A House-Senate conference committee, with significant input from the White House, is currently striving to produce a compromise stimulus bill that will satisfy all three players. One item that won’t be in the bill is funding for family planning, which was nixed from the House version late last month. The proposal to include money for contraception—which would have been part of a bundle of funds to help states with Medicaid costs—faced high-profile opposition from conservatives, who argued that it would not stimulate the economy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding to the criticism, countered, “The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now…one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception—will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.”

It turns out that the debate over whether population growth is a net gain or loss for the economy has been going on for decades. According to Population Matters: Demographic Change, Economic Growth, and Poverty in the Developing World (see ECSP event), edited by Nancy Birdsall, Allen Kelly, and Steven Sinding, in developing countries, rapid population growth slows economic growth, and rapid fertility decline reduces poverty. Furthermore, as described in “Poor Health, Poor Women: How Reproductive Health Affects Poverty,” research by Margaret Greene and Thomas Merrick found that poor reproductive health—which includes unmet need for family planning—negatively impacts certain measures of poverty, including health and educational attainment.

Academics aren’t the only ones exploring these concepts; the popular press has also taken on the question of how population growth affects economic growth. The Christian Science Monitor published “Can Obama’s family-planning policies help the economy?,” which Population Connection’s Marian Starkey criticized for failing to adequately answer the question in its headline. MarketWatch published an op-ed contending that population growth is the world’s biggest economic problem. On the other side of the debate, the Wall Street Journal argued, “A smaller workforce can result in less overall economic output. Without enough younger workers to replace retirees, health and pension costs can become debilitating. And when domestic markets shrink, so does capital investment.”

Population-poverty links are incredibly complex, and it’s worth paying attention to the different dynamics between—and among—developing and developed countries, as well as the distinction between the larger goal of economic growth and the more targeted aim of jumpstarting an economy out of a recession. Nevertheless, policymakers don’t have to be flying blind when it comes to the question of whether access to contraceptives affects economic growth. Demographers and economists have been studying these relationships for a long time, and although they may never have complete answers, they have already come up with some valuable insights.

“There’s such a fundamental misunderstanding that most people have about the environment—that it exists outside of us,” said Harvard Medical School’s Eric Chivian at the January 14, 2009, launch of Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, which he co-edited. This disconnect “is really at the heart of the global environmental crisis, and it’s the reason we wrote this book.” Chivian was joined by the Natural Capital Project’s Michael Wright and the Heinz Center’s Thomas Lovejoy, who called Sustaining Life “a remarkable achievement,” for a discussion of the myriad ways in which biodiversity benefits human health—and how its loss endangers us.

Proof Positive: Biodiversity Supports Health

The most exotic—and unlikely—species can yield valuable discoveries, Lovejoy explained. For example, slime molds on the banks of the Zambezi River repel their enemies with chemicals that can treat cancers resistant to Taxol, one of the main chemotherapy drugs—which is itself derived from the needles and bark of the Pacific yew tree. Chivian offered another remarkable example: The best new pain medication, which is 1,000 times more powerful than morphine, is derived from the toxins of marine cone snails.

Of Polar Bears and Parasites

Polar bears—which new research suggests are likely to be extinct in the wild by 2100 due to the melting of the Arctic ice sheet—may help cure several devastating diseases. Polar bears “den,” or near-hibernate, for five to nine months of each year, yet substances in their blood prevent them from losing bone mass during that time. “Osteoporosis is an enormous public health problem; it kills some 70,000 people in the United States every year, costs the U.S. economy $18 billion dollars a year,” explained Chivian.

When they den, polar bears go for months without eating, drinking, defecating, or urinating. Studying this phenomenon may provide humans with alternatives to dialysis or kidney transplants. Finally, while polar bears are extremely obese, they do not develop Type II diabetes. In contrast, 16 million Americans—6 percent of the population—have obesity-related Type II diabetes, costing the United States $91 billion a year. “Again, polar bears may hold the secret for treating this very difficult and lethal disease,” said Chivian.

Not only can certain species help us treat human diseases, but the loss of biodiversity can increase the prevalence of others. For instance, Lyme disease is more common in degraded environments with low vertebrate diversity. In these environments, the disease spreads more quickly because the white-footed mouse—the best vector for Lyme disease—has fewer predators and competitors for food.

