldrum and Cheng 21-- ANDREW MELDRUM and MARIA CHENG, AP News, “Vaccine technology transfer center to open in South Africa,” 6/21/2021, https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-south-africa-africa-technology-coronavirus-vaccine-3cbdee395502802b55db2b5c81e6becd. (AG, DebateDrills) Poor countries in Africa and elsewhere are facing dire shortages of COVID-19 jabs despite some countries having the ability to produce vaccines, lamented Lara Dovifat, a campaign and advocacy adviser for Doctors Without Borders. “The faster companies share the know-how, the faster we can put an end to this pandemic,” she said in a statement. Numerous factories in Canada, Bangladesh, Denmark and elsewhere have previously called for companies to immediately share their technology, saying their idle production lines could be churning out millions of doses if they weren’t hampered by IP intellectual property and other restrictions. More than 1 billion coronavirus vaccines have been administered globally, but fewer than 1 have been in poor countries. South Africa accounts for nearly 40 of Africa’s total recorded COVID-19 infections and is currently suffering a rapid surge, but vaccine rollout has been slow, marked by delayed deliveries among other factors. South Africa currently does not manufacture any COVID-19 vaccines from scratch, but its Aspen Pharmacare assembles the JJ Johnson and Johnson shot by blending large batches of the ingredients sent by JandJ and then putting the product in vials and packaging them, a process known as fill and finish. Earlier this month the company had to discard 2 million doses because they had ingredients produced in the U.S. in a factory under suspect conditions. The plan sets a precedent to seamlessly shift to a direct support model during pandemics--that solves future pandemics but avoids the innovation DA. Brink Lindsey 21. Vice President, Niskanen Center; Writes for Brookings, “Why Intellectual Property and Pandemics Don’t Mix,” Brookings, June 3, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/06/03/why-intellectual-property-and-pandemics-dont-mix/, RJP, DebateDrills. PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCIES AND DIRECT GOVERNMENT SUPPORT For pandemics and other public health emergencies, patents’ mix of costs and benefits is misaligned with what is needed for an effective policy response. The basic patent bargain, even when well struck, is to pay for more innovation down the road with slower diffusion of innovation today. In the context of a pandemic, that bargain is a bad one and should be rejected entirely. Here the imperative is to accelerate the diffusion of vaccines and other treatments, not slow it down. Giving drug companies the power to hold things up by blocking competitors and raising prices pushes in the completely wrong direction. What approach to encouraging innovation should we take instead? How do we incentivize drug makers to undertake the hefty RandD costs to develop new vaccines without giving them exclusive rights over their production and sale? The most effective approach during a public health crisis is direct government support: public funding of RandD, advance purchase commitments by the government to buy large numbers of doses at set prices, and other, related payouts. And when we pay drug makers, we should not hesitate to pay generously, even extravagantly: we want to offer drug companies big profits so that they prioritize this work above everything else, and so that they are ready and eager to come to the rescue again the next time there’s a crisis.It was direct support via Operation Warp Speed that made possible the astonishingly rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines and then facilitated a relatively rapid rollout of vaccine distribution (relative, that is, to most of the rest of the world). And it’s worth noting that a major reason for the faster rollout here and in the United Kingdom compared to the European Union was the latter’s misguided penny-pinching. The EU bargained hard with firms to keep vaccine prices low, and as a result their citizens ended up in the back of the queue as various supply line kinks were being ironed out. This is particularly ironic since the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was developed in Germany. As this fact underscores, the chief advantage of direct support isn’t to “get tough” with drug firms and keep a lid on their profits. Instead, it is to accelerate the end of the public health emergency by making sure drug makers profit handsomely from doing the right thing.Patent law and direct support should be seen not as either-or alternatives but as complements that apply different incentives to different circumstances and time horizons. Patent law provides a decentralized system for encouraging innovation. The government doesn’t presume to tell the industry which new drugs are needed; it simply incentivizes the development of whatever new drugs that pharmaceutical firms can come up with by offering them a temporary monopoly. It is important to note that patent law’s incentives offer no commercial guarantees. Yes, you can block other competitors for a number of years, but that still doesn’t ensure enough consumer demand for the new product to make it profitable. DIRECT SUPPORT MAKES PATENTS REDUNDANT The situation is different in a pandemic. Here the government knows exactly what it