Saturday, December 26, 2009

Compulsory Private Health Insurance: Just Another Bailout for the Financial Sector?

by: Ellen Hodgson Brown J.D., t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed


 

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, is quoted as warning two centuries ago:

 

"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship. . . . The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."

 

That time seems to have come, but the dictatorship we are facing is not the sort that Dr. Rush was apparently envisioning. It is not a dictatorship by medical doctors, many of whom are as distressed by the proposed legislation as the squeezed middle class is. The new dictatorship is not by doctors but by Wall Street - the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector that now claims 40 percent of corporate profits.

 


Economist L. Randall Wray observes that ever since Congress threw out the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from investment banking, insurance and Wall Street finance have been "two peas in a pod." He writes:

 

"[T]here is a huge untapped market of some 50 million people who are not paying insurance premiums—and the number grows every year because employers drop coverage and people can't afford premiums. Solution? Health insurance 'reform' that requires everyone to turn over their pay to Wall Street. . . . This is just another bailout of the financial system, because the tens of trillions of dollars already committed are not nearly enough."

 

The health reform bills now coming through Congress are not focused on how to make health care cheaper or more effective, how to eliminate waste and fraud or how to cut out expensive middlemen. As originally envisioned, the public option would have pursued those goals. But the public option has been dropped from the Senate bill and radically watered down in the House bill. Rather than focusing on making health care affordable, the bills focus on how to force people either to buy health insurance if they don't have it, or to pay more for it if they do. If you don't have insurance and don't purchase it, you will be subject to a hefty fine. And if you do purchase it, premiums, co-pays, co-insurance payments and deductibles are liable to keep health care cripplingly expensive. Most of the people who don't have health care can't afford to pay the deductibles, so they will never use the plans they are forced to buy.  

 

To subsidize those who can't pay, the Senate bill would make families earning two to four times the poverty level who don't have employer-sponsored insurance surrender 8 to 12 percent of their income to insurance payments, or pay a fine. In another effort to make insurance payments "affordable," the Senate bill calls for the lowest-cost plan to cover only 60 percent of health care costs. "In other words," wrote Dr. Andrew Coates in a November 23 article, "a guarantee of insurance industry dominance and the continued privatization of health care in every arena."


 

An excellent analysis was posted on December 22 by a national organization of 17,000 physicians called Physicians for a National Health Program. The authors observed:

 

"Some paint the Senate bill as a flawed first step to reform that will be improved over time, citing historical examples such as Social Security. But where Social Security established the nidus of a public institution that grew over time, the Senate bill proscribes any such new public institution. Instead, it channels vast new resources – including funds diverted from Medicare – into the very private insurers who caused today's health care crisis. Social Security's first step was not a mandate that payroll taxes which fund pensions be turned over to Goldman Sachs! . . .

"The bill would drain $43 billion from Medicare payments to safety-net hospitals, threatening the care of the 23 million who will remain uninsured even if the bill works as planned. . . . The bill would leave hundreds of millions of Americans with inadequate insurance – an 'actuarial value' as low as 60 percent of actual health costs. . . . The bill would inflate the already crushing burden of insurance-related paperwork that currently siphons $400 billion from care annually. . . . [T]he bill will cause U.S. health costs to increase even more rapidly than presently, and budget neutrality is to be achieved by draining funds from Medicare and an accounting trick – front-loading the new revenues while delaying most new coverage until 2014."

 

The Right to Sovereignty Over Our Own Bodies

 

Compulsory health insurance is like compulsory selective military service (the draft), except that all of our numbers have come up. The argument has been made that auto insurance is compulsory, so why not health insurance? But the obvious response is that you can choose to drive a car. The only way to escape the vehicle we call a body is to give up the ghost.


 

And that brings up another issue alluded to by Dr. Rush: the matter of freedom of choice in health care, which some people would equate with freedom of religion. Not everyone believes in modern medicine. If we the people have a right to choose what we believe about life after death, we should have the right to choose what we believe about life before death, by choosing how to maintain our own bodies.

