After the Green Economy, Green Security

How to Build Resilient Communities in a Chaotic World
By Chip Ward

Now that we've decided to "green" the economy, why not green homeland security, too? I'm not talking about interrogators questioning suspects under the glow of compact fluorescent light bulbs, or cops wearing recycled Kevlar recharging their Tasers via solar panels. What I mean is: Shouldn't we finally start rethinking the very notion of homeland security on a sinking planet?

Now that Dennis Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, claims that global insecurity is more of a danger to us than terrorism, isn't it time to release the idea of "security" from its top-down, business-as-usual, terrorism-oriented shackles? Isn't it, in fact, time for the Obama administration to begin building security we can believe in; that is, a bottom-up movement that will start us down the road to the kind of resilient American communities that could effectively recover from the disasters -- manmade or natural (if there's still a difference) -- that will surely characterize this emerging age of financial and climate chaos? In the long run, if we don't start pursuing security that actually focuses on the foremost challenges of our moment, that emphasizes recovery rather than what passes for "defense," that builds communities rather than just more SWAT teams, we're in trouble.

Today, "homeland security" and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), that unwieldy amalgam of 13 agencies created by the Bush administration in 2002, continue to express the potent, all-encompassing fears and assumptions of our last president's Global War on Terror. Foreign enemies may indeed be plotting to attack us, but, believe it or not (and increasing numbers of people, watching their homes, money, and jobs melt away are coming to believe it), that's probably neither the worst, nor the most dangerous thing in store for us.

Outsized fear of terrorism and what it can accomplish, stoked by the apocalyptic look of the attacks of 9/11, masked the agenda of officials who were all too ready to suppress challenges by shredding our civil liberties. That agenda has been driven by a legion of privateers, selling everything from gas masks to biometric ID systems, who would loot the public treasury in the name of patriotism. Like so many bad trips of the Bush years, homeland security was run down the wrong tracks from the beginning -- as the arrival of that distinctly un-American word "homeland" so clearly signaled -- and it has, not surprisingly, carried us in the wrong direction ever since.

In that context, it's worth remembering that after 9/11 came Hurricane Katrina, epic droughts and wildfires, Biblical-level floods, and then, of course, economic meltdown. Despite widespread fears here, the likelihood that most of us will experience a terrorist attack is slim indeed; on the other hand, it's a sure bet that disruptions to our far-flung supply lines for food, water, and energy will affect us all in the decades ahead. Nature, after all, is loaded with disturbances like droughts (growing ever more intense thanks to global climate change) that resonate through the human realm as famines, migrations, civil wars, failed states, and eventually warlords and pirates.

Even if these seem to you like nature's version of terrorism, you can't prevent a monster storm or a killer drought by arresting it at the border or caging it before it strikes. That's why a new green version of security should concentrate our energies and resources on recovery from disasters at least as much as defense against them -- and not recovery as delivered by distant, fumbling Federal Emergency Management Agency officials either. The fact is that pre-organized, homegrown (rather than homeland) networks of citizens who have planned and prepared together to meet basic needs and to aid one another in times of trouble will be better able to bounce back from the sorts of disasters that might actually hit us than a nation of helpless individuals waiting to be rescued or protected.

Imagine redubbing the DHS the Department of Homegrown Security and at least you have a place to begin.

Homegrown Security for a Cantankerous Future

Homeland security, post-9/11, has been highly militarized and focused primarily on single-event disasters like attacks or accidents, not on, say, the infection of critical grain crops by some newly evolved disease or, as is actually happening, the serial collapse of ocean fisheries. Unlike a terrorist attack, such disasters could strike everywhere at once, rendering single-point plans useless. If Miami goes down in a hurricane, FEMA can (we hope) feed people via trucks and airlifts. If some part of the global food trade were to shut down, hundreds of thousands of community gardens and networks of backyard farmers ready to share their harvests, not warehouses full of emergency provisions, could prove the difference between crisis and catastrophe. Systemic challenges, after all, require systemic responses.

Food and security may not be a twosome that comes quickly to mind, but experts know that our food supply is particularly vulnerable. We're familiar with the hardships that follow spikes in the price of gas or the freezing of credit lines, but few of us in the U.S. have experienced the panic and privation of a broken food chain -- so far. That's going to change in the decades ahead. Count on it, even if it seems as unlikely today as, for most of us, an economic meltdown did just one short year ago.

Our industrialized and globalized food production and distribution system is a wonder, bringing us exotic eats from distant places at mostly affordable prices. Those mangos from Mexico and kiwis from New Zealand are certainly a treat, but the understandable pleasure we take in them hides a great risk. If you're thinking about what the greening of homeland security might actually mean, look no further than our food supply.

The typical American meal travels, on average, 1,000 miles to get to your plate. The wheat in your burger bun may be from Canada, the beef from Argentina, and the tomato from Chile. Food shipped from that far away is vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions -- a calamitous storm that hits a food-growing center; spikes in the price of fuel for fertilizer, farm machinery, and trucking; internecine strife or regional wars that shut down harvests or block trade routes; national policies to hoard food as prices spike or scarcities set in; not to speak of the usual droughts, floods, and crop failures that have always plagued humankind and are intensifying in a globally warming world.

An interruption of food supplies from afar is only tolerable if we've planned ahead and so can fill in with locally grown food. Sadly, for those of us who live outside of California and Florida, local food remains seasonal, limited, and anything but diverse. And don't forget, local food has been weakened in this country by the reasonably thorough job we've done of wiping out all those less-than-superprofitable family farms. U.S. agriculture is now strikingly consolidated into massive, industrial-style operations. So chickens come from vast chicken farms in Arkansas, hogs from humongous hog outfits in Georgia, corn from the mono-crop Midwestern "cornbelt," and so on.

Such monolithic enterprises may be profitable for Big Ag, but they're not going to do us much good, given the cantankerous future already inching its way toward us. When a severe drought in Australia led to plummeting rice production in the Murray River Basin last year, the price of rice across the planet suddenly doubled. The spike in rice prices, like the sudden leap in the cost of wheat, soy, and other staples, was primarily due to the then-soaring price of oil for farm machinery, fertilizer, and transport, though rampant market speculation contributed as well. At that moment, the collapse of Australian rice farming pushed a worsening situation across a threshold into crisis territory. Because the world agricultural trade system is so thoroughly interconnected and interdependent, a shock on one part of the planet can resonate far and wide -- just as (we've learned to our dismay) can happen in financial markets.

