| Number 244 | February 20, 2004 |
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This Week:
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Greetings, I’m still on a media kick this week, as I was last week. And as I will continue to be next week, or so it appears at the moment, when I plan to talk about pay equity, opinion polls, extortion in foreign policy, and who-knows-what else, as seen through the phantasmagorical lens that we call The Media. Also, I am amassing a file of highly-qualified candidates for the honor of Nygaard Notes “Quote” of the Week, so I may have to do a “Quote”-O-Rama, and publish several all together next week. If I can find the room! OK, back to the keyboard to prepare for next week. Nygaard |
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On the front page of the “Variety” Section of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of January 19th was a fascinating piece about a woman named Kathy Mulvey. Mulvey is the executive director of a non-profit called Infact. Readers may recall Infact, which got its start in the 1970s with the Nestle boycott campaign aimed at stopping the marketing of infant formula in poor countries (“Infact” used to stand for “Infant Formula Action Coalition.”) Infact has since targeted General Electric for its involvement in the nuclear weapons business, and General Electric has since gotten out of that business. Now Infact has turned its sights on the tobacco industry, with a ten-year campaign to “reduce the political and economic influence of the Altria Corporation (formerly known as Phillip Morris).” Typical of the personalized “human interest” stories of this ilk (this one appeared under the heading “Monday Profile” in the Variety section), Ms. Mulvey is portrayed as a hero, the kind of person whose individual personality characteristics are what make political change happen. For example, the article, which was a reprint of an article in the Boston Globe, states that “much of the answer” to the question of Infact’s success in taking on Big Tobacco “lies with Mulvey, a 37-year-old activist who has the tenacity of a pit bull latched onto an ankle.” Et Cetera. (To get a better picture of what that organization is really about, go to the Infact website: http://www.infact.org/helpstop.html) Besides lionizing Mulvey, the article does report on a remarkable fact, one that deserves placement on the front pages. And that fact is the existence of a remarkable international treaty, the ratification of which is the subject of a huge international campaign, of which the Infact campaign is a part, of which Mulvey is, in turn, just a part, albeit a very visible one. The treaty is called the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. It is the world’s first public health treaty, and it was adopted unanimously last May 21 by the 192 nations in attendance at the World Health Assembly, sponsored by the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO). How remarkable is this treaty? The Globe article summarized it well: “The treaty would ban tobacco advertising, promotion, and sponsorship, meaning Altria would have to do away with its iconic Marlboro Man and stop sponsoring athletic and cultural events in the countries that ratify it. Cigarette brands would no longer appear on billboards, hats, bags, café umbrellas, and other merchandise.” And this would be true in every country that ratifies the treaty! There was a little coverage of the treaty in this country at the time it was adopted, but not much. And there was very little coverage, indeed, of the ongoing U.S. effort in the months leading up to the signing to “water down” the treaty, and perhaps to block it completely. As CBS News reported last March, “[U.S. health attache David] Hohman hinted to exhausted delegates that the United States might press for parts of the text to be renegotiated at the forthcoming World Health Organization assembly. That risks the unraveling of the entire treaty.” The BBC explained part of the reason for the U.S. decision to stand—nearly alone in the world—against this ground-breaking treaty: “The US claims a total ban on tobacco advertising would be a violation of its constitutional commitment to free speech.” (The BBC adds that “Health activists, however, accuse the US of trying to protect the tobacco companies, pointing out that the U.S. is home to Philip Morris [now Altria], the world's biggest tobacco exporter.”) CBS alluded to an even more telling cause of U.S. opposition to the treaty, saying that “The United States could not agree to the section of the text that expresses concern about high smoking levels in ‘indigenous peoples.’ Washington fears that use of ‘peoples’ rather than ‘people’ could imply sovereignty and would send a wrong signal to native American Indians.” That “wrong signal,” as the Christian Science Monitor put it, “could imply an American Indian sovereignty the US does not recognize.” To date, 89 countries have signed the treaty, and 8 countries have ratified it. The United States has done neither. All in all, a very important and historic process is underway, news of which belongs on the front page of the newspapers, not on the front page of the “Variety Section” in a human interest story on Mulvey the Pit Bull. Learn more about the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control at the website of the Framework Convention Alliance, a global organization of non-governmental organizations working to get this historic treaty ratified: http://fctc.org. |
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While much of the world was discussing and passing the historic public health treaty that would protect people from being sucked into the clutches of tobacco addiction, my own state of No New Taxes Minnesota (NNT MN) was going in the opposite direction. During the 1990s, 46 states sued the major tobacco companies to recover tobacco-related health care costs. Four of them, including NNT MN, reached individual settlements before the “Master Settlement Agreement” was reached with all the states in 1998. The Master Agreement required the tobacco companies to make annual payments to the states in perpetuity, with total payments over the first 25 years estimated at $246 billion. It also imposed limited restrictions on the marketing of tobacco products. NNT MN’s share of the settlement was$6.1 billion. Here’s what happened with that money, according to the Minnesota Smoke Free Coalition:
