The Dalai Lama's dilemma
Published in the Rutgers Daily Targum
Published: Monday, January 17, 2005

"It seems to me, peace is not just the absence of violence but much more," the Dalai Lama said this past Sunday in his talk, "Peace, War and Reconciliation."

Peace, according to Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th dalai lama of Tibet, means creating and coming into being. It has to do with attitude, motivation and compassion.

The peace of the Cold War, for example, was not peace at all, because it was a time where the terror of nuclear annihilation kept the nations of the two blocs in a relative military standoff. But fear and suspicion ruled for decades.

"Any action which is motivated by hatred, anger or jealousy, is essentially violent," he said.

The Dalai Lama's speech was disarmingly simple, yet full of a wisdom that is so uncomplicated it will take most of us a lifetime to even begin to implement in our lives.

"We are all living things, including those trees, flowers, this grass. ... Is this real grass? It looks like real grass!" the Dalai Lama said.

He was referring to the Astroturf on which a hundred or so people were sitting, in front of the stage.

It is, unfortunately, the most straightforward and uncomplicated things that are hardest for those of us entangled in the chaos and overstimulation of modern urban life to grapple with.

For example, the monks of the Drepung Loseling Monastery of Tibet have been working on a sand mandala - a circular patterned drawing made out of different colored sands - since Wednesday last week and finished off their beautiful mandala at the Zimmerli Art Museum on Saturday.

Sand mandalas are symbols of the universe and its energy and are also used by Tibetan monks in meditation and the initiation of new monks. Tibetan monks have been traveling around the United States over the past decade or so, publicizing their struggle for a Tibet free and independent from China. They have shared sand mandalas and prayer chants with audiences throughout the United States to raise awareness of their culture and what is being stifled by communist China's occupation of Tibet and the forced exile of its monks.

These sand mandalas represent the cycle of life and death; the mandala is created laboriously over a few days by several monks and then destroyed. The sand is emptied into a nearby body of water - in this case, the Raritan River.
This process symbolizes the transience of life and the ideal of avoiding attachment to the material world.
It surprised me, then, to see that once the mandala was destroyed, bags of the sand were to be distributed to museum visitors - of which there were hundreds - as a souvenir of the event.

It surprised me even more that people were scrambling into place to get their bags of sand first, in case the stuff ran out, and they couldn't take home their own little piece of the art.

Intentions were, I have no doubt, good-hearted. Those who were interested enough in the culture of another nation to turn up at the Zimmerli wanted to show their respect to the monks in taking a piece of their hard work home with them. They also wanted to support the monks by buying books, incense, Tibetan and Nepali cloth work and, of course, T-shirts. There was also a "donations" box, which, while it had some dollar bills in it, went largely ignored by the majority.

We were all awed by the mesmeric chants of the Drepung Loseling yellow-hat monks and their intricate sand drawing. Everyone who attended either the Zimmerli exhibition or the Dalai Lama's talk - I'm sure the population of both events overlapped a great deal - came away with a greater awareness of an ancient and inspiring tradition and its political perils with China.

What escaped many of us, however, was the essential spirit in which these monks, including the Dalai Lama, approach the world, which gives them such quiet sophistication that most of us can only imitate at best.
The point of destroying the sand mandala was that beauty and art, like life, must be enjoyed for what they are but then let go. The sand, the monks explained, is usually released into the water so it can carry the monks' blessings into the ocean and then into the rain, which spreads the blessings and prayers over the earth. Taking home bags of colored sand, whose pattern and beauty has already been destroyed, defeats an essential point of Buddhist philosophy - and of most spiritual philosophies, for that matter.

What is even more unfortunate than our lack of understanding of what it means to enjoy life without wanting to take it home in a bag, is this understanding does not come with being Buddhist or any other religion.
Most of us in the world are born into one religious background but have managed to carry the most hollow remnants of spirituality with us into our urban adulthood while leaving behind the essentially similar tenets most religions are founded on: compassion, tolerance and contentment.

Osama bin Laden, in terrorizing the globe with random and ignorant acts of violence, acts in the hope of bringing everyone to Islam, which, according to him, "is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights and defending the oppressed and persecuted."
While he has the tenets of his religion down pat in this statement, his actions and those he has orchestrated couldn't be further from the teachings of Islam.

Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, who theoretically share the Dalai Lama's philosophy of peace and nonviolence, have been heavily involved in the politics of the civil war between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government and the mainly Hindu Tamil separatists. The monks are fully supportive of the government's war against and extermination of the Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam, more commonly known as the Tamil Tigers.
Speaking to a reporter from The Associated Press, one politically prominent Buddhist monk said, "Nowadays, monks cannot go and sleep in the forest. The monks of Sri Lanka have always been involved in national issues."

According to the article, "Rathana, an official with a powerful Buddhist group, dismisses Sri Lanka's peace process and urges renewed military action against Tamil Tiger separatists."

"We should fight against unjust activities," Rathana said, according to the AP. "Yes, we should fight."

It seems, therefore, that while we are blessed with the immensely wise canons and values of ancient, but still relevant, religions today, most of the world's leaders, political actors and even everyday citizens - including those of us fortunate enough to witness Tibetan Buddhism at the Zimmerli and Rutgers Stadium - are somehow missing the point. Hopefully, listening to and understanding the Dalai Lama's call to tolerance, compassion and contentment will clear our minds of the complicated inanities of life and give us a glimpse of the simple profundities.

Ruha Devanesan is a Rutgers College senior majoring in journalism and political science. Her column, "Disorientations," appears on alternate Wednesdays.

I have little doubt that everybody who drives a car is woefully aware that gas prices in the United States - a meager $1.86 a gallon just a year ago - have jumped over a dollar since then to around $3 a gallon today. I don't drive a car, which is fortunate for the environment, but not so fortunate for me in the middle of highway-clad New Jersey suburbia. I've been assaulted left and right, nevertheless, by cries and sighs of indignation over the phenomenal price of oil these days.

Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the U.S. Gulf Coast explains the recent hike in prices- more than 83 percent of gas production and 95 percent of oil production in that region has been shut down over the past week because of the damage to oil rigs and refineries, according to British Broadcasting Company News.
The BBC reports that about 30 percent of the country's entire crude oil output is out of commission.

The price of oil per barrel broke records, rising to around $70 a barrel on Aug. 30 this year, just after the hurricane. This is the highest price of oil ever recorded, but it still falls short of the oil crisis of the late 1970s, where, adjusted for inflation, the black gold was selling for about $90 a barrel. So cheer up, things have been worse.

Oil prices are already slowly falling, partially because various oil producing countries have offered to provide the United States with oil to buffer the shortage caused by the hurricane's impact.

The International Energy Association, for example, has offered to release two million barrels of petrol a day - the amount Kuwait puts out - to the United States. Consisting of 26 countries, including France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom, the IEA holds a combined stockpile of four billion barrels of oil, 1.4 billion of which are available to these governments for emergency use.

While this buffer supply is yet to arrive in the United States, the American government is already using its own Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks to counter a sharp rise in gas prices, according to the BBC.

Prices fluctuate, however, not only with actual rises and falls in oil availability, but with speculation on disaster and how much damage will arise. This explains why the price of oil leapt from about $66.86, set on Aug. 12 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, to $70 before demand for oil outstripped the interrupted supply from the Gulf Coast.

The price of crude oil has been steadily rising for other reasons, long before Hurricane Katrina struck refineries along the Gulf Coast.

Upsets in oil supply from major oil-producing nations such as Niger (undergoing internal political strife), Iraq (undergoing an externally induced chaotic cataclysm and recently a rebellious sabotage of the power grid) and Venezuela (where strikes interrupted oil export) also contributed to the edging up of oil prices.

If that's not enough of a complication of the usual media-pulverized, mushy public-feed that oil prices are up plainly because Katrina struck, here's another one. An overall rise in demand for oil has driven up prices in recent years because the supply of oil is restricted - both by what the poor earth has left in her tired loins as well as by oil producing cartels like the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

China, the new oversized kid on the block, consumed about 6.7 million barrels of oil per day last year, 3.2 million of which came from imports. Its consumption is speculated by the various bespectacled cogitating oil gurus to increase as its economy expands.