Think of the shortages and ensuing food riots in 30 countries across the planet in 2008 as grim coming attractions for life on a planet with unpredictable extreme weather, booming populations, overloaded ecosystems, and distorted food economies. The spike in prices that put food staples out of reach of rioting masses of people was soon enough mitigated by the collapse of energy prices when the global economy tanked. Make no mistake, though: food shortages and the social unrest that goes with them will eventually return.

And here's something else to take into consideration: Nations that suffer food shortages may, when their hungry citizens demand food sovereignty, protect their agricultural sectors by erecting trade barriers -- just as is beginning to happen in other areas of production under the pressure of the global economic meltdown. The era of globalized food production, whose fruits (and vegetables) we Americans have come to consider little short of our supermarket birthright, may contract significantly in the relatively near future. We should be prepared. And that's where a Department of Homegrown Security could make some real sense.

Most American cities, after all, have less than a week's worth of food in their pipeline and most of us don't stockpile, which makes city dwellers especially vulnerable to disruptions of the food supply. Skip your next three meals and you'll grasp the panic likely to arise if the American food chain is ever broken in a significant way. The question is: How can we address rather than ignore this vital, if underappreciated, aspect of homeland security?

Vertical Farms and Victory Gardens

Because cities are so dependent on daily food shipments, local food security in urban areas might well mean storing more food for emergencies; this would certainly be the old-school approach to disaster planning, and it has worked well enough over the short run. Over the long run, however, what makes real sense is to encourage urban and suburban community gardens and farmers' markets, and not just on a scale that ensures a summer supply of arugula and fresh tomatoes, but on one that might actually help mitigate prolonged food disruptions. There are enough vacant lots, backyards, and rooftops to host many thousands of gardens, either created by voluntary groups or by small-scale entrepreneurs. Urban farming could even go big. Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier recently unveiled his vision of a "vertical farm," a 30-story tower right in the middle of an urban landscape, that could grow enough food to feed 50,000 people in the surrounding neighborhood.

Cultural historian and visionary critic Mike Davis has already wondered why our approach to homeland security doesn't draw from the example of "victory gardens" during World War II. In 1943, just two years into the war, 20 million victory gardens were producing a staggering 30-40% of the nation's vegetables. Thousands of abandoned urban lots were being cleared and planted by tenement neighbors working together. The Office of Civilian Defense encouraged and empowered such projects, but the phenomenon was also self-organizing because citizens on the home front wanted to participate, and home gardening was, after all, a delicious way to be patriotic.

Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark, reports that, within the de-industrialized ruins of Detroit, a landscape she describes as "not quite post-apocalyptic but… post-American," people are homesteading abandoned lots, growing their own produce, raising farm animals, and planting orchards. In that depopulated city, some have been clawing (or perhaps hoeing) their way back to a semblance of food security. They have done so because they had to, and their reward has been harvests that would be the envy of any organic farmer. The catastrophe that is Detroit didn't happen with a Hurricane Katrina-style bang, but as a slow, grinding bust -- and a possibly haunting preview of what many American municipalities may experience, post-crash. Solnit claims, however, that the greening of Detroit under the pressure of economic adversity is not just a strategy for survival, but a possible path to renewal. It's also a living guidebook to possibilities for our new Department of Homegrown Security when it considers where it might most advantageously put some of its financial muscle while creating a more secure -- and resilient -- America.

As chef and author Alice Waters has demonstrated so practically, schools can start "edible schoolyard" gardens that cut lunch-program costs, provide healthy foods for students, and teach the principles of ecology. The food-growing skills and knowledge that many of our great-grandparents took for granted growing up in a more rural America have long since been lost in our migration into cities and suburbs. Relearning those lost arts could be a key to survival if the trucks stop arriving at the Big Box down the street.

The present Department of Homeland Security has produced reams of literature on detecting and handling chemical weapons and managing casualties after terrorist attacks. Fine, we needed to know that. Now, how about some instructive materials on composting soil, rotating crops to control pests and restore soil nutrients, and canning and drying all that seasonal bounty so it can be eaten next winter?

It's not just about increasing the local food supply, of course. Community gardens provide a safe place for neighbors to cooperate, socialize, bond, share, celebrate, and learn from one another. The self-reliant networks that are created when citizens engage in such projects can be activated in an emergency. The capacity of a community to self-organize can be critically important when a crisis is confronted. Such collective efforts have been called "community greening" or "civic ecology," but the traditional name "grassroots democracy" fits no less well.

Ideally, the greening of homeland security would mean more than pamphlets on planting, but would provide actual seed money -- and not just for seeds either, but for building greenhouses, distributing tools, and starting farmers' markets where growers and consumers can connect. How about raiding the Department of Homeland Security's gluttonous budget for "homegrown" grants to communities that want to get started?

Here's the interesting thing: Without federal aid or direction, the first glimmer of a green approach to homeland security is already appearing. It goes by the moniker "relocalization," and if that's a bit of an awkward mouthful for you, it really means that your most basic security is in the hands not of distant officials in Washington but of neighbors who believe that self-reliance is safer than dependence. In this emerging age of chaos, pooled resources and coordinated responses will, this new movement believes, be more effective than thousands of individuals breaking out their survival kits alone, or waiting for the helicopters to land.

Actually, relocalization is an international movement and, as usual when it comes to the greening of modern society, the Europeans are way ahead of us. There are now hundreds of local groups in at least a dozen countries that are convening local meetings as part of the Relocalization Network to "make other arrangements for the post-carbon future" of their communities. In Great Britain, an allied "Transition Towns" movement has sprung up in an effort to spark ideas about, and focus energies on, how to wean whole communities off imported energy, food, and material goods. With a rising sea at its front door, the Netherlands has taken a further step. Its national security plan actually makes sustainability and environmental recovery key priorities.

In the U.S., "post-carbon" working groups are beginning to sprout across the country. In my backyard, right in the heart of red-state Utah, a diverse group of citizens calling themselves the Canyonlands Sustainable Solutions have come together to generate practical plans for insulating the remote town of Moab, 200 miles from the trade and transport hub of Salt Lake City, from future food and energy price shocks and supply interruptions. Such local groups are often loosely allied with one another, especially regionally, through websites and blogs that report on the progress of diverse projects, trade ideas as well as information, and offer lots of feedback.