Better Safe Than Sorry

By providing dozens of concrete examples of how we depend on and benefit from the environment, Sustaining Life is “a wonderful rebuttal to people who call conservationists treehuggers,” said Wright. Yet he reminded the audience that the path from species to valuable product is serendipitous and unpredictable. Therefore, he argued, we should endeavor to protect all species in order to save those that may most benefit human health.

Chivian, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the medical dimensions of nuclear war, argued that it is difficult for the public to grasp the threats posed by climate change: “The level of complexity and abstraction is really an order of magnitude—or many times more than that—greater than it is about nuclear weapons…and therefore, it’s even more essential for physicians and public health professionals to describe and discuss these global environmental changes in human-health terms.”

Photo: Eric Chivian of Harvard Medical School. Courtesy of the Wilson Center and Dave Hawxhurst.

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Critics have warned that the new unified U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) could threaten the sovereignty of African nations and encroach on the portfolios of other U.S. agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). But in an interview with USAID newsletter FrontLines, General William E. “Kip” Ward, head of AFRICOM, went out of his way to dispel these fears. Some of the most interesting parts of the interview:

On AFRICOM’s humanitarian efforts:

“We know that our piece is only a very small part of the totality of humanitarian assistance that’s being performed by USAID and other agencies. We would not look to take those roles over.”

On civilian-military cooperation:

“We are learning to understand one another better and truly, as [USAID] Administrator [Henrietta] Fore and [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates said, we are seeing with greater clarity the importance of all these efforts working as cohesively together as they can. Security and development go hand-in-hand to produce stability that we all seek.”

On coordinating with USAID and host countries:

“We would get involved where those development projects complemented the work being done by developmental agencies, USAID, in very close coordination with the country team, the ambassador, and representatives from USAID that are there on the ground. We want to ensure that we don’t do things that conflict with the work being done by others. This might include a school being built so we can complement each other’s efforts. Or, at the request of a country, we might conduct an exercise and we may need to build a road to get to a training area. And if building the road in one place or another could help the population, then we would look to work with the country team and the ambassador so it provides benefits to the population.”

Photo: Comoran Defense Chief of Staff Salimou Mohamed Amiri (left) talks with General William E. Ward, commander of U.S. Africa Command (right), on January 21, 2009. Ward met with Comoran government officials as part of his first official visit to the island nation. Courtesy of by Kenneth Fidler, U.S. Africa Command.

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Were you one of the millions—or billions—who tuned in to watch President Barack Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday? If so, and you also happen to be one of several thousand New Security Beat readers, your ears probably perked up at this paragraph in his inaugural address:

“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.”

Development practitioners and advocates are tickled pink that President Obama saw fit to mention their issues in such a prominent forum. They’re not resting on their laurels, though: ONE launched an e-mail campaign asking supporters to thank President Obama for his commitment to international development and urge him to include funding for it in his first presidential budget request.

Meanwhile, WaterAid America released a statement saying it “welcomes the mention of clean water in Obama’s speech and stands ready to support the commitment made by the new President in his first day of office. Along with other NGOs, WaterAid America has been encouraging the new administration to recognize the importance of clean water and sanitation and to take a lead to end the years of political neglect of these vital services.”

Although Obama did not mention family planning and reproductive health in his speech, population experts are also trying hard to ensure their recommendations are heard by the new administration.

Family planning experts and advocates have wasted no time urging President Barack Obama to reverse former President George W. Bush’s international family planning policies. Five former directors of population and reproductive health at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) call for the United States to renew its political and financial commitment to global family planning programs in Making the Case for U.S. International Family Planning Assistance, a report by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). The former bureaucrats recommend that USAID’s budget for international family planning be increased to $1.2 billion in FY 2010, up from $457 million in FY 2008, and that it be raised gradually to $1.5 billion in FY 2014 in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of universal access to reproductive health services by 2015.

Ten years of negotiations over a new pact governing the use of the Nile River have come to a halt, due to Egyptian and Sudanese reluctance to relinquish their near-total control over the distribution of water resources. “The technocrats had worked out all the paper work for a good protocol but the politicians have thrown a clean piece of cloth in the mud,” Professor Afuna Aduula, chair of the Nile Basin Discourse Forum, told IPS News. “Since Egypt must consent to other nations’ use of the Nile’s water, most of the other basin countries have not developed projects that use it extensively. Not surprisingly, over the years other basin countries have contested the validity of these treaties and demanded their revocation to make way for a more equitable system of management,” explains Patricia Kameri-Mbote in “Water, Conflict, and Cooperation: Lessons From the Nile River Basin.” Decreasing water levels in Lake Victoria, the Nile’s source, have also added to upstream countries’ concerns about water allocation.