The United States and Europe have also increased demand over the last few years, putting more of a strain on oil supply.

While North America contributes about 4.8 percent to global oil production at just over 14 million barrels a day, oil greedy America boasts the highest consumption in the world and has to import an additional 11 million barrels a day to support its needs.

The fact of the matter is that this precious commodity that keeps the United States on its knees before Saudi Arabia and Kuwait while it kicks Iraq and Iran in the pants for Islamic fundamentalism is a slippery fish that will never leave us with our bellies, or rather our gas tanks, full. So why do we so desperately cling to it? What on earth do we use all of this oil for?

Perhaps the national obsession with sport-utility vehicles, Hummers and other generally colossal, compulsively oil-guzzling American-made cars has something to do with it.

The BBC tries to convince us that sales of the SUV, "the nation's top-selling car," are "sluggish with a disappointing 4.1percent increase for the year." That's a sluggish increase, by the way. Hummer sales, however, declined by 21 percent, and the hybrid, a more environmentally friendly car that combines petrol and electric power, is basking in the sun of celebrity endorsements by the likes of Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio. American registrations for Hybrids rose more than 25 percent last year, apparently, to nearly 44,000. That number may seem impressive on its own (even then, not really), but when compared to just one car company's - Toyota's - 675,809 American light-truck sales (SUVs, vans and pickups) last year, the number of hybrids on the road in the United States today is, in fact, insignificant.

Decades of environmental activism and warnings from international conservation groups even oil companies like Shell and Chevron, indicate that the current levels of fuel consumption are ruining the environment and exhausting a non renewable natural resource. Yet, these factors haven't curbed our consumption of oil. Maybe the only thing that will is astronomical gas prices. If this is the case, I say hitch up the price a few more dollars, OPEC!

There are viable alternatives to driving huge cars back and forth across the vast smoggy expanses of America. Bicycles (two-wheeled, non-fuel-consuming and human-powered machines) are one great way to traverse short distances and jettison those two pounds you've been trying to lose since the '90s. Walking is another.

If exercise isn't your thing, other alternatives such as trains (NJ Transit is offering FREE trips to and from New York all this week), buses and carpooling in regular or hybrid cars do exist.

Gas prices may descend eventually, but in the meantime, I suggest taking this opportunity to leave the car in the garage and explore the world of the bipedal!

Ruha Devanesan is a Rutgers College senior majoring in journalism and political science. Her column, "Disorientations," appears on alternate Wednesdays.

I was racking my brain for something to write about for this week's column the other day - believe it or not, scrambling your way up to earning a soapbox is not half the struggle, it's finding something significant to say when you're on it - when a friend of mine suggested I read an article on the British Broadcasting Corporation's online front-page.

This may be giving away far too much of my research method and robbing me of my seemingly thorough info-gathering skills, but I get most of my international news from the BBC, as well as most of the seeds of interest from whence I launch into a foray of the Web for more, more, more. And this was one story that unfolded from Africa to India and then across the rest of the world.

The article was about hundreds of Kenyan people living with HIV or AIDS who had gathered to demonstrate at the Indian High Commission in Nairobi. The reason for the protests, also planned in Uganda and Tanzania, according to the BBC, was that India's parliament will be reviewing the Indian Patent Act of 1970 over the next few weeks. Its government could, quite probably, begin enforcing patent laws that will end the production of generic AIDS medications used to treat millions across India, Africa and other developing countries that cannot afford the branded drugs produced by large pharmaceutical companies.

The difference between generic anti-retroviral drugs and brand-named drugs is nothing to sneeze at. The article mentions that one African patient pays $20 a month for treatment with generic forms of drugs that would otherwise cost $395.

In Nigeria, the government has resorted to subsidizing the generic drugs themselves, which, despite being more than 10 times cheaper than brand-named drugs, are still not affordable to many of the four million Nigerians estimated to be HIV-positive today. Under the program, the Indian-produced generic ARVs are given to around 14,000 Nigerians for $7 per patient per month, and that number was supposed to rise to 100,000 this year.