 

The conventional treatment promoted by the medical/pharmaceutical complex is an aggressive approach that can wind up killing the patient as collateral damage in its war on the disease. Among other researchers questioning the wisdom of this approach is Gary Null, who reported the results of an exhaustive independent review by the Nutrition Institute of America in 2004. The reviewers concluded that the number-one killer is not heart disease or cancer, but conventional medicine itself. Conventional medicine was found to be responsible for an estimated 783,936 deaths annually, including 106,000 deaths from adverse drug reactions, 98,000 from medical errors and 88,000 from infection. And those figures were conservative, since no more than 20 percent of iatrogenic (doctor- or drug-caused) mishaps are ever reported.

 

There are more natural, less invasive alternatives, but most are not covered by insurance, and even such simple remedies as healthy organic food may be too expensive for people forced to use a major portion of their incomes for medical insurance.

A true public option of the Medicare-for-all variety could have solved the problem by keeping health care affordable. If other industrialized countries can find the money for a national health service, we could too. For a model, we could follow the lead of Canada, which originally obtained the funds for its national health service from its own publicly-owned central bank. But that will be the subject of another article. Stay tuned. 



http://www.truthout.org/1224094?print

US Senate bill advance sparks health care stock rally

By Kate Randall
24 December 2009

Health care company shares rose sharply this week, with the Senate health care bill poised for a final vote and passage Thursday morning. The stock market rally offered one more indication that the Obama-sponsored legislation—far from offering relief from health care hardships for ordinary Americans—will boost the giant insurers’ and pharmaceuticals’ profits, and that the industry and Wall Street are keenly aware of this fact.

The health care sector has conducted a concerted effort over the past year to ensure that the legislation is crafted in its interests, with spending by an estimated 3,300 lobbyists expected to top $1 billion for the past two years. (See “Health care profiteers: A billion-dollar industry”) The industry has been handsomely rewarded with a bill that will deliver millions of new cash-paying customers to private insurers, while placing virtually no limits on what the insurance companies can charge.

At the same time, any fears on the part of private insurers that the final Senate bill would contain a government-run “public option” were put to rest when Senator Joseph Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, threatened to withhold his critical vote if it were included; the measure was summarily dumped. Although the public option would have at best provided only a fig leaf of reform to an otherwise reactionary piece of legislation, the insurance industry was vehemently opposed to any measure representing even the hint of a threat to its profits.

Following the 60-40 vote early Monday morning to end debate on the bill—averting a Republican filibuster and clearing the way for its passage—a number of health care stocks saw considerable gains. That day the Standard and Poor’s Managed Health Care index rose 4.6 percent and the S&P Healthcare Index was up 1.4 percent, while the Morgan Stanley Healthcare Payors stock index rose 3.6 percent.

Oppenheimer Asset Management analyst Carl McDonald commented in a research note, “All in all, relative to the last version of health reform issued by the Senate, things have turned out pretty well for the health insurance industry.” He added, “In particular, all versions of a government-run health plan have largely been eliminated.”

Private insurer stocks seeing significant gains Monday were: Cigna Corp., 5.3 percent; Aetna Inc., 5.84 percent; Humana Inc., 3.79 percent; UnitedHealth Group Inc., 5 percent; and WellPoint Inc., 3.8 percent.

The pharmaceutical benefits sector also saw gains, with Medco Health Solutions Inc. shares rising Monday by 3.84 percent and Express Scripts going up 5.2 percent.

Shares of Allergan Inc., maker of Botox, rose by 1.7 percent Monday after a proposed 5 percent tax on the anti-wrinkle treatment was ditched in favor of a 10 percent tax on tanning salons.

Revisions to the Senate bill also delayed a nearly $20 billion tax on medical device manufacturers until 2011, reflected in stock gains in this sector: St. Jude Medical Inc. rose 1 percent, Stryker Corp. 0.6 percent and Zimmer Holdings Inc. 0.9 percent.