wants to incentivize: the creation of vaccines to prevent the spread of a specific virus and other drugs to treat that virus. Under these circumstances, the decentralized approach isn’t good enough. There is no time to sit back and let drug makers take the initiative on their own timeline. Instead, the government needs to be more involved to incentivize specific innovations now. As recompense for letting it call the shots (pardon the pun), the government sweetens the deal for drug companies by insulating them from commercial risk. If pharmaceutical firms develop effective vaccines and therapies, the government will buy large, predetermined quantities at prices set high enough to guarantee a healthy return. For the pharmaceutical industry, it is useful to conceive of patent law as the default regime for innovation promotion. It improves pharmaceutical companies’ incentives to develop new drugs while leaving them free to decide which new drugs to pursue – and also leaving them to bear all commercial risk. In a pandemic or other emergency, however, it is appropriate to shift to the direct support regime, in which the government focuses efforts on one disease. In this regime, it is important to note, the government provides qualitatively superior incentives to those offered under patent law. Not only does it offer public funding to cover the up-front costs of drug development, but it also provides advance purchase commitments that guarantee a healthy return. It should therefore be clear that the pharmaceutical industry has no legitimate basis for objecting to a TRIPS waiver. Since, because of the public health crisis, drug makers now qualify for the superior benefits of direct government support, they no longer need the default benefits of patent support. Arguments that a TRIPS waiver would deprive drug makers of the incentives they need to keep developing new drugs, when they are presently receiving the most favorable incentives available, can be dismissed as the worst sort of special pleading. That said, it is a serious mistake to try to cast the current crisis as a morality play in which drug makers wear the black hats and the choice at hand is between private profits and public health. We would have no chance of beating this virus without the formidable organizational capabilities of the pharmaceutical industry, and providing the appropriate incentives is essential to ensure that the industry plays its necessary and vital role. It is misguided to lament that private companies are profiting in the current crisis: those profits are a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering cost of this pandemic in lives and economic damage. What matters isn’t the existence or size of the profits, but how they are earned. We have good reason to want drug makers to profit from vaccinating the world: the comparative price is minuscule, and the incentive effects are a vital safeguard of public health in the event of future crises. What we want to avoid at all costs is putting drug makers in the position where drug companies can profit from standing in the way of rapid global vaccination. That is why intellectual property rights need to be taken out of the equation. Vaccinating the world in any kind of reasonable time frame will require large-scale technology transfer to drug firms in other countries and rapid expansion of their production capacity. And looking beyond the current pandemic to the longer term, we need ample, redundant global vaccine production capacity that is widely distributed around the planet. To achieve these goals as rapidly as possible will require the active cooperation of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, which is why the direct support model now needs to be extended. What is needed now is an Operation Warp Speed for the world, in which we make it worth current vaccine producers’ while to share their know-how broadly and ramp up global capacity. Here again, we must recognize that the choice isn’t between people on the one hand and profits on the other. Rather, the key to good pandemic response policy is ensuring that incentives are structured so that drug company profit-seeking and global public health are well aligned. That means opting out of the default, decentralized patent bargain in favor of generous but well-focused direct government support. Framing Pleasure and pain are intrinsically valueable and disvalueable – everything else regresses. Evolutionary knowledge is reliable – broad consensus and robust neuroscience prove. Blum et al. 18 Kenneth Blum, 1Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Dayton VA Medical Center, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA 2Department of Psychiatry, McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville, FL, USA 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA 5Department of Precision Medicine, Geneus Health LLC, San Antonio, TX, USA 6Department of Addiction Research and Therapy, Nupathways Inc., Innsbrook, MO, USA 7Department of Clinical Neurology, Path Foundation, New York, NY, USA 8Division of Neuroscience-Based Addiction Therapy, The Shores Treatment and Recovery Center, Port Saint Lucie, FL, USA 9Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 10Division of Addiction Research, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC. North Kingston, RI, USA 11Victory Nutrition International, Lederach, PA., USA 