The citizens engaged in relocalization projects have largely given up on federal aid and are going it alone. Still, think how much farther they could go if only a fraction of the $27 billion directed at state and local governments to enhance "emergency preparedness" in the 2009 Department of Homeland Security budget were given in grants to their projects. If we can afford to hand rural Craighead County in Arkansas $600,000 for hazmat suits and other anti-terror paraphernalia to defend cotton and soybean farmers from attack, surely we could provide grants for urban homesteaders in Detroit.

Food security, of course, is just one aspect of a green vision of homegrown (instead of homeland) security. Other obvious elements like energy and water security could also be re-imagined, if only official Washington weren't so stuck in the obvious. No doubt, somewhere out there on the Titanic this planet is becoming, the go-it-aloners, with no Department of Homegrown Security to back them, are already doing so -- and helping prepare us all as best they can for the realization that, right now, there are not enough lifeboats to carry us to safety.

Perhaps it's not so unrealistic to expect that someday, as a homegrown security movement builds and matures, it can capture a share of the federal funds that now go to such dubious measures as closed-circuit TVs and crash-proof barriers at sports stadiums, including $345,000 for Razorback Stadium in Arkansas.

In the meanwhile, let's encourage projects that are building resilience in communities as small as Moab and as large as New York City, while revitalizing local culture with a dose of grassroots engagement. Seed it, and feed it, and it will bloom. Along the way we will learn that when it comes to home, or land, or security, living in an open, inclusive, and robust democracy is not an impediment to defense but a deep advantage. Democracy, if only we nurture it, is the very soil of our resilience.

Chip Ward is a former grassroots organizer/activist who has led several successful campaigns to hold polluters accountable. He described his political adventures in Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. Today he works to protect the spectacular redrock wildlands of Utah.

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Too Many Overseas Bases

In the midst of an economic crisis that’s getting scarier by the day, it’s time to ask whether the nation can really afford some 1,000 military bases overseas. For those unfamiliar with the issue, you read that number correctly. One thousand. One thousand U.S. military bases outside the 50 states and Washington, DC, representing the largest collection of bases in world history.

Officially the Pentagon counts 865 base sites, but this notoriously unreliable number omits all our bases in Iraq (likely over 100) and Afghanistan (80 and counting), among many other well-known and secretive bases. More than half a century after World War II and the Korean War, we still have 268 bases in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. Others are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Bulgaria and Bahrain, Colombia and Greece, Djibouti, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, and of course, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — just to name a few. Among the installations considered critical to our national security are a ski center in the Bavarian Alps, resorts in Seoul and Tokyo, and 234 golf courses the Pentagon runs worldwide.

Unlike domestic bases, which set off local alarms when threatened by closure, our collection of overseas bases is particularly galling because almost all our taxpayer money leaves the United States (much goes to enriching private base contractors like corruption-plagued former Halliburton subsidiary KBR). One part of the massive Ramstein airbase near Landstuhl, Germany, has an estimated value of $3.3 billion. Just think how local communities could use that kind of money to make investments in schools, hospitals, jobs, and infrastructure.

Even the Bush administration saw the wastefulness of our overseas basing network. In 2004, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas installations, moving 70,000 troops and 100,000 family members and civilians back to the United States. National Security Adviser Jim Jones, then commander of U.S. forces in Europe, called for closing 20% of our bases in Europe. According to Rumsfeld’s estimates, we could save at least $12 billion by closing 200 to 300 bases alone. While the closures were derailed by claims that closing bases could cost us in the short term, even if this is true, it’s no reason to continue our profligate ways in the longer term.

Costs Far Exceeding Dollars and Cents

Unfortunately, the financial costs of our overseas bases are only part of the problem. Other costs to people at home and abroad are just as devastating. Military families suffer painful dislocations as troops stationed overseas separate from loved ones or uproot their families through frequent moves around the world. While some foreign governments like U.S. bases for their perceived economic benefits, many locals living near the bases suffer environmental and health damage from military toxins and pollution, disrupted economic, social, and cultural systems, military accidents, and increased prostitution and crime.

In undemocratic nations like Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Saudi Arabia, our bases support governments responsible for repression and human rights abuses. In too many recurring cases, soldiers have raped, assaulted, or killed locals, most prominently of late in South Korea, Okinawa, and Italy. The forced expulsion of the entire Chagossian people to create our secretive base on British Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is another extreme but not so aberrant example.

Bases abroad have become a major and unacknowledged “face” of the United States, frequently damaging the nation’s reputation, engendering grievances and anger, and generally creating antagonistic rather than cooperative relationships between the United States and others. Most dangerously, as we have seen in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and as we are seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan, foreign bases create breeding grounds for radicalism, anti-Americanism, and attacks on the United States, reducing, rather than improving, our national security.

Proponents of maintaining the overseas base status quo will argue, however, that our foreign bases are critical to national and global security. A closer examination shows that overseas bases have often heightened military tensions and discouraged diplomatic solutions to international conflicts. Rather than stabilizing dangerous regions, our overseas bases have often increased global militarization, enlarging security threats faced by other nations who respond by boosting military spending (and in cases like China and Russia, foreign base acquisition) in an escalating spiral. Overseas bases actually make war more likely, not less.

The Benefits of Fewer Bases

This isn’t a call for isolationism or a protectionism that would prevent us from spending money overseas. As the Obama administration and others have recognized, we must recommit to cooperative forms of engagement with the rest of the world that rely on diplomatic, economic, and cultural ties rather than military means. In addition to freeing money to meet critical human needs at home and abroad, fewer overseas bases would help rebuild our military into a less overstretched, defensive force committed to defending the nation’s territory from attack.

In these difficult economic times, the Obama administration and Congress should initiate a major reassessment of our 1,000 overseas bases. Now is the time to ask if, as a nation and a world, we can really afford the 1,000 bases that are pushing the nation deeper into debt and making the United States and the planet less secure? With so many needs facing our nation, it’s unconscionable to have 1,000 overseas bases. It’s time to begin closing them.

David Vine, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, is organizing the Security Without Empire conference that will bring together leading U.S. peace activists and scholars, as well as base opponents from 11 nations from February 27-March 2. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press), to be released in April.