Hospital chains also saw gains, on expectations that provisions of the Senate legislation will reduce the number of uninsured patients seeking hospital care. Over the past week, Tenet Healthcare Corp. shares were up 8.4 percent; and Community Health Systems Inc. stock climbed 5.5 percent in value.

These companies will see an influx of new customers—estimated at some 30 million—resulting in increased profits. Sheryl R. Skolnick, managing director at Pali Capital, told the Wall Street Journal that any health care overhaul that increases the number of people with insurance “is good reform as long as it pays more than Medicare,” and that both the House and Senate bills would do this.

Monday’s boost for stock shares followed a general rise over the past two months, beginning around the time Connecticut’s Lieberman first signaled that he would filibuster with the Republicans if the Senate bill included a public option.

The Huffington Post reported the following sharp gains for major health insurance companies from October 27 through December 18:

• Coventry Health Care Inc., up 31.6 percent

• Cigna Corp., up 29.1 percent

• Aetna Inc., up 27.1 percent

• WellPoint Inc., up 26.6 percent

• UnitedHealth Group Inc., up 20.5 percent

• Humana Inc., up 13.6 percent

These figures show that investors are (correctly) interpreting the Senate health plan as a massive subsidy for private insurers. Oppenheimer strategist Brian Belski remarked, “It’s like a blanket has been lifted off this sector.” (By comparison, during this same period the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 2.3 percent and the NASDAQ rose by only 1.4 percent.)

In anticipation of the Senate bill’s passage, Gregory Nersessian of Credit Suisse raised his price targets on seven insurers—Aetna, Cigna, Amerigroup Corp., Humana, Molina Healthcare Inc., UnitedHealth Group, and Wellcare Health Plans Inc.—a prediction of greater strength of stock performance.

Central to both the House and Senate versions of the health care legislation is the legal obligation of individuals and families to obtain insurance or pay a penalty, while, on the other hand, no restrictions are placed on what the insurance companies can charge for this coverage. Private insurers are expecting to haul in as much as $50 billion in new annual revenue, coming both from new paying customers and government subsidies.

To counteract measures in the Obama-sponsored legislation that prohibit insurers from denying coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, or from charging these customers higher premiums, the insurance companies will respond in a manner that protects every cent in their bottom line: by either raising premium prices for everyone or cutting benefits across the board.

Private insurers also fared well with a revision in the Senate bill on health insurance industry taxation. Under the original Senate bill the industry would have been taxed a fixed $6.7 billion a year. According to the revised proposal, health insurers would be taxed $2 billion in 2011, with increases over time rising to $10 billion in 2017.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/stoc-d24.shtml

Happy Holidays From America's Banks

Saturday 19 December 2009

by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

Never mind Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope. It's the audacity of the banks that takes your breath away. Mean old Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life seems like Father Christmas by comparison.

A recent report that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs may have received preferential treatment getting doses of the swine flu vaccine was enough to give Ebenezer Scrooge the yips. Then came news that in order for us to get back the taxpayer bailout money we loaned them, Citigroup is receiving billions of dollars in tax breaks from the IRS.

And there's a new study this week, "Rewarding Failure," from the public interest group Public Citizen, revealing that in the years leading up to the financial meltdown, the CEO's of the 10 Wall Street giants that either collapsed or got huge amounts of TARP money were paid an average of $28.9 million dollars a year.

In 2007, that amounted to 575 times the median income of an American family. Now, thanks in part to the banks' monumental malfeasance that led to our economic swan dive, food stamps are now being used to feed one in eight Americans, and a quarter of all the kids in this country. A new poll from The New York Times and CBS News reports that more than half of our unemployed have borrowed money from friends and relatives and have cut back on medical treatment. The Times wrote that, "Joblessness has wreaked financial and emotional havoc on the lives of many of those out of work... causing major life changes, mental health issues and trouble maintaining even basic necessities."

Yet according to the non-profit Americans for Financial Reform the reported $150 billion that Wall Street is paying itself in compensation and bonuses this year would be enough to solve the budget crisis of every one of the fifty states or create millions of jobs or prevent all foreclosures for four years.