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA, Marjorie Gondré-Lewis, 12National Human Genome Center at Howard University, Washington, DC., USA 13Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC US, Bruce Steinberg, 4Division of Applied Clinical Research and Education, Dominion Diagnostics, LLC, North Kingstown, RI, USA, Igor Elman, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, David Baron, 3Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Keck Medicine University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Edward J Modestino, 14Department of Psychology, Curry College, Milton, MA, USA, Rajendra D Badgaiyan, 15Department Psychiatry, Cooper University School of Medicine, Camden, NJ, USA, Mark S Gold 16Department of Psychiatry, Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA, “Our evolved unique pleasure circuit makes humans different from apes: Reconsideration of data derived from animal studies”, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 28 February 2018, accessed: 19 August 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6446569/, R.S. Pleasure is not only one of the three primary reward functions but it also defines reward. As homeostasis explains the functions of only a limited number of rewards, the principal reason why particular stimuli, objects, events, situations, and activities are rewarding may be due to pleasure. This applies first of all to sex and to the primary homeostatic rewards of food and liquid and extends to money, taste, beauty, social encounters and nonmaterial, internally set, and intrinsic rewards. Pleasure, as the primary effect of rewards, drives the prime reward functions of learning, approach behavior, and decision making and provides the basis for hedonic theories of reward function. We are attracted by most rewards and exert intense efforts to obtain them, just because they are enjoyable 10. Pleasure is a passive reaction that derives from the experience or prediction of reward and may lead to a long-lasting state of happiness. The word happiness is difficult to define. In fact, just obtaining physical pleasure may not be enough. One key to happiness involves a network of good friends. However, it is not obvious how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to an ice cream cone, or to your team winning a sporting event. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure 14. Pleasure as a hallmark of reward is sufficient for defining a reward, but it may not be necessary. A reward may generate positive learning and approach behavior simply because it contains substances that are essential for body function. When we are hungry, we may eat bad and unpleasant meals. A monkey who receives hundreds of small drops of water every morning in the laboratory is unlikely to feel a rush of pleasure every time it gets the 0.1 ml. Nevertheless, with these precautions in mind, we may define any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to produce pleasure as a reward. In the context of reward deficiency or for disorders of addiction, homeostasis pursues pharmacological treatments: drugs to treat drug addiction, obesity, and other compulsive behaviors. The theory of allostasis suggests broader approaches - such as re-expanding the range of possible pleasures and providing opportunities to expend effort in their pursuit. 15. It is noteworthy, the first animal studies eliciting approach behavior by electrical brain stimulation interpreted their findings as a discovery of the brain’s pleasure centers 16 which were later partly associated with midbrain dopamine neurons 17–19 despite the notorious difficulties of identifying emotions in animals. Evolutionary theories of pleasure: The love connection BO Charles Darwin and other biological scientists that have examined the biological evolution and its basic principles found various mechanisms that steer behavior and biological development. Besides their theory on natural selection, it was particularly the sexual selection process that gained significance in the latter context over the last century, especially when it comes to the question of what makes us “what we are,” i.e., human. However, the capacity to sexually select and evolve is not at all a human accomplishment alone or a sign of our uniqueness; yet, we humans, as it seems, are ingenious in fooling ourselves and others–when we are in love or desperately search for it. It is well established that modern biological theory conjectures that organisms are the result of evolutionary competition. In fact, Richard Dawkins stresses gene survival and propagation as the basic mechanism of life 20. Only genes that lead to the fittest phenotype will make it. It is noteworthy that the phenotype is selected based on behavior that maximizes gene propagation. To do so, the phenotype must survive and generate offspring, and be better at it than its competitors. Thus, the ultimate, distal function of rewards is to increase evolutionary fitness by ensuring the survival of the organism and reproduction. It is agreed that learning, approach, economic decisions, and positive emotions are the proximal functions through which phenotypes obtain other necessary nutrients for survival, mating, and care for offspring. Behavioral reward functions have evolved to help individuals to survive and propagate their genes. Apparently, people need to live well