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Saline Agriculture to Feed and Fuel the World

Fresh water in short supply and salinization widespread

People now use about half of the global supply of fresh water, and good fresh water is becoming an expensive resource. About 1 percent of water on earth is fresh while another 1 percent is brackish (water that has more salt than fresh water, but not as much as seawater), while 98 percent is sea water. Agriculture not only has to compete for limited fresh water resources with home and industrial use; it is being threatened by the spread of soil salinization.

Irrigation of food and feed crops contributes to salinization. High rates of evaporation and transpiration lead to salt accumulation in the root zones as salts are drawn from the deep layers of the soil. Global warming also accelerates salinization as sea level rises and floods coastal regions. Soil salinization is irreversible in arid regions because water is not available to leach the accumulated salts out of the soil. As salinity increases, crop yields decline, because most existing crop plants are not salt-tolerant.

Saline agriculture to the rescue

To cope with the shortage of fresh water and increasing salinization of agricultural land, there has been renewed interest in saline agriculture: cultivating crops that are salt-tolerant, so they can grow in brackish water and sea water [1].

Two prominent advocates of saline agriculture are NASA scientists Robert Hendricks (Glenn Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio) and Dennis Bushnell (Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia). They want to see halophytes (salt-tolerant plants) being used for food, feed, and fuel [2].

They point out that halophytes could be grown in coastal areas, marshes, inland lakes, desert regions with subterranean brackish aquifers, and directly in oceans or seas. Cultivating halophytes would not compete for land that should be cultivating food [3] (see Biofuels: Biodevastation, Hunger & False Carbon Credits, SiS 33); it would provide more food and feed; and as added bonus, halophytes provide shoreline erosion protection and feeding areas for birds, fish and animals.

Some halophytes may even reclaim the land for freshwater plants. They can leach soil salt through enhanced percolation and, to some extent, through storing salt in their leaves that are harvested and removed from the fields.

By selecting and growing both micro and macro halophytes, we could get proteins, oils, and biomass to provide food, food, and fuel needs.

The oceans are also vast reservoirs of nutrients (nearly 80 percent of required plant nutrients) that could be recycled back to the land for greater sustainability in the grand circular eco-economy of nature (see The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms [4] for more).

Visions of large-scale industry based on halophytes go back to the 1990s [5, 6], when it was already seen to provide sustainable fuel-food supply while increasing the sequestration of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Halophytes under development for food feed and fuel

Bushnell [7] points out that there are some 10 000 halophytic plant species, of which 250 are potential staple crops. Vast land areas worldwide are salt affected and major regions overlay saline aquifers. A number of halophytes are now under development [2].The glasswort (Salicornia bigelovli) is a leafless annual salt-marsh plant with green jointed and succulent stems indigenous to the Arabian Sea coasts of Pakistan and India on the margin of salt lakes and Sri Lanka [8]. It produces seeds that are 30 percent oil and 35 percent protein; the oil is similar in fatty acid composition to safflower oil, and hence suitable for edible oil production. Its yield is also superior to soybeans and other oil seeds [2]. The seawater foundation has several hundred hectares under development (www.seawaterfoundation.org).

S. bigelovii, farm2.static.flickr.com

The seashore mallow (Kosteletzkya virginica), a perennial, is one of the many salt-tolerant plants that grow wild on the coastal marshlands or inland brackish lakes, and serves as a source of both feed and fuel [9]. The oil content of the seed is 18 percent, similar to soybean with a fatty acid composition more like cotton seed; but unlike them both, it is a perennial, saving a lot of labour in resowing and sequestering more carbon in the deep roots (See [10] Ending 10 000 Years of Conflict between Agriculture and Nature, SiS 39, for the advantages of perennial crops which are being bred in the Land Institute, Kansas, in the USA to replace the annuals we now grow.)

K. virginica, farm2.static.flickr.com

Distichlis spicata, another perennial, is one of the halophyte grasses used in response to saline-affected lands, and is most suited to the high temperatures and high-radiation regimes in the summer months of southern Australia. In an extensive soil sampling survey conducted sites in Western Australia where D. spicata had been growing for 8 years, a marked improvement in the soil was found compared to control soil, where no grass had been growing. There was a 12-fold increase in water percolation plus increases in carbon and nitrogen content [11]. Australia had an estimated 5.7 million hectares of saline-affected land in 2000, and projected to reach 17 million hectares by 2050. A test carried out there in 2002 [12] confirmed that several NyPa Distichlis cultivars grow well in sea water, with green matter yields up to 25 tonnes/ha and tolerating 1.5 times ocean salt conditions.

D. spicata, farm2.static.flickr.com

John Gallagher who heads the Halophyte Biotechnology Center at the University of Delaware has been developing halophytes cultivated in seawater for a long time [13], producing hay, protein rich grain, and a spinach-like vegetable.

Algae halophyte for biodiesel

There is a great deal of activity directed at producing biofuels from algae, the potential of which we reported earlier [14] (see Green Algae for Carbon Capture & Biodiesel, SiS 30). The hope is to find halophytic algae that produce more than 30 percent its biomass in oil, and cultivation methods that make it commercially feasible [15]. Many companies have invested in research and development efforts to bring the cost of culture down and the production up to the goal of 50g/m²/day of dry biomass set by the US Department of Energy. Currently, an Israeli company Seambiotic maintains a 1 000 m² site that can produce approximately 23g/m²/day, according to its scientific advisor and algal growth expert Ami Ben-Amotz. This translates to more than 5 600 gallons/ha/year of algal oil, compared to palm oil yield at 1 187 gal/ha/y, Brazil ethanol at 1 604 gal/ha/y, and soy oil at 150 gal/ha/y.

Hendricks and Bushnell [9] estimate that the theoretical biomass conversion efficiency is 22 percent of the photosynthetic active radiation (400 to 700 nm), or 10 percent of total solar radiation, and is equivalent to 100 g dry biomass per day. In the case of algal oil, it would produce 24 500 gal/ha/y. As some 43 to 44 percent of the Earth landmass is arid or semi-arid, there is considerable potential for developing a multiplicity of seawater irrigated halophyte cultivation and algal aquaculture. An area the size of the Sahara desert (13.6 percent of the world’s arid and semi-arid area) would be sufficient to produce 16 times the energy used by the world in a year (2004). On the current status of the art, algal aquaculture would produce 27.6 percent of the energy used in 2004.