All of this wretched excess is occurring as more and more people can't afford a roof over their heads. Foreclosures were up another five percent in the third quarter - 23 percent more than a year ago. Fewer Americans are willing to buy foreclosed properties, and the Obama administration's foreclosure prevention plan has been a bust so far - way too timid, critics say, and many of the banks won't play ball, refusing to negotiate in good faith with homeowners desperate to hold on.

We got a first hand look at the crisis this week, when thousands lined up at the Jacob Javits Convention Center just a few blocks from our Manhattan offices to attend a mortgage assistance event sponsored by the non-profit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA). So many showed up for this leg of the "Save the Dream Tour" that on many days, staff and volunteers stayed to help until one in the morning.

NACA has had success getting homeowners and banks together to work out a deal to prevent foreclosure. But the big banks' return to the government of the TARP bailout money with which we underwrote them over the last 14 months is a mixed blessing - great to have the cash returned so quickly, terrible because any leverage Washington held over the banks because of the loans virtually vanishes with the payback. They're back in the saddle and not inclined to be of much assistance helping anyone else out, especially those in mortgage trouble.

As Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times wrote in the wake of President Obama's Monday meeting with Wall Street's top guns (three of whom failed to show up because of airport delays), "Executive compensation , leverage limits and lending standards were all issues that Washington said it planned to change - and when the taxpayers were the shareholders of these firms, it probably could have done so. But now the White House has been left in the position of extending invitations, rather than exercising its clout. And in the figurative and literal sense, it is getting stood up."

Afterwards, Obama said, "The problem is there's a big gap between what I'm hearing here in the White House and the activities of lobbyists on behalf of these institutions or associations of which they're a member up on Capitol Hill."

That's putting it mildly. This week, the American Bankers Association sent out an update and "call to action" memorandum crowing over its success watering down the bank reform bill that was approved by the House and urging its members to beat back similar legislation in the Senate. Self-righteously, it concludes, "As one of your New Year's resolutions, please vow to do everything in your power to show, and to have your colleagues in your bank show, your Senators the right path to true reform."

It helps when the right path is paved with silver and gold. As "Crossing Wall Street," a November report from the Center for Responsive Politics notes, "The finance, insurance and real estate sector has given $2.3 billion to candidates, leadership PACs and party committees since 1989, which eclipses every other sector...

"The financial sector has also been a voracious lobbying force, spending an unprecedented $3.8 billion since 1998, while sending an army of lobbyists to Capitol Hill to make its case. That's more money than any other sector has spent on influence peddling. Not even the health care sector, which spun up a lobbying frenzy this year over health reform, has spent more."

The banks are making a list and checking it twice. And lest we forget, during his run for the White House, the finance sector filled Barack Obama's stocking with $39.5 million dollars worth of campaign contributions, more than any other presidential candidate.

God bless us, every one!

Research support provided by producer William Brangham and associate producer Katia Maguire.

http://www.truthout.org/1219092

The Dehumanization of the Enemy

Racism and War:
The Dehumanization of the Enemy:

Our real enemy is not the ones living in a distant land whose names or policies we don't understand; The real enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable, the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, the Insurance Companies who deny us Health care when it's profitable, the Banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemies are not several hundred thousands away. They are right here in front of us - Mike Prysner

Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy:

Mike Prysner describes a mission he took part in which his unit forced Iraqis out of half a dozen homes, with no compensation, so the US military could use them. “One family in particular, a woman with two small girls, very elderly man, and two middle-aged men—we dragged them from their houses and threw them onto the street, and arrested the men because they refused to leave.” Since he left, he has been plagued by guilt “anytime I see a mother with her children, like the one who cried hysterically and screamed that we were worse than Saddam as we forced her from her home, …anytime I see a young girl like the one I grabbed by the arm and dragged into the street.” Prysner also describes the physical abuse of a wounded prisoner, with a sandbag over his head and his hands tied behind his back. “We were told we were fighting terrorists; the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism is this occupation.” See http://snipurl.com/tt0ui

Have Americans Traded Freedom For Security?