and long enough to reproduce. Most would agree that homo-sapiens do so by ingesting the substances that make their bodies function properly. For this reason, foods and drinks are rewards. Additional rewards, including those used for economic exchanges, ensure sufficient palatable food and drink supply. Mating and gene propagation is supported by powerful sexual attraction. Additional properties, like body form, augment the chance to mate and nourish and defend offspring and are therefore also rewards. Care for offspring until they can reproduce themselves helps gene propagation and is rewarding; otherwise, many believe mating is useless. According to David E Comings, as any small edge will ultimately result in evolutionary advantage 21, additional reward mechanisms like novelty seeking and exploration widen the spectrum of available rewards and thus enhance the chance for survival, reproduction, and ultimate gene propagation. These functions may help us to obtain the benefits of distant rewards that are determined by our own interests and not immediately available in the environment. Thus the distal reward function in gene propagation and evolutionary fitness defines the proximal reward functions that we see in everyday behavior. That is why foods, drinks, mates, and offspring are rewarding. There have been theories linking pleasure as a required component of health benefits salutogenesis, (salugenesis). In essence, under these terms, pleasure is described as a state or feeling of happiness and satisfaction resulting from an experience that one enjoys. Regarding pleasure, it is a double-edged sword, on the one hand, it promotes positive feelings (like mindfulness) and even better cognition, possibly through the release of dopamine 22. But on the other hand, pleasure simultaneously encourages addiction and other negative behaviors, i.e., motivational toxicity. It is a complex neurobiological phenomenon, relying on reward circuitry or limbic activity. It is important to realize that through the “Brain Reward Cascade” (BRC) endorphin and endogenous morphinergic mechanisms may play a role 23. While natural rewards are essential for survival and appetitive motivation leading to beneficial biological behaviors like eating, sex, and reproduction, crucial social interactions seem to further facilitate the positive effects exerted by pleasurable experiences. Indeed, experimentation with addictive drugs is capable of directly acting on reward pathways and causing deterioration of these systems promoting hypodopaminergia 24. Most would agree that pleasurable activities can stimulate personal growth and may help to induce healthy behavioral changes, including stress management 25. The work of Esch and Stefano 26 concerning the link between compassion and love implicate the brain reward system, and pleasure induction suggests that social contact in general, i.e., love, attachment, and compassion, can be highly effective in stress reduction, survival, and overall health. Understanding the role of neurotransmission and pleasurable states both positive and negative have been adequately studied over many decades 26–37, but comparative anatomical and neurobiological function between animals and homo sapiens appear to be required and seem to be in an infancy stage. Finding happiness is different between apes and humans As stated earlier in this expert opinion one key to happiness involves a network of good friends 38. However, it is not entirely clear exactly how the higher forms of satisfaction and pleasure are related to a sugar rush, winning a sports event or even sky diving, all of which augment dopamine release at the reward brain site. Recent multidisciplinary research, using both humans and detailed invasive brain analysis of animals has discovered some critical ways that the brain processes pleasure. Remarkably, there are pathways for ordinary liking and pleasure, which are limited in scope as described above in this commentary. However, there are many brain regions, often termed hot and cold spots, that significantly modulate (increase or decrease) our pleasure or even produce the opposite of pleasure— that is disgust and fear 39. One specific region of the nucleus accumbens is organized like a computer keyboard, with particular stimulus triggers in rows— producing an increase and decrease of pleasure and disgust. Moreover, the cortex has unique roles in the cognitive evaluation of our feelings of pleasure 40. Importantly, the interplay of these multiple triggers and the higher brain centers in the prefrontal cortex are very intricate and are just being uncovered. Desire and reward centers It is surprising that many different sources of pleasure activate the same circuits between the mesocorticolimbic regions (Figure 1). Reward and desire are two aspects pleasure induction and have a very widespread, large circuit. Some part of this circuit distinguishes between desire and dread. The so-called pleasure circuitry called “REWARD” involves a well-known dopamine pathway in the mesolimbic system that can influence both pleasure and motivation. In simplest terms, the well-established mesolimbic system is a dopamine circuit for reward. It starts in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the midbrain and travels to the nucleus accumbens (Figure 2). It is the cornerstone target to all addictions. The VTA is encompassed with neurons