In part as a result of that spending, “use of any tobacco product declined by 11 percent among high school and middle school students [in Minnesota] between 2000 and 2002,” according to the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids. That’s the good news. However, the Smoke Free Coalition adds, “Sadly, during the 2003 legislative session Governor Pawlenty and lawmakers chose to completely eliminate the tobacco endowments to fix the budget deficit. As a result, not one penny of Minnesota’s historic tobacco settlement is being used to prevent kids from smoking.” During the time some of those pennies were used for public health purposes, about 38,000 kids (rough estimate) in Minnesota stopped, or never started, using tobacco. In the wake of the diversion of the Tobacco Prevention endowment money, that decline in tobacco use can be expected to reverse itself, with the result being untold human suffering, along with increased health care costs in the long term. On the “bright” side, the more affluent segments of the population of Minnesota avoided a tax increase. And such is modern life in No New Taxes Minnesota. |
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The perpetuation of cultural myths can occur in the strangest ways. Consider the front page of the Metro Section of the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) of November 15th, headlined “Wrestling Taught Him to Grapple with Hunger.” The subject of the article was 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug. Borlaug was in Minneapolis because he was on the wrestling team at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s, and he comes to town now and again to give inspirational speeches to the modern-day wrestling teams. (This is according to the Star Trib—I’m not making this up!) The Star Trib article dutifully repeats the mythology surrounding Borlaug, saying that his work “brought hunger to its knees in Mexico, India, Pakistan and other nations.” Borlaug, for those not familiar with his work, was instrumental in developing the “high-yield, disease-resistant wheat plant” that was the basis for the so-called “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 70s. He not only developed the varieties, the article tells us, but also “helped organize cadres of young scientists from Asia, Africa and Latin America to return to their homelands to plant, battle with their own entrenched governments and feed the hungry.” And so the myth goes. The “Green Revolution” did not “bring hunger to its knees,” as the passing years have shown. And why not? Because Borlaug’s work, however well-intentioned, was based on a false premise: that world hunger was a result of insufficient food supplies. It wasn’t, and isn’t. (And, even if it were, we now know that Green Revolution technologies actually lead to declining crop yields after prolonged use, in addition to damaging the environment and human health.) Why is this myth so appealing, and so easily accepted by reporters for the Star Tribune and (apparently) by their readers? Many of us in the global North (i.e. the wealthy countries) find it convenient to believe that our affluence is unrelated to the poverty of those in the global South, the so-called Third World. We would like to believe that world hunger is nothing more than a technical problem, and that the solution can—in fact, must—be supplied by U.S.-based technology and ideas. It fits well, in other words, with a deep-seated European/U.S. colonial paternalism. My point was underlined, ever so clearly, in a report released later that same month by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Entitled “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2003,” the report tells us that world hunger, after a slight decline in the early 1990s, is on the rise again. (Tellingly, the report made no mention of hunger having spent any time on its knees.) As reported in the NY Times of November 25, in a short article on page 13, “Hunger very seldom happens because of lack of food, according to the [FAO] report.” The Times quotes Hartwig de Haen, FAO assistant director, as saying that “There is enough food available in world markets and even often in [specific] countries, but people who are affected by hunger don't have access to it, either through income and purchasing power or through access to land and water.” In other words, hunger is a function of poverty and injustice, not scarcity. Once this basic understanding comes to replace the “Green Revolution” myth in the minds of the people in charge of the world economy—which most likely will involve putting a whole new set of people in charge of the world economy—then we’ll see some real changes. Instead of well-meaning but misguided (and toxic, and ineffective) attempts to increase the supply of food, we’ll begin to put our energies into a more just and life-sustaining distribution of the food we already have. A motivational speech on that theme would really get the wrestling team going, now, wouldn’t it? For more details on the “More food = Less Hunger” myth, see my article “Hunger, Power, and Politics: Looking for the Key Fact,” in Nygaard Notes #210. |
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I don’t have time to say anything original about what is going on in Haiti, but people of good will should pay some attention to another looming “regime change.” This one involves the targeting of a democratically-elected president by a group of sinister thugs. My main advice for the moment: Do not believe anything you see or hear about Haiti in the mainstream media. Here are a few alternative sources of information, all on the web:
That’s it for now. |