This is unlikely if India changes its patent laws to prohibit the generic production of patented drugs. Under current law, Indian drug companies have been able to replicate products patented in other countries as long as the process of production is not entirely the same. In other words, India recognizes patents on the process of drug-making but not on the final product.

Working with loopholes is a forte with Indian businesses, which have learnt to thrive despite continuous entanglement in the one thing the country is never short of - red tape.

Indian pharmaceutical companies such as Cipla, Ranbaxy and Hetero have capitalized on this patent loophole in a way that would make any crafty businessman proud, effectively plagiarizing drugs that have taken years and millions of dollars' worth of research and development by multinational pharmaceutical companies, and mass producing them for a fraction of the price, therefore cornering a market that had been monopolized by a few huge companies till the recent past.

The difference between this craftiness and any other is that thousands of lives are made better because these drugs are finally being offered at an affordable price for AIDS victims and their countries, which have a responsibility to try to curb the epidemic and support those already infected as much as they can.

Such is the usefulness of these generic ARVs that the World Health Organization has listed Cipla, amongst other low-cost generic drug producers, as a safe provider of antiretroviral drugs for United Nations purchase. William Haddad, from Cipla, called this a breakthrough, saying it was the first time the WHO "has had the nerve to challenge the multinationals by listing generic versions of drugs that are still on patent."

India itself, the second most populous country in the world after China, has one of the highest numbers of HIV/AIDS cases - over five million people. There is no doubt the Indian government would prefer home-made generic ARVs to patented imported ones. So why the move to end this industry, which also brings significant amounts of profit into India's coffers?

India may not be the land of the free or the home of the melting pot of two-garage suburban houses with four-wheel-drive sport utility vehicles in the driveway and multi-colored people on the inside. But the country has had one pride in common with the United States - its economic isolationism. Alas, both great loners have fallen into the melee of the global market. India now has to answer to the World Trade Organization on its patent laws, and its grace period with the WTO came to an end this year.

The trade-related aspects of the Intellectual Property Rights agreement, drawn up by the WTO between 1986 and 1994 to ensure intellectual property rights are respected in international trade came into effect in 1995, but different countries have had different periods after which they must comply with the law.

India's compliance must come at the beginning of this year, or it will face severe economic penalties from the WTO. The drug companies themselves, Cipla, Ranbaxy and Hetero among other generic producers, have their own incentives for withdrawing their generic drugs from the market, the fear of litigation outweighing the hefty profit margins they've made from generic medicines - about a sixth of the $48 billion global market for these generic drugs.

What we're left with is a situation where AIDS victims in Kenya and Nigeria may begin to die at a rate higher than the current 500-700 a day from AIDS-related diseases so that pharmaceutical multinationals don't feel cheated out of profits.

It seems that once again, economics overrides social welfare - the precedence of the WTO over the WHO when it comes to condoning or even encouraging the production of low-cost generic drugs to treat AIDS patients being just one disturbing example.

The provision of the basic healthcare needed for AIDS patients to survive is dependent on privatized pharmaceutical companies that want to make up in profit what they spent on research and development. Governments, trying to provide their citizens with healthcare also have their arms twisted by a supranational organization that is more interested in protecting patent laws than providing reasonable healthcare when possible. This is, of course, the best case scenario where governments do actually take an active interest in the health of their citizens.

Drugs so vital to human survival should not be subject to the laws of the market. If research and development costs are what keep the multinational drug companies from providing their latest drugs at prices that do not require them to be ripped off by the developing world to make them affordable to this world, then there must be another solution. Perhaps government should fund such research or institute more lax laws when ARVs and other such vital drugs are involved.

Ruha Devanesan is a Rutgers College junior majoring in journalism and political science. Her column, "No Exit," appears on alternate Tuesdays.

Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, has been busy shuttling around Europe and the Middle East to take some of the sharpness out of relations between the United States and the rest of the world that have embittered considerably since the Bush administration took over the show.

Despite this renewed attempt at diplomacy, while the United Nations is attempting to pull together some self-respect and exercise a little diplomatic influence over badly behaved nuclear wannabes like Iran and North Korea, talks seem slow to progress, and the United States is getting fidgety.