Posted By Paul Craig Roberts On December 25, 2009 @ 11:00 pm

Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises — the closing of the Guantánamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.

In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantánamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process and ceasing to torture them in violation of U.S. and international laws.

All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the U.S. government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantánamo to a prison in Thomson, Illinois.

Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the US government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of U.S. legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.

The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantánamo. Now the prisoners are up against two U.S. senators, a U.S. representative, a mayor, and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.

Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan war lords and sold to the Americans as "terrorists" in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the Defense Secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantánamo detainees to be the "780 most dangerous people on earth."

The vast majority have been released after years of abuse. The 100 who are slated to be removed to Illinois have apparently been so badly abused that the U.S. government is afraid to release them because of the testimony the prisoners could give to human rights organizations and foreign media about their mistreatment.

Our British allies are showing more moral conscience than Americans are able to muster. Former PM Tony Blair, who provided cover for President Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, is being damned for his crimes by UK officialdom testifying before the Chilcot Inquiry.

The London Times on December 14 summed up the case against Blair in a headline: "Intoxicated by Power, Blair Tricked Us Into War." Two days later the British First Post declared: "War Crime Case Against Tony Blair Now Rock-solid." In an unguarded moment Blair let it slip that he favored a conspiracy for war regardless of the validity of the excuse [weapons of mass destruction] used to justify the invasion.

The movement to bring Blair to trial as a war criminal is gathering steam. Writing in the First Post Neil Clark reported: "There is widespread contempt for a man [Blair] who has made millions [his reward from the Bush regime] while Iraqis die in their hundreds of thousands due to the havoc unleashed by the illegal invasion, and who, with breathtaking arrogance, seems to regard himself as above the rules of international law." Clark notes that the West’s practice of shipping Serbian and African leaders off to the War Crimes Tribunal, while exempting itself, is wearing thin.

In the U.S., of course, there is no such attempt to hold to account Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the large number of war criminals that comprised the Bush Regime. Indeed, Obama, whom Republicans love to hate, has gone out of his way to protect the Bush cohort from being held accountable.

Here in Great Moral America we only hold accountable celebrities and politicians for their sexual indiscretions. Tiger Woods is paying a bigger price for his girlfriends than Bush or Cheney will ever pay for the deaths and ruined lives of millions of people. The consulting company, Accenture Plc, which based its marketing program on Tiger Woods, has removed Woods from its Web site. Gillette announced that the company is dropping Woods from its print and broadcast ads. AT&T says it is re-evaluating the company’s relationship with Woods.

Apparently, Americans regard sexual infidelity as far more serious than invading countries on the basis of false charges and deception, invasions that have caused the deaths and displacement of millions of innocent people. Remember, the House impeached President Clinton not for his war crimes in Serbia, but for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Americans are more upset by Tiger Woods’ sexual affairs than they are by the Bush and Obama administrations’ destruction of U.S. civil liberty. Americans don’t seem to mind that "their" government for the last 8 years has resorted to the detention practices of 1,000 years ago — simply grab a person and throw him into a dungeon forever without bringing charges and obtaining a conviction.

According to polls, Americans support torture, a violation of both U.S. and international law, and Americans don’t mind that their government violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and spies on them without obtaining warrants from a court. Apparently, the brave citizens of the "sole remaining superpower" are so afraid of terrorists that they are content to give up liberty for safety, an impossible feat.

With stunning insouciance, Americans have given up the rule of law that protected their liberty. The silence of law schools and bar associations indicates that the age of liberty has passed. In short, the American people support tyranny. And that’s where they are headed.

http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/12/25/have-americans-traded-freedom-for-security/print/

AFRICA: Drying, Drying, Disappearing…

By Paul Virgo

ROME, Dec 26 (IPS) - Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is les than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years.

Climate change and overuse have put one of Africa's mightiest lakes in mortal danger, and the livelihoods of the 30 million people who depend on its waters is hanging by a thread as a result.

An unprecedented crisis is looming that would create fresh hunger in a region already suffering grave food insecurity, and pose a massive threat to peace and stability, experts say.