Algae ponds, electricitybook.com

Livestock that can thrive on halophytes

There is already research indicating that various livestock can thrive on halophytes or a combination of halophytes and conventional feed.

Sheep fed with halophyte forage was compared with sheep fed Bermuda grass forage or Bermuda grass mixed with salt to simulate the salt content of the halophyte. Halophyte-fed lambs gained weight at the same rate as control while the salt amended control gained significantly less. The halophyte diet appears to have contained balanced nutrients, which render their high salt level less detrimental than adding the same salt levels to Bermuda grass hay [16]. Cattle fed a halophytic grass gained weight equally to maize fodder fed controls [17]. An extensive review listed numerous halophytes including grasses and legumes that provide suitable forage for animals. The review indicated that grazing halophyte alone can result in salt overload for some animals so they stop feeding and begin to lose weight. A mixed ration of halophyte with conventional hay or maize is therefore advisable. The most salt tolerant farm animal is the camel, followed by sheep, then cattle, followed by horses, and the least tolerant are pigs and chickens [18]. Camels appear to be a promising source of meat in areas where halophytes irrigated with sea water can pasture large camel herds. Camels tolerate drinking water containing up to 2 percent sodium chloride while sea water contains in the range of 3.5 percent sodium chloride. Camels thrive while consuming brackish water and halophytes [19].

Domesticating wild halophytes are the way forward

In view of so many existing naturally salt-tolerant plants, researchers Jelte Rosema at the Free University, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and Tim Flowers at the University of Sussex Brighton, in the UK think that the best way ahead is to domesticate wild plants and cross-breed them to produce higher yields [1, 20}. Plants such as sea kale and the asparagus-like samphire, which grow along the coast all over the world have been eaten for thousands of years. Sea kale is now farmed in the Netherlands. Spinach and beetroot are closely related to samphire, and crops such as sugar beet can grow well in salty conditions. .

Genetic modification experiments have been conducted for more than 30 years to try to make crops such as wheat or rice salt tolerant. But Rozema and Flowers say that the genetic manipulations necessary to achieve that for commercial growing may be too complex at present..

Rana Munns’s research team at the Australian CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) in Canberra had succeeded in breeding a new variety of salt-tolerant durum (pasta) wheat by crossing with an ancient Persian variety [21]. Modern durum wheat is not salt tolerant, but wheat originated from around the Mediterranean which is a heavily salt-affected area. So the researchers went back to the original wheat varieties to find some that were salt tolerant and crossed them into the current wheat. They knew that bread wheat tolerates salty soil, because its roots are good at excluding the salt and letting in the other nutrients, so they looked for salt in the leaves and selected for those that had hardly any salt in them. They found an ancient variety from what is today Iran, which they crossed with the modern durum wheat to get a new salt-tolerant variety. The ability to exclude sodium was associated with two genes Nax1 and Nax2 [22].

Identifying genes involved in salt tolerance

Substantial effort has been dedicated to identifying genes and genetic networks involved in salt tolerance, so that crop plants could be enhanced in salt tolerance by conventional selection and breeding. Another approach is to introduce transgenes into the crop plants to enhance salt tolerance, or influence expression of the salt tolerance genes. The naturally highly tolerant crops include beetroot, barley and rye. Moderately tolerant crops include spinach, rice, tomato, olive, wheat, cabbage and oats [23].

Identifying the genes for salt tolerance in halophytes facilitates the improvement of those crops but also provides a source of genes for improving the salt tolerance of conventional crops. Transcript profiling of salt tolerant red fescue grass (Festuca rubra ssp. Litoralis) revealed a complex regulatory network controlling salt stress response. The salt regulated transcripts included those involved in regulating gene transcription and signal transduction found in the cells of the root epidermis, cortex, endodermis and the vascular tissues; while other tissue cells had less active salt transcript activity. The gene transcription results showed coordinated control of ion homeostasis and water status at high salinity [24]. Heat stress was found to alter the expression of salt stress induced genes in the halophyte smooth cord grass [25].

Small proteins that regulate salt stress response in Arabidopsis were identified. Over- expressing one of those genes results in salt tolerance in the plant. Salt directly affects the small protein’s signalling by inducing its degradation [26]. Proteomic analysis on grapevine revealed that 48 out of 800 proteins were altered after exposure to high salt, including 32 that were up regulated, 9 down regulated, and 2 newly expressed. The salt stress response suggests that salt spreads systematically throughout the plant [27]. A gene transcription map was used to identify a set of genes related to salt tolerance in salt-sensitive indica rice seedling compared with a natural salt-tolerant relative. Over one thousand salt regulated genes were identified and several mapped to a QTL (quantitative locus) for salt-tolerance on chromosome 1. Selected members of the genes are considered candidate transgenes for crop improvement [28].

Small regulatory RNA response to salt stress was studied in maize roots. Micro array analysis identified 98 regulatory RNAs that were altered in activity following exposure to salt, along with 18 regulatory RNA molecules that were only active in salt tolerant maize [29].

The results of these studies do confirm the complexity of salt tolerance, which is why transgenesis has so far failed in produce salt tolerant crop plants beyond the greenhouse stage. On the other hand, these results will help considerably in enhancing the salt tolerance of crops by marker assisted conventional selective breeding.

Transgenic salt tolerant crops

There have been a number of attempts to create salt tolerant crops by introducing and over-expressing certain ‘major’ genes involved in salt tolerance.

Transgenic salt tolerant tomato plants were created by over-expressing a gene taken from Arabidopsis, encoding the vacuolar Na⁺/H⁺ antiporter protein. The transgenic tomato accumulated salt in the leaves but not in fruit. The transgenic protein transports sodium ions from the cytoplasm into membrane-bound vacuoles within the plant cell, thereby isolating them from the cell cytoplasm. Tomatoes that are normally somewhat resistant to salt become sufficiently resistant to survive exposure to 1.2 percent sodium chloride that kills the non-transgenic controls [30].

Transgenic salt tolerant sugar beet expressing the same Arabidopsis vacuolar sodium/hydrogen antiporter gene used in the salt tolerant tomato accumulated more soluble sugar but less salt in the storage roots than did unmodified beets [31]. The same gene over-expressed in trangenic tall fescue (a perennial grass) enabled the grass to survive 1.2 percent sodium chloride [32]; while transgenic maize with the antiporter gene survived 0.8-1.0 percent salt solutions [33].