using glutamate, GABA, and dopamine. The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is located within the ventral striatum and is divided into two sub-regions—the motor and limbic regions associated with its core and shell, respectively. The NAc has spiny neurons that receive dopamine from the VTA and glutamate (a dopamine driver) from the hippocampus, amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. Subsequently, the NAc projects GABA signals to an area termed the ventral pallidum (VP). The region is a relay station in the limbic loop of the basal ganglia, critical for motivation, behavior, emotions and the “Feel Good” response. This defined system of the brain is involved in all addictions –substance, and non –substance related. In 1995, our laboratory coined the term “Reward Deficiency Syndrome” (RDS) to describe genetic and epigenetic induced hypodopaminergia in the “Brain Reward Cascade” that contribute to addiction and compulsive behaviors 3,6,41. Furthermore, ordinary “liking” of something, or pure pleasure, is represented by small regions mainly in the limbic system (old reptilian part of the brain). These may be part of larger neural circuits. In Latin, hedus is the term for “sweet”; and in Greek, hodone is the term for “pleasure.” Thus, the word Hedonic is now referring to various subcomponents of pleasure: some associated with purely sensory and others with more complex emotions involving morals, aesthetics, and social interactions. The capacity to have pleasure is part of being healthy and may even extend life, especially if linked to optimism as a dopaminergic response 42. Psychiatric illness often includes symptoms of an abnormal inability to experience pleasure, referred to as anhedonia. A negative feeling state is called dysphoria, which can consist of many emotions such as pain, depression, anxiety, fear, and disgust. Previously many scientists used animal research to uncover the complex mechanisms of pleasure, liking, motivation and even emotions like panic and fear, as discussed above 43. However, as a significant amount of related research about the specific brain regions of pleasure/reward circuitry has been derived from invasive studies of animals, these cannot be directly compared with subjective states experienced by humans. In an attempt to resolve the controversy regarding the causal contributions of mesolimbic dopamine systems to reward, we have previously evaluated the three-main competing explanatory categories: “liking,” “learning,” and “wanting” 3. That is, dopamine may mediate (a) liking: the hedonic impact of reward, (b) learning: learned predictions about rewarding effects, or (c) wanting: the pursuit of rewards by attributing incentive salience to reward-related stimuli 44. We have evaluated these hypotheses, especially as they relate to the RDS, and we find that the incentive salience or “wanting” hypothesis of dopaminergic functioning is supported by a majority of the scientific evidence. Various neuroimaging studies have shown that anticipated behaviors such as sex and gaming, delicious foods and drugs of abuse all affect brain regions associated with reward networks, and may not be unidirectional. Drugs of abuse enhance dopamine signaling which sensitizes mesolimbic brain mechanisms that apparently evolved explicitly to attribute incentive salience to various rewards 45. Addictive substances are voluntarily self-administered, and they enhance (directly or indirectly) dopaminergic synaptic function in the NAc. This activation of the brain reward networks (producing the ecstatic “high” that users seek). Although these circuits were initially thought to encode a set point of hedonic tone, it is now being considered to be far more complicated in function, also encoding attention, reward expectancy, disconfirmation of reward expectancy, and incentive motivation 46. The argument about addiction as a disease may be confused with a predisposition to substance and nonsubstance rewards relative to the extreme effect of drugs of abuse on brain neurochemistry. The former sets up an individual to be at high risk through both genetic polymorphisms in reward genes as well as harmful epigenetic insult. Some Psychologists, even with all the data, still infer that addiction is not a disease 47. Elevated stress levels, together with polymorphisms (genetic variations) of various dopaminergic genes and the genes related to other neurotransmitters (and their genetic variants), and may have an additive effect on vulnerability to various addictions 48. In this regard, Vanyukov, et al. 48 suggested based on review that whereas the gateway hypothesis does not specify mechanistic connections between “stages,” and does not extend to the risks for addictions the concept of common liability to addictions may be more parsimonious. The latter theory is grounded in genetic theory and supported by data identifying common sources of variation in the risk for specific addictions (e.g., RDS). This commonality has identifiable neurobiological substrate and plausible evolutionary explanations. Over many years the controversy of dopamine involvement in especially “pleasure” has led to confusion concerning separating motivation from actual pleasure (wanting versus liking) 49. We take the position that animal studies cannot provide real clinical information as described by self-reports in humans. As mentioned