The United States, like a father who forfeits a relationship with his children because he must work and "bring home the bacon," leaves the mundane nurturing of the brats to his wife, the United Nations. She does what she can, given the little money he brings in, but he's been bringing in less and less than he promised, and her hands are usually tied when it comes to disciplining them because he wants the final say, but he's never home to give it. The munchkins grow up and become petulant, and one day, father U.S. comes home to find mother U.N. yanking her hair out with frustration - threats of sanctions just don't do the trick. He whips off his leather belt and lets the twerps have it.

Simplistic, perhaps, but the situation is far too reminiscent of the traditional male-dominated family unit to pass up the metaphor.

It all began when, back in the good old days of the Cold War, there were two super-powers: the United States and Russia. It was a happy and balanced time, because the peoples and nations dominated and exploited by one power at least lived with a healthy hatred for another power - a good outlet for the frustration of the oppressed.

What came with this Cold War, which lasted between World War II and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, was the proliferation of nuclear warheads in the United States and Russia - an arms race that lasted nearly 50 years. This, in turn, was accompanied by paranoia of total annihilation, should the little red-faced dictator on the other side decide to press the little red button.

The United States was the first to acquire nuclear capability, following research conducted by several scientists, including Albert Einstein, between 1939 and 1945 - "the Manhattan Project." Russia followed, developing capabilities in 1949, then the United Kingdom in 1952, France in 1960 and China in 1964.

Fast forward to the present day, and we now live in a world where Russia is thought to possess 8,500 warheads, with another 11,000 in stockpiles. The United States is believed to have 7,000 operational warheads with 3,000 in reserve, and China, France and the United Kingdom follow with 420, 350 and 200 respectively.
Considering it took only one uranium bomb, "Little Boy," to kill 66,000 people and injure 69,000 others at Hiroshima in an instant, the thought of thousands of these weapons of mass destruction sitting around in stockpiles around the world is less than comforting.

Matters get even more unnerving when you realize that the above-listed nuclear countries are only those who have declared their capabilities and have signed a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty along with 182 other countries. These countries submit their nuclear activities to the inspections of International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.N. Security Council, if necessary. Their conformance to the rules becomes increasingly irrelevant, however, when other states do not.

India, Israel and Pakistan are the only three nations known to possess nuclear weapons who have not signed the treaty. While India and Pakistan have declared their possession of nuclear weapons and conducted very controversial nuclear tests as machismo displays over their border squabbles, Israel has declined to even admit it possesses weapons but is believed to have between 75 and 200.

Iran, a signatory of the NPT, hid its nuclear enrichment program for years, violating the stipulations of the treaty. It has agreed to suspend nuclear enrichment activities for the moment, while talks are being conducted with Britain, France and Germany.

But as a senior Iranian cleric and former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said last week in response to the European Union talks, ``It is not acceptable that developed countries generate 70 or 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear energy and tell Iran, a great and powerful nation, that it cannot have nuclear electricity."
France does, in fact, produce close to 80 percent of its electricity with nuclear power stations, and other industrial countries produce less but do use the technology for electricity generation.

This brings up an important point. The United States and United Nations are not dealing with children. They are dealing with nations and cultures that have extremely strong and proud histories and a set of rationalities and values that, while they may not sit nicely with Western rationality, cannot be dismissed as irrational, whimsical and fanatic.

What right, after all, do industrialized countries have to their advanced nuclear energy programs and nuclear warheads if they deny developing countries the same right?

Surely America's latest rampage for freedom and democracy doesn't preclude the right to self-protection from developing and politically unstable countries, when it has the second largest stockpile of nuclear warheads itself?

It is this very instability and insecurity that lead a nation to develop nuclear weapons in the first place. This was what led to the nuclear arms race between the United States and Russia, and it is the same thing that is creating nuclear arms races between India and Pakistan, and Israel and its neighbors.

It is also what led the United States, the only country to ever use nuclear weapons against another nation, to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Saying that politically unstable nations should not have access to nuclear weaponry is absolutely correct. To have this ideal implemented, nuclear arms should not be accessible to anybody. No one can possibly use the amount of nuclear warheads available in actual war - the entire world would be annihilated. It is more about display of power than actual security measures.