Mn superoxide dismutase (SOD) is a critical enzyme eliminating reactive oxygen species in plants under environmental stresses. Transgenic Arabidopsis over-expressing it (more than 2 fold) tolerated 150 mM (~0.9 percent NaCl). Other antioxidative enzymes such as Cu/Zn-SOD Fe-SOD, catalase and peroxidase in transgenic plants treated with NaCl were also markedly higher than those of wild type plants, and contents of malondialdehyde were lower than those of wild type plants, which shows that Mn SOD plays a key role in protecting the plant against reactive oxygen species in stressful conditions [34].

Over-expression of an NAC transcription factor from rice enhanced both drought resistance and salt tolerance [35]. The NAC transcription family is large and diverse; it includes those regulating embryonic, floral and vegetative development, lateral root formation and auxin signalling, defence, and abiotic stress.

Conclusion

Salt tolerance is clearly a very complex character, linked to stress and other developmental responses. Not only is it difficult to genetic engineer successfully in crop plants. Apart from the usual hazards inherent to genetic modification [36] (GM is Dangerous and Futile, SiS 40), the very complexity of salt tolerance increases the possibilities for unexpected, unintended effects.

On the other hand, as we have shown, there is much scope for domesticating a range of existing halophytes that already perform well in salt-affected environments, and for improving salt tolerant crops by conventional marker-assisted breeding. That is by far the best way forward

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A Planet at the Brink - Will Economic Brushfires Prove Too Virulent to Contain?

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations -- none as yet in the United States -- your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

For the most part, such upheavals, even when violent, are likely to remain localized in nature, and disorganized enough that government forces will be able to bring them under control within days or weeks, even if -- as with Athens for six days last December -- urban paralysis sets in due to rioting, tear gas, and police cordons. That, at least, has been the case so far. It is entirely possible, however, that, as the economic crisis worsens, some of these incidents will metastasize into far more intense and long-lasting events: armed rebellions, military takeovers, civil conflicts, even economically fueled wars between states.

Every outbreak of violence has its own distinctive origins and characteristics. All, however, are driven by a similar combination of anxiety about the future and lack of confidence in the ability of established institutions to deal with the problems at hand. And just as the economic crisis has proven global in ways not seen before, so local incidents -- especially given the almost instantaneous nature of modern communications -- have a potential to spark others in far-off places, linked only in a virtual sense.

A Global Pandemic of Economically Driven Violence

The riots that erupted in the spring of 2008 in response to rising food prices suggested the speed with which economically-related violence can spread. It is unlikely that Western news sources captured all such incidents, but among those recorded in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were riots in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.

In Haiti, for example, thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince and demanded food handouts, only to be repelled by government troops and UN peacekeepers. Other countries, including Pakistan and Thailand, quickly sought to deter such assaults by deploying troops at farms and warehouses throughout the country.

The riots only abated at summer's end when falling energy costs brought food prices crashing down as well. (The cost of food is now closely tied to the price of oil and natural gas because petrochemicals are so widely and heavily used in the cultivation of grains.) Ominously, however, this is sure to prove but a temporary respite, given the epic droughts now gripping breadbasket regions of the United States, Argentina, Australia, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Look for the prices of wheat, soybeans, and possibly rice to rise in the coming months -- just when billions of people in the developing world are sure to see their already marginal incomes plunging due to the global economic collapse.

Food riots were but one form of economic violence that made its bloody appearance in 2008. As economic conditions worsened, protests against rising unemployment, government ineptitude, and the unaddressed needs of the poor erupted as well. In India, for example, violent protests threatened stability in many key areas. Although usually described as ethnic, religious, or caste disputes, these outbursts were typically driven by economic anxiety and a pervasive feeling that someone else's group was faring better than yours -- and at your expense.

In April, for example, six days of intense rioting in Indian-controlled Kashmir were largely blamed on religious animosity between the majority Muslim population and the Hindu-dominated Indian government; equally important, however, was a deep resentment over what many Kashmiri Muslims experienced as discrimination in jobs, housing, and land use. Then, in May, thousands of nomadic shepherds known as Gujjars shut down roads and trains leading to the city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, in a drive to be awarded special economic rights; more than 30 people were killed when the police fired into crowds. In October, economically-related violence erupted in Assam in the country's far northeast, where impoverished locals are resisting an influx of even poorer, mostly illegal immigrants from nearby Bangladesh.

Economically-driven clashes also erupted across much of eastern China in 2008. Such events, labeled "mass incidents" by Chinese authorities, usually involve protests by workers over sudden plant shutdowns, lost pay, or illegal land seizures. More often than not, protestors demanded compensation from company managers or government authorities, only to be greeted by club-wielding police.

Needless to say, the leaders of China's Communist Party have been reluctant to acknowledge such incidents. This January, however, the magazine Liaowang (Outlook Weekly) reported that layoffs and wage disputes had triggered a sharp increase in such "mass incidents," particularly along the country's eastern seaboard, where much of its manufacturing capacity is located.

By December, the epicenter of such sporadic incidents of violence had moved from the developing world to Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. Here, the protests have largely been driven by fears of prolonged unemployment, disgust at government malfeasance and ineptitude, and a sense that "the system," however defined, is incapable of satisfying the future aspirations of large groups of citizens.

One of the earliest of this new wave of upheavals occurred in Athens, Greece, on December 6, 2008, after police shot and killed a 15-year-old schoolboy during an altercation in a crowded downtown neighborhood. As news of the killing spread throughout the city, hundreds of students and young people surged into the city center and engaged in pitched battles with riot police, throwing stones and firebombs. Although government officials later apologized for the killing and charged the police officer involved with manslaughter, riots broke out repeatedly in the following days in Athens and other Greek cities. Angry youths attacked the police -- widely viewed as agents of the establishment -- as well as luxury shops and hotels, some of which were set on fire. By one estimate, the six days of riots caused $1.3 billion in damage to businesses at the height of the Christmas shopping season.