Despite the political tensions between many of the 10 Nile Basin riparians—which also include Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda—and the critical importance of water to agriculture, health, and economic growth, analysts think it is unlikely that tensions over water will lead to war. All 10 countries belong to the Nile Basin Initiative, a ministerial-level body that has conducted the negotiations, as well as other cooperative and confidence-building measures. “While formally framed as a development enterprise, these efforts also implicitly serve as a means to prevent conflict predicated on environmental interdependence,” notes ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in “An Uncommon Peace: Environment, Development, and the Global Security Agenda.”

Photo: Satellite image of the northern Nile River. Courtesy of Flickr user thevoyager.

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As the dispute between Russia and Ukraine over natural gas pricing and delivery heads into its second week, it has grown into a larger political standoff between the two countries. The Council on Foreign Relations’ Jeffrey Mankoff explains that the “background is a long-running dispute between Russia and Ukraine in terms of gas relationships over two things: One is over the price that Ukraine pays, and the second is over debt that Ukraine owes Russia for gas shipments in the past that it hasn’t paid for. There’s also a political subtext because Ukraine, since 2004, has had a government that is interested in pursuing integration with Euro-Atlantic institutions, including NATO.”

Europe receives one-fifth of its natural gas from Russia; Bulgaria, Slovakia, and other countries in Eastern and Southeast Europe have been particularly hard-hit by the shutdown. Russia and Ukraine agreed to resume natural-gas deliveries to Europe on Monday, but that EU-brokered agreement has fragmented, and the two countries continue to argue over which pipelines to use and how much gas to deliver. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Ukranian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko are scheduled to meet at an EU-sponsored summit on Saturday.

Natural resources are frequently involved when Russia makes international headlines. For instance, in August 2008, Russia and Georgia went to war over resource-rich, geopolitically strategic South Ossetia. In addition, in January 2006, Russia and Ukraine got into a similar dispute over natural gas—although that one did not last as long as the present one. It remains to be seen which side—if either—will benefit from the manipulation of natural resources in the current situation.

“The countries in which terrorism could gain a foothold contain vast areas that are poverty-stricken and lawless. The common denominator within these areas is the absence of human security for the local population,” argues Major John Bellflower in “The Soft Side of Airpower” in the Small Wars Journal. “[A]dopting a human security paradigm as a counterinsurgency strategy could generate positive effects in the war on terror, particularly within AFRICOM,” and the Air Force could play a significant role in bringing human security to vulnerable populations, he claims.

When we picture the Air Force as an instrument of soft power, we tend to think of planes airlifting humanitarian aid into impoverished or disaster-stricken areas. But Bellflower argues that the Air Force could also help fulfill the longer-term health, food, economic, environmental, and community aspects of human security. For instance, the Air Force currently provides short-term health care in Africa through MEDFLAG, a biannual medical exercise. Bellflower suggests MEDFLAG “could be expanded to include a larger, centrally located field hospital unit that could serve a number of dispersed clinics.”

Bellflower also advocates deploying the Air Force’s Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers (REDHORSE) into impoverished, unstable areas to build airstrips, drill wells, and employ local labor to construct “clinics, schools, police stations, community centers, or whatever is needed for a particular area. Additionally, these units could repair existing facilities to allow electricity, water, and other needed life support systems to become functional or construct earthen dams or the like to protect against natural disaster and meet environmental security needs.” Employing young men to build this infrastructure “results in a lower chance of these individuals succumbing to the lure of terrorist group recruiting tactics,” asserts Bellflower.

Bellflower joins a growing cadre of academics and practitioners arguing that the Department of Defense (DoD) should be more involved in peacebuilding and international development. He makes an original contribution in detailing how the Air Force—typically viewed as the most hands-off branch of the armed forces—could help stabilize poor, volatile regions. Yet his vision would likely attract objections from both sides. Many humanitarian aid groups would resist what they view as DoD’s repeated incursions into an area in which it lacks expertise and has ulterior (i.e., national security) motives. On the other side, many military personnel would view this as an example of mission creep, and would hesitate to send soldiers into risky areas simply for humanitarian reasons.

Photo: A U.S. Air Force Europe airman from the 793rd Air Mobility Squadron moves humanitarian supplies into position for loading in support of the humanitarian mission to Georgia in August 2008. Photo courtesy of Captain Bryan Woods, 21st TSC Public Affairs, and Flickr user heraldpost.