Summary

The motion of this debate was "THE UN SHOULD IMPOSE SANCTIONS ON COUNTRIES THAT DESTROY THEIR RAINFORESTS". The proposition in their case proposed that the UNSC should pass a resolution to impose trade sanctions on countries that destroy rainforests for quick development and that the people affected by these sanctions would be subsidized to mitigate the effects this would have. At the very beginning of our arguments, we made it clear that we agreed that rainforest are vital to our survival, as that is not something that cannot be challenged and also we made it clear that we believed the subsidies that the proposition talked about would not be enought to mitigate the effects on the huge markets concerned. In their first argument, they talked about how sanctions are the effective as they would reduce profits and stop deforestation. Our reply to this was plain and simple - even though in some cases sanctions maybe effective, they are destrucitve too. There would not only be problems in the sanctioned countries, but in the importing countries too. We gave the example of Brazilian meat to illustrate some of the possible effects the sanctions could have, including high prices, shortage of supply, and possible public outcry due to use of taxpayer's money to subsidze foreign workers while prices were high at home. Instead of taking such damaging measures, we introduced the idea of reducing demand, which would be less destructive, but would have the same effects. In response to our rebuttal, they gave examples and showed how EU and US weren't importing meat through severely outdated statistics. Their severe underestimation of the possible side effects of shortage of goods surprised us and we pointed out some of the effects other than the ones related to McDonald's in our response to their response to our rebuttal of their argument. In their next argument, they pointed out how rainforests are global resources. However it did not remain as an argument as we acknowledged the fact that they are indeed so as they affect all the people in the world – a fact that cannot be argued about. We also mentioned that since rainforests are global resources, they should be protected through lessening the dependence on products produced by destroying them instead of taking sudden and unprecedented actions that could have far reaching harmful side-effects. Even though they said that this was status quo, we argued otherwise. In their third argument, they argued that putting sanctions would be a sort of punishment to the offender. Our rebuttal to this was that this would not be the case as the mindset that the countries would have would be of double standards. Some of the countries, including countries in the UNSC emit CO2 and remain unpunished while others are punished by some of the polluting countries themselves. They responded to our rebuttal by saying that we said that developing countries produce all goods for developed countries and that the blame game should not be played. However we implied that rainforest countries (mainly developing countries), supply rainforest goods to many developed countries. We also said that it would be very hard to explain the double standards to the sanctioned countries. Their fourth argument argued that sanctions were good for the govt themselves by saying that saved rainforests are good, but throughout the debate we pointed out that we could reach the same conclusions through less harmful means. In response to our argument about gradual change in demand, they gave example of tectonic plates moving slowly. However, we feel that gradual, but obviously not as slow as the prop imagines it to be is better than destructive solutions. We also mentioned that sanctions would give rise to problems like divides among countries and that their proposal would not address the issue of overpopulation. We could achieve the same degree of lessening of deforestation as proposed by them, without bad effects through alternate solutions. In short, in the debate, our arguments were based on the ideas of reducing demand to reduce consumption of rainforest goods, whereas they proposed to reach the same conclusion through sudden and possibly devastating means that would bring divides and possible economic mayhem – things very very unlikely to happen through the alternative introduced by us.