Russia also experienced a spate of violent protests in December, triggered by the imposition of high tariffs on imported automobiles. Instituted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to protect an endangered domestic auto industry (whose sales were expected to shrink by up to 50% in 2009), the tariffs were a blow to merchants in the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok who benefited from a nationwide commerce in used Japanese vehicles. When local police refused to crack down on anti-tariff protests, the authorities were evidently worried enough to fly in units of special forces from Moscow, 3,700 miles away.

In January, incidents of this sort seemed to be spreading through Eastern Europe. Between January 13th and 16th, anti-government protests involving violent clashes with the police erupted in the Latvian capital of Riga, the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, and the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It is already essentially impossible to keep track of all such episodes, suggesting that we are on the verge of a global pandemic of economically driven violence.

A Perfect Recipe for Instability

While most such incidents are triggered by an immediate event -- a tariff, the closure of local factory, the announcement of government austerity measures -- there are systemic factors at work as well. While economists now agree that we are in the midst of a recession deeper than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s, they generally assume that this downturn -- like all others since World War II -- will be followed in a year, or two, or three, by the beginning of a typical recovery.

There are good reasons to suspect that this might not be the case -- that poorer countries (along with many people in the richer countries) will have to wait far longer for such a recovery, or may see none at all. Even in the United States, 54% of Americans now believe that "the worst" is "yet to come" and only 7% that the economy has "turned the corner," according to a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll; fully a quarter think the crisis will last more than four years. Whether in the U.S., Russia, China, or Bangladesh, it is this underlying anxiety -- this suspicion that things are far worse than just about anyone is saying -- which is helping to fuel the global epidemic of violence.

The World Bank's most recent status report, Global Economic Prospects 2009, fulfills those anxieties in two ways. It refuses to state the worst, even while managing to hint, in terms too clear to be ignored, at the prospect of a long-term, or even permanent, decline in economic conditions for many in the world. Nominally upbeat -- as are so many media pundits -- regarding the likelihood of an economic recovery in the not-too-distant future, the report remains full of warnings about the potential for lasting damage in the developing world if things don't go exactly right.

Two worries, in particular, dominate Global Economic Prospects 2009: that banks and corporations in the wealthier countries will cease making investments in the developing world, choking off whatever growth possibilities remain; and that food costs will rise uncomfortably, while the use of farmlands for increased biofuels production will result in diminished food availability to hundreds of millions.

Despite its Pollyanna-ish passages on an economic rebound, the report does not mince words when discussing what the almost certain coming decline in First World investment in Third World countries would mean:

"Should credit markets fail to respond to the robust policy interventions taken so far, the consequences for developing countries could be very serious. Such a scenario would be characterized by... substantial disruption and turmoil, including bank failures and currency crises, in a wide range of developing countries. Sharply negative growth in a number of developing countries and all of the attendant repercussions, including increased poverty and unemployment, would be inevitable."

In the fall of 2008, when the report was written, this was considered a "worst-case scenario." Since then, the situation has obviously worsened radically, with financial analysts reporting a virtual freeze in worldwide investment. Equally troubling, newly industrialized countries that rely on exporting manufactured goods to richer countries for much of their national income have reported stomach-wrenching plunges in sales, producing massive plant closings and layoffs.

The World Bank's 2008 survey also contains troubling data about the future availability of food. Although insisting that the planet is capable of producing enough foodstuffs to meet the needs of a growing world population, its analysts were far less confident that sufficient food would be available at prices people could afford, especially once hydrocarbon prices begin to rise again. With ever more farmland being set aside for biofuels production and efforts to increase crop yields through the use of "miracle seeds" losing steam, the Bank's analysts balanced their generally hopeful outlook with a caveat: "If biofuels-related demand for crops is much stronger or productivity performance disappoints, future food supplies may be much more expensive than in the past."

Combine these two World Bank findings -- zero economic growth in the developing world and rising food prices -- and you have a perfect recipe for unrelenting civil unrest and violence. The eruptions seen in 2008 and early 2009 will then be mere harbingers of a grim future in which, in a given week, any number of cities reel from riots and civil disturbances which could spread like multiple brushfires in a drought.

Mapping a World at the Brink

Survey the present world, and it's all too easy to spot a plethora of potential sites for such multiple eruptions -- or far worse. Take China. So far, the authorities have managed to control individual "mass incidents," preventing them from coalescing into something larger. But in a country with a more than two-thousand-year history of vast millenarian uprisings, the risk of such escalation has to be on the minds of every Chinese leader.

On February 2nd, a top Chinese Party official, Chen Xiwen, announced that, in the last few months of 2008 alone, a staggering 20 million migrant workers, who left rural areas for the country's booming cities in recent years, had lost their jobs. Worse yet, they had little prospect of regaining them in 2009. If many of these workers return to the countryside, they may find nothing there either, not even land to work.

Under such circumstances, and with further millions likely to be shut out of coastal factories in the coming year, the prospect of mass unrest is high. No wonder the government announced a $585 billion stimulus plan aimed at generating rural employment and, at the same time, called on security forces to exercise discipline and restraint when dealing with protesters. Many analysts now believe that, as exports continue to dry up, rising unemployment could lead to nationwide strikes and protests that might overwhelm ordinary police capabilities and require full-scale intervention by the military (as occurred in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989).

Or take many of the Third World petro-states that experienced heady boosts in income when oil prices were high, allowing governments to buy off dissident groups or finance powerful internal security forces. With oil prices plunging from $147 per barrel of crude oil to less than $40 dollars, such countries, from Angola to shaky Iraq, now face severe instability.

Nigeria is a typical case in point: When oil prices were high, the central government in Abuja raked in billions every year, enough to enrich elites in key parts of the country and subsidize a large military establishment; now that prices are low, the government will have a hard time satisfying all these previously well-fed competing obligations, which means the risk of internal disequilibrium will escalate. An insurgency in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, fueled by popular discontent with the failure of oil wealth to trickle down from the capital, is already gaining momentum and is likely to grow stronger as government revenues shrivel; other regions, equally disadvantaged by national revenue-sharing policies, will be open to disruptions of all sorts, including heightened levels of internecine warfare.