But I do not believe there is a developed nation today that is willing to give up all of its nuclear capabilities in the name of peace and security.

The United States, seemingly the biggest advocate for eradicating nuclear development in countries like Iran and Korea, must lead the process by eliminating its own stockpile.

The possession of nuclear arms, whether by developing nations or developed, is the surest recipe for disaster.

Ruha Devanesan is a Rutgers College junior majoring in journalism and political science. Her column, "No Exit," appears on alternate Tuesdays.

Big Bucks
Published in the Rutgers Daily Targum
Published: Monday, February 1, 2005

A new year begins, and resolutions to try to make the world a better place are, naturally, at the top of everyone's list.

The question arises: What can I do about the refugees in Sudan, the victims of the tsunami or the perennial poverty of Ethiopia? They're too big, they require a lifetime of dedication on my part to see even a little improvement, and ultimately, I don't think I have what it takes to do that.

And so the brief moment of altruistic global conscientiousness passes, and we pick readily obtainable goals like losing those 10 pounds of Christmas dinner that have embraced our thighs with such fervent holiday cheer.
But what so many post-New Years dieters don't realize is that it doesn't take a lifetime of dedication to make a difference. Fair Trade has slipped off the agenda in general since 2002 when aid agencies launched a massive lobby preceding the G8 summit in Canada and the EU's annual summit in Seville that year. But it seems a very viable step we, as consumers, can now take toward changing the unfair economic manipulation and exploitation we see only glimpses of in the world today through our news media. We are, after all, a key part of the economic exchanges between nations, and our advocacy for fairer prices for producers and smaller profit margins for middlemen, like the big juggernaut enterprises of the coffee industry, are bound to make a difference if we scream loud enough - in this case with our consumer choices, not our lungs.

Oxfam International's "Make Trade Fair" campaign in 2002 aimed to challenge governments, international institutions and companies to change the rules governing international trade, and set free the potential of trade to reduce poverty. But Fair Trade has come to be the guise under which multinationals like Starbucks Coffee continue to exploit the developing world, while now making even more of a profit as they cater to the emerging niche of the population that actually does want to see more organic, environmentally friendly, and economically sustainable coffee for their buck.

Starbucks coffee proclaims proudly on its glossy Web site: Coffee "is an important source of income for an estimated 25 million people living in more than 70 tropical coffee-producing countries," and "in some cases, accounts for more than 80 percent of their foreign exchange earnings."

Ah the aroma of a sweet deal! We continue to indulge ourselves in a full-bodied, dark, sexy cup of liquid love, and the Nicaraguans down there in the tropics have rice on the table because of our graceful condescension through Starbucks, the middle-martyr, who "paid the farmers a fair price," made sure "that the coffee was grown in an ecologically sound manner" and "invested something meaningful in the farming communities where our coffees are produced."

And it's true - Starbucks has been taking more of a paternal interest in its coffee farmers, be they Nicaraguan, Ethiopian or Javanese. Starbucks, like Nike and the other mega corporate franchises that found it impossible to continue exploiting every resource possible in order to make the bigger buck - regardless of whether these resources constituted under-aged sweat-shop laborers in Thailand or over-worked Mexican bean pickers sweating over Arabica leaves - has had to clean up its act for the sake of consumer opinion, if not out of the goodness of its heart. Any publicity is good publicity in politics, but in business, negative publicity drives down sales and generally makes bad business. The huge protests of activists and non-governmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Oxfam and Amnesty International over the years have made a dent in corporate sales and forced them to change their images.

