Zero Grazing

Like most conservatives, I'm all for a little hypocrisy now and then - it's the tribute that vice plays to virtue, the glue that holds society together, and all the rest of it. It does seem, though, that the Bush Administration's abstinence advocates have stretched this principle to the breaking point. I don't really have much to say about the fate of Randall Tobias, the Deputy Secretary of State who seems to have frequented escort services when he wasn't out promoting the ABC method of AIDS prevention ("abstain, be faithful, use a condom"). If you're curious about the question of how best to fight AIDS in Africa, though, I highly recommend this New York Review of Books essay from two years back on Uganda, which has been something of a success story in the effort to drive down HIV rates. The author, Helen Epstein, argues that neither abstinence education nor condom distribution really addresses the root of the problem, which has more to do with the consequences of polygamy, formal and informal, than any other single factor:

Africans are at higher risk of AIDS than people elsewhere not because they have so many partners, but because they often have more than one long-term partner at a time. Ugandan tribes, like many in Africa, are traditionally polygamous. Men are entitled to marry as many wives as they can afford to support, and they sleep with them at closely spaced intervals. But polygamous cultures, in which many people conduct several ongoing sexual affairs at once, create fertile ground for the spread of HIV. If all the men slept only with the women they were married to and the women did the same, HIV would not spread. However, extramarital affairs inevitably occur, as they do everywhere. In addition, economic hardship has meant that these days many men have difficulty providing for even one family, but they nevertheless continue to conduct informal relationships with mistresses, who may have additional partners themselves, sometimes out of economic necessity.

Thus the practice of formal and informal polygamy creates a network of simultaneous or "concurrent" sexual relationships that links sexually active people not only to one another but also to the partners of their partners— and to the partners of those partners, and so on—creating a giant web that can extend across huge regions. If one member contracts HIV, then everyone else in the web may, too. Polygamous men generally seek out young women, even as they themselves age. In this way, formal and informal polygamy pumps the virus from one generation to the next.

Uganda's most effective anti-AIDS campaign, Epstein argues - which has since been abandoned because it passed muster with neither liberal family-planning advocates nor evangelical abstinence-boosters - addressed precisely this problem:

... the Ugandans knew that HIV was spreading rapidly through networks of sexual relationships, and it was killing people. They also knew it would be unrealistic to insist that all men abandon their extra wives and mistresses, many of whom depend on the men for the opportunity to work on the land and for money and consumer goods for themselves and their children. Zero Grazing was a compromise. It recognized that sexual arrangements in Africa are often different from the Western nuclear ideal and serial monogamy.

"Zero Grazing was mainly addressed to men," she writes, and the program urged them to "try to stick to one partner, but if you have to keep your long-term mistresses and concubines and extra wives, at least avoid short-term casual encounters with bar girls and prostitutes. Also, you mustn't casually seduce and exploit young women, who may be susceptible to your charms and wealth." Which sounds like advice that certain Bush Administration officials should have taken to heart.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2007/04/zero-grazing/54299/