Bolivia is another energy producer that seems poised at the brink of an escalation in economic violence. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it harbors substantial oil and natural gas reserves in its eastern, lowland regions. A majority of the population -- many of Indian descent -- supports President Evo Morales, who seeks to exercise strong state control over the reserves and use the proceeds to uplift the nation's poor. But a majority of those in the eastern part of the country, largely controlled by a European-descended elite, resent central government interference and seek to control the reserves themselves. Their efforts to achieve greater autonomy have led to repeated clashes with government troops and, in deteriorating times, could set the stage for a full-scale civil war.

Given a global situation in which one startling, often unexpected development follows another, prediction is perilous. At a popular level, however, the basic picture is clear enough: continued economic decline combined with a pervasive sense that existing systems and institutions are incapable of setting things right is already producing a potentially lethal brew of anxiety, fear, and rage. Popular explosions of one sort or another are inevitable.

Some sense of this new reality appears to have percolated up to the highest reaches of the U.S. intelligence community. In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 12th, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, declared, "The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications... Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period" -- certain to be the case in the present situation.

Blair did not specify which countries he had in mind when he spoke of "regime-threatening instability" -- a new term in the American intelligence lexicon, at least when associated with economic crises -- but it is clear from his testimony that U.S. officials are closely watching dozens of shaky nations in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia.

Now go back to that map on your wall with all those red and orange pins in it and proceed to color in appropriate countries in various shades of red and orange to indicate recent striking declines in gross national product and rises in unemployment rates. Without 16 intelligence agencies under you, you'll still have a pretty good idea of the places that Blair and his associates are eyeing in terms of instability as the future darkens on a planet at the brink.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books).

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Drug patent plan gets mixed reviews

GlaxoSmithKline's bid to tackle neglected diseases receives a muted response from the rest of the industry.

Proposals to radically change the way the drug industry approaches neglected tropical diseases have prompted intense debate within the sector.

Andrew Witty, chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), outlined the suggestions in a speech on 13 February at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He committed GSK — the world's second-largest pharmaceutical company by sales — to sharing some of its patents to boost research into neglected diseases, and to making its drugs available more cheaply in the very poorest countries.

He also offered to open up GSK's research centre for neglected diseases at Tres Cantos in Spain to other researchers, companies and governments. The aim would be to foster a global public–private network to supplant the present fragmented research efforts on the most neglected diseases, such as sleeping sickness, visceral leishmaniasis and dengue fever.

Reactions from scientists and public-health experts have ranged from wildly enthusiastic to deeply sceptical. But it is undoubtedly a pioneering move, particularly for a firm that just a decade ago joined 38 other drug companies in suing the South African government to try to stop it making cheap anti-HIV drugs.

"That was the low-water mark for multinationals and global health," says Peter Singer, an expert in public health at the University of Toronto in Canada. "This announcement may not yet be the high-water mark, but it is incontrovertible evidence that the tide has turned. It sends a clear signal that GSK wants to be part of the solution and not part of the problem."

The most innovative aspect of GSK's proposal is the creation of a 'patent pool' for drugs and manufacturing processes related to neglected tropical diseases. Researchers and companies, including manufacturers of generic drugs, would be able to license participants' patents from the pool for free to develop new treatments for neglected diseases in the world's 50 least-developed countries (LDCs).

"A patent pool giving access to molecule libraries and information from different groups is something we have been asking for for years," says Bernard Pécoul, head of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative based in Geneva, Switzerland. But its success depends on what companies are willing to put in, he adds. "If they put garbage in, we will get garbage out."

Although the pool would be oriented towards drug discovery, it could also provide access to promising drug candidates, existing drugs and formulation technologies for commercialization.

"It's a fantastic step forward," says Mary Moran, director of health policy at the George Institute for International Health in Sydney, Australia. Drug companies usually fight to defend their patent portfolios, she says, refusing to allow their free use for good causes such as tackling neglected diseases. As the patents in this sector have little monetary value, this amounts to "two bald men fighting over a comb", she observes wryly.
Industrial unease

But several other drug companies contacted by Nature were lukewarm about the idea. French firm Sanofi-aventis says that the proposals are "too vague" to comment on, and Swiss-based Novartis "does not consider intellectual property as an obstacle to access to medicines", according to company representatives.

In principle, Bayer in Germany is not against the idea of pooling intellectual property, says the company's spokeswoman, Denise Renn­mann. But it would prefer an industry-wide approach to be agreed multilaterally, she adds — something that the World Health Organization and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers are already discussing. Many companies highlighted their own efforts to improve access to drugs for neglected diseases (see 'Opening access').

The patent-pool proposal has also sparked controversy because it excludes GSK's HIV patents, as the company feels that there is already enough research in this area. That is hotly contested by Michelle Childs, director of policy and advocacy at Médecins Sans Frontières' Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines, who says that there is still a great need for new antiretroviral combinations and formulations for children.

However, GSK's HIV patents could yet dive into a different pool. UNITAID, an international organization that negotiates lower drug prices, hopes to launch a patent pool by the end of this year that would allow companies to license their AIDS drugs in return for royalties. Ellen 't Hoen, UNITAID's senior adviser on intellectual property, says that although no companies have yet signed up, several have expressed interest, including GSK.

There is a sound incentive for companies to join such patent pools. Countries with large populations of sick patients are increasingly likely to use their rights under TRIPS, the World Trade Organization's intellectual-property agreement, to issue compulsory licences, allowing them to produce generic copies of patented drugs at low royalties.

Western drug companies fret that such licences could limit their opportunities in what they see as their biggest future growth markets: the well-off elites in emerging economies such as India, China or Brazil. Preserving these markets may explain why GSK has limited its proposals to the LDCs, says Brook Baker, an expert on health and human rights at Northeastern University in Boston.

Witty also announced that GSK would cut the prices of all its medicines in the LDCs to no more than 25% of their prices in the richest countries. But the focus on the LDCs means that these cuts, and the patent pool, will not benefit the vast number of poverty-stricken people living in middle-income countries, says Baker. According to the World Bank, more people live on less than $2 per day in India than in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Despite the cuts, GSK's drugs will still be unaffordable to most poor people, he adds. And if generic producers can only use the patent pool to produce drugs for the LDCs, they will not be able to get the economies of scale they need to sell drugs cheaply enough.

"When Glaxo and others announced at the start of the decade that they would cut the cost of HIV drugs by 70%, initially we thought 'this is a big deal'," says Childs. "But they were still unaffordable. It was only when generic manufactures brought prices down 99% that we saw wide access to drugs."

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