"If Lake Chad dries up, 30 million people will have no means of a livelihood, and that is a big security problem because of growing competition for smaller quantities of water," Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, executive secretary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) tells IPS in Rome.

"Poverty and hunger will increase. When there is no food to eat, there is bound to be violence."

The lake, which shrank 90 percent between 1963 and 2001 from 25,000 square kilometres to under 1,500, is bordered by Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria.

Four more countries, the Central African Republic, Algeria, Sudan and Libya, share the lake's hydrological basin and are therefore affected by its fortunes.

"Lake Chad has experienced shrinkage," Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said at November's World Food Security Summit at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome. "If it dries up, it will be a real disaster. I want to warn the world about this imminent disaster."

That disaster has already started. Villages that used to be thriving lakeside ports are now stranded miles from the water, and have been swallowed by the advancing Sahara desert. Fishers and farmers are struggling to survive.

"The dramatic situation is already taking place," Maher Salman, a technical officer with FAO's land and water division tells IPS. "It's clear that the consequences have started. There is outward migration. People are looking for water, so they leave the basin area."

Fishers have seen once massive catches frequently reduced to half-filled buckets. The FAO says the lake's fish production has fallen 60 percent, and the variety of fish caught has dramatically declined too.

Farmers who rely on lake waters for irrigation are having to move nearer to the water or abandon their activities. Lack of water has caused pasture lands to shrivel up and led to a serious shortage of animal feed, estimated at 46.5 percent in some areas in 2006, resulting in cattle deaths and plummeting livestock production.

This is the sort of situation former World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin was worried about in 1995 when he said that "the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, and the wars of the next century will be about water" – a view echoed in reports by several organisations including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

While some experts remain sceptical about the prospect of all-out wars being fought over water, there have been numerous reports of clashes between farmers and herds-people competing for productive land in the Lake Chad area.

Biodiversity too has been hit by the lake's retreat. So has the region's health situation.

"Due to the movement of people looking for food there is a high level of interaction, which complicates matters because of the high prevalence of HIV among Lake Chad inhabitants," says Ganduje. "The African Development Bank has come to our aid, and we are tackling this."

Little can be done at the regional level about climate change, which is attacking the lake on two fronts - reducing the rainfall that feeds it, and accelerating evaporation of its waters due to higher temperatures. Its shallowness for such a major water body makes it particularly vulnerable to these attacks.

It is a grim situation, but not a hopeless one. The other half of the problem, over-extraction, can be tackled locally.

"We are optimistic," says Ganduje. "We are regulating the use of Lake Chad water. We are drawing up a charter so everyone has common rules and regulations in the use of water.

"We are also controlling activities on the tributaries to Lake Chad, such as the construction of dams and irrigation activities. We are controlling human behaviour in response to other factors that are outside of our control."

This confidence is justified in part by growing understanding of the need for a response.

"There is recognition of the need for new management strategies to be put into place," says Salman. "The most common conclusion of studies on the lake's shrinkage is that it is due to both human pressure on water resources and on climate change. A solution should be possible.

"There needs to be optimum use of the waters in each sector, up-scaling water conservation and small-scale agricultural technologies for more efficient irrigation. Awareness about use of the waters is important as well, so people cut down."

The LCBC also has high hopes of an ambitious plan to replenish the lake to its 1960s levels by diverting water from the Oubangui River, which is the major tributary to the Congo River.

"The feasibility study has started and a fund has been set up," says Ganduje. "The heads of state are confident of progress. If the feasibility study is positive, we believe we have the political support required."

The FAO says it does not have a position on whether the transfer project should go ahead, although it has called for very careful consideration of its impact, including that on the Congo River system. What it views as key is the presentation of concrete plans to save the lake, so donors can be badgered into committing to a cause that is crucial to millions of people .

"There is a strategic action plan for the sustainable development of Lake Chad, but to translate that into action we need an investment plan," says Salman. "We need more meetings of donors to get them to commit and make good those commitments through investment. The good news is that there is a consensus on the need for action." (END/2009)

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49820