"In April 2000," according to the Organic Consumers Association, "Starbucks became a leader among major coffee companies when it announced it would begin to offer Fair Trade coffee in thousands of stores nationwide." It continues to lead the coffee industry as one of the largest purchasers of Fair Trade coffee, but dig a little beneath the surface, and it seems that image is all that these companies aim to change.
Going legitimately "fair" means losing very significant amounts of profit, and the temptation to "greenwash," or jump on the organic and social responsibility bandwagon without giving up much is strong. Out of the more than 100 million pounds of coffee Starbucks buys each year, only 2.8 million pounds of Certified Organic coffee, 2.1 million pounds of Fair Trade certified coffee, and 1.8 million pounds of Conservation (shade-grown) coffee were bought in 2003, according to Starbucks' latest figures. That amounts to, at most, 2.1 percent of its coffee as Fair Trade and 6.7 percent of its total coffee purchases being socially responsible at some level. For a company that boldly boasts a natural and back-to-the-source image, these numbers are not representative of its image at all.
Starbucks may have been the world leader in Fair Trade coffee once - the "big four" coffee companies, Sara Lee, Kraft, Nestle and Proctor and Gamble having made even less of an effort to adopt Fair Trade policies with their products - but several major coffee retailers are now making significant headway in the struggle to pay fairer prices to farmers of coffee - $1.26/lb for Fair Trade coffee and $1.41/lb for organic Fair Trade coffee (which must be grown under pesticide-free and environmentally sustainable conditions) - and make enough profit to survive and grow as businesses.

Ahold USA, for example, a subsidiary of the corporation that owns Giant Food and Stop & Shop, is introducing five Fair Trade selections of coffee in 1,200 American supermarkets. Proctor and Gamble has finally joined the Fair Trade market, and 42 out of 100 of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters' coffees are Fair Trade, while Starbucks has only one out of nearly 50 varieties, according to the Organic Consumers Association. More impressive is Thanksgiving Coffee Company, which earns 1,000 times less in revenues than Starbucks, but sells only 10 times less Fair Trade coffee.

The Fair Trade seed has been sown in coffee retail, and Starbucks has been reaping the benefits of its Fair Trade and Organic image for long enough. It is time it made more of an effort to turn a green façade into tangible results. Whether it be by avoiding Starbucks for more Fair Trade-friendly brands or demanding the company introduce weekly Fair Trade coffees of the day instead of just once a month, the effort on your part is a small one. Here, finally, is one thing you can do.

Ruha Devanesan is a Rutgers College junior majoring in journalism and political science. Her column, "No Exit," runs alternating Tuesdays.

The Lasting Impact of Disasters
Published in the Rutgers Daily Targum
Published: Monday, January 17, 2005

Already, news of the tsunamis that hit 12 countries in Asia and Africa on Dec. 26 last year is taking a backseat to more recent and salient reports.

I remember watching a woman in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, as she wept in front of a BBC camera and told of how she held onto her three children with one arm and floating debris with the other, attempting to keep afloat as the water swept through her village. Trying to get a better hold against the force of the water, she loosened her grip on her children for a brief moment, and all three - ranging from about 18 months to 5 years old - were taken from her. No mother should have to go through this.

As countless stories of the thousands who lost their lives or lost those close to them were published in newspapers and aired on our television screens across the world, even the hardest cynic had to concede that the sensationalism of the news media - hardly doing justice in this case to the real tragedy and loss that the victims of the tsunamis - still stirred up an impressive amount of sympathy and desire to help in the surrounding countries of Asia, as well as the Western world.

Josef Stalin, the Russian expert on the issue of meaningless death, once said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." I had come to much the same shameful conviction over the past few years as I watched disaster after disaster plague the Third World and recede quickly out of the attention of a global attention afflicted with too much information and not enough recourse to alleviate the problems with which we're faced. Hundreds died and millions were displaced in Bangladesh and Haiti from floods last year alone.

This catastrophe, however, has been such a slap in the face to the entire world that it cannot go overlooked. The nightmare of the giant ripples caused by the 9.5-magnitude earthquake off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, has not only taken approximately 140,000 native lives in the countries struck, but the lives of thousands of tourists from Britain, Sweden and other Western nations. It is estimated that around 40 percent of the dead in Sri Lanka were children, and thousands more children left orphaned have probably elevated sympathy for the almost incomprehensible scope of the tragedy. What leaves Stalin wrong in this case is the way the media have turned statistics into stories and images of death and struggle faced by Sri Lankans, Indonesians and others. Although not every story can be told - and those told cannot make us feel what people at the scene must feel - they make human something facts and figures cannot.