earlier and in the abstract, on November 23rd, 2017, evidence for our concerns was discovered 50 In essence, although nonhuman primate brains are similar to our own, the disparity between other primates and those of human cognitive abilities tells us that surface similarity is not the whole story. Sousa et al. 50 small case found various differentially expressed genes, to associate with pleasure related systems. Furthermore, the dopaminergic interneurons located in the human neocortex were absent from the neocortex of nonhuman African apes. Such differences in neuronal transcriptional programs may underlie a variety of neurodevelopmental disorders. In simpler terms, the system controls the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that plays a significant role in pleasure and rewards. The senior author, Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale, stated: “Humans have evolved a dopamine system that is different than the one in chimpanzees.” This may explain why the behavior of humans is so unique from that of non-human primates, even though our brains are so surprisingly similar, Sestan said: “It might also shed light on why people are vulnerable to mental disorders such as autism (possibly even addiction).” Remarkably, this research finding emerged from an extensive, multicenter collaboration to compare the brains across several species. These researchers examined 247 specimens of neural tissue from six humans, five chimpanzees, and five macaque monkeys. Moreover, these investigators analyzed which genes were turned on or off in 16 regions of the brain. While the differences among species were subtle, there was a remarkable contrast in the neocortices, specifically in an area of the brain that is much more developed in humans than in chimpanzees. In fact, these researchers found that a gene called tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) for the enzyme, responsible for the production of dopamine, was expressed in the neocortex of humans, but not chimpanzees. As discussed earlier, dopamine is best known for its essential role within the brain’s reward system; the very system that responds to everything from sex, to gambling, to food, and to addictive drugs. However, dopamine also assists in regulating emotional responses, memory, and movement. Notably, abnormal dopamine levels have been linked to disorders including Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and spectrum disorders such as autism and addiction or RDS. Nora Volkow, the director of NIDA, pointed out that one alluring possibility is that the neurotransmitter dopamine plays a substantial role in humans’ ability to pursue various rewards that are perhaps months or even years away in the future. This same idea has been suggested by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University. Dr. Sapolsky cited evidence that dopamine levels rise dramatically in humans when we anticipate potential rewards that are uncertain and even far off in our futures, such as retirement or even the possible alterlife. This may explain what often motivates people to work for things that have no apparent short-term benefit 51. In similar work, Volkow and Bale 52 proposed a model in which dopamine can favor NOW processes through phasic signaling in reward circuits or LATER processes through tonic signaling in control circuits. Specifically, they suggest that through its modulation of the orbitofrontal cortex, which processes salience attribution, dopamine also enables shilting from NOW to LATER, while its modulation of the insula, which processes interoceptive information, influences the probability of selecting NOW versus LATER actions based on an individual’s physiological state. This hypothesis further supports the concept that disruptions along these circuits contribute to diverse pathologies, including obesity and addiction or RDS. Thus, the standard is maximizing expected well-being or act hedonistic util. Prefer additionally –
1 Outweighs – A Predictability – most authors assume util when discussing the cost/benefit tradeoffs of policy B topic ed – other frameworks don’t engage with key questions of implemented policy impacts – that’s key, b/c we only have 2 months for this topic. C TJFs first because they assume the framework being good for debate 2 Death is bad and outweighs – a) agents can’t act if they fear for their bodily security which constrains every ethical theory, b) it destroys the subject itself – kills any ability to achieve value in ethics since life is a prerequisite C) o/w on magnitude- trillions 3 Actor spec—governments must use util because they don’t have intentions and are constantly dealing with tradeoffs—outweighs since different agents have different obligations—takes out calc indicts since they are empirically denied and linked turns them because the alt is no action.
Underview
Underview 1 1AR theory is legit – anything else means infinite abuse – drop the debater, competing interps, no rvis and the highest layer of the round – 1AR is too short to make up for the time trade-off – no RVIs or 2NR theory and paradigm issues– 6 min 2NR means they can brute force me every time. 2 Assume I-meets to spec shells since bidirectional shells and infinite regress prove abuse is inescapable 3 Give me new 2AR weighing and arguments - I only know what arguments I have to weigh against in the 2NR, but they know in the 1AR.