As news broke of the disaster in Britain on Boxing Day and the following days, the British government, with its initial pledge of a meager amount of 1 million pounds - if I remember correctly - was put to shame by the amount raised by the public, which came to 33 million pounds by New Year's Eve. Oxfam bookstores and thrift stores posted large notices in their windows asking for donations. Pubs encouraged the donation of the price of one drink to funds for aid. Money poured in to various other nongovernmental organizations from the British public. As of Jan. 14, the British public has managed to pledge an estimated 200 million pounds, according to the country's Disasters Emergency Committee, an umbrella charity group. I use Britain as an example because I was there, spending Christmas and New Year's Day with my family, but other nations such as China, Japan, Sweden and the United States had their own share of unprecedented public mobilization in the face of the calamity.

National governments have also donated considerable amounts of money and aid to the cause, U.S military aircraft helping in the few days after the disaster to shuttle the collecting aid from Medan to Aceh in Indonesia, and Britain sending plane-loads of makeshift tents and tarpaulin as well as emergency food supplies to Sri Lanka's affected areas. The United Nations has taken charge of the international aid effort, and could finally come into its own as a supranational governmental body capable of organizing efforts of such a large scope and scale.

According to The New York Times, for example, President George W. Bush ordered American aid to the disaster areas be increased from the initial $35 million to 10 times that amount. This outpouring of generosity came as a response to a senior U.N. official's charge that long-term Western aid efforts had been "stingy."
He also took the opportunity of a weekly radio address from his Texas ranch, where he was spending the week to say that America is leading the relief efforts and many other countries are following its example.
In fact, taking sheer numbers, Japan pledged far more than the United States, promising $500 million to the recovery effort. The initial figures pledged by countries as the scale of the disaster emerged also showed Britain, China and France as the largest donors, pledging $96 million, $60 million and $56 million respectively behind the World Bank, which pledged $250 million. The United States, sixth on the U.N. list of donors, can hardly be said to be "leading" the aid effort. Poorer countries - such as Nepal, Latin American countries and East Timor, which pledged $50,000 despite being one of the poorest nations in the world - have mounted a truer display of humanity through their donations, said Jan Egeland, the United Nation's humanitarian relief coordinator.
But enough of that. Whatever national interests might come into the international aid effort, the result takes precedence over the motives behind it. Talk of the political gain America might obtain by establishing a friendly foothold in Asia through aid efforts is making its rounds. The anti-American sentiment in Indonesia and India could be somewhat alleviated through the gratitude these nations may feel for the help offered by Big Brother. Japan's huge aid pledge is no doubt also politically and economically motivated on some level.

What we must ask ourselves and hold our governments to is how much of this pledged aid will eventually make its way to its destinations once the heat of the moment has died down and a new disaster takes the limelight.
According to Oxfam International, donor governments' short attention spans are a notorious problem. The Flash Appeal in response to Iran's earthquake a year ago was only 54 percent funded, and the Flash Appeal during the series of disasters that struck Haiti from March to September in 2004 was only 36 percent funded.
So far, $717 million of the $3.4 billion formally pledged by donor countries has been secured as a concrete commitment of aid money over the next six months, Egeland said. That aid is 73 percent of the $977 million U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has requested - an impressive response given the previous response figures.
What is more important than the immediate donations flowing in from around the world - from people truly struck by the tragedy who genuinely want to help to governments that have ultimately constituted the bulk of the aid efforts - is that this concern for the people who have lost everything in this natural disaster continue over the months and years it will take to reconstruct their lives.
Money seems the most effective and easiest way to help at this stage, but traveling to Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and the African countries affected in the future to volunteer whatever help we can offer should be something at least seriously considered by those of us who are able.
The media cannot, unfortunately, be counted on to keep up the scale of coverage of the tsunami story. It will be replaced just as Iraq's position in the news has been supplanted by reports of this latest natural disaster, one of the worst in modern history. It is our duty to remember and to continue to search out information on the reconstruction efforts and what can be done long after the situation disappears from front-page headlines. This, more than the immediate pouring out of sympathy and pocket change, will be the true test of our humanity and our empathy for the mothers who have watched their children get swept away to their deaths and the men, women and children who have been stripped of their homes and families by this senseless cataclysm.

Ruha Devanesan is a Rutgers College junior majoring in journalism and political science. Her column, "No Exit," runs alternating Tuesdays.