KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Dec 13 2023 (IPS) – With the US Fed raising interest rates, the world economy is slowing as debt distress spreads across the global South, increasing poverty worldwide to pre-pandemic levels, with the poorest countries faring worst.
Extreme poverty continues to be high and is now worse than before the pandemic in low-income countries (LICs) and among those affected by fragility, violence and conflict. The promise of eradicating poverty worldwide by 2030 has become unachievable.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
The Bretton Woods institutions’ (BWIs) annual meetings in Marrakech in October were only the second-ever in Africa. But the rich nations-dominated BWIs failed yet again to rise to the challenges of our times, setting Africa and the global South even further back.
Instead of fostering cooperation to address the causes and effects of the contemporary catastrophe, neither the International Monetary Fund nor the World Bank governors could agree on joint communiques due to the greater politicisation of multilateral fora.
Indebtedness immobilises governments Indebtedness and restrictive creditor rules prevent governments from spending more counter-cyclically to overcome the many contractionary tendencies of recent times, besides preventing them from addressing looming social and environmental crises.
The G20’s largest twenty economies have urged strengthening “multilateral coordination by official bilateral and private creditors … to address the deteriorating debt situation and facilitate coordinated debt treatment for debt-distressed countries”.
But its Common Framework to restructure debt has been roundly criticised by civil society, think tanks and even the World Bank on many grounds, including the paltry concessional credit relief offered to a few of the very poorest countries.
In contrast, the G24 caucus of developing countries at the BWIs has emphasised the need for “durable debt resolution measures while collaborating on resolving the structural issues leading to such vulnerabilities.”
But all those advocating purported solutions are not even trying to ensure fiscal space and public spending capacity for counter-cyclical efforts, let alone achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and national development objectives.
Surcharges The IMF currently imposes additional charges on countries that do not quickly clear their debts to the Fund. Besides the usual fees and interest, borrowing countries paid over $4 billion in such surcharges in 2020-22, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Surcharges will cost debt-distressed countries about $7.9 billion over six years. The G24 has emphasised that surcharges are pro-cyclical and regressive, especially with monetary tightening.
Governments have undertaken contractionary policies and cut imports for lack of foreign exchange. This deepens the problems of heavily indebted poor countries who cannot but count on the Fund for relief and solutions.
At Marrakech, the governing International Monetary and Financial Committee decided to “consider a review of surcharge policies”. The G24 called for “a suspension of surcharges while the review – which we hope will lead to substantial permanent reduction or complete elimination – is being conducted.”
Rich nations have been divided over surcharges. With Ukraine now among the top surcharge payers, following civil society criticisms, the Biden administration’s refusal to review surcharges in 2022 was heavily criticised by the US Congress.
Deepening austerity IMF fiscal austerity measures of the 1980s returned with a vengeance after the 2008 global financial crisis, and then again during the Covid-19 pandemic from 2020. Most Fund loans require cutting the public sector wage bill (PSWB), the budget line to pay employees.
Most wage earners in many LICs, including nurses, teachers and other social service workers, work for the state, directly or indirectly. Although much needed, these employees have been more likely to be targeted by such budget cuts.
PSWB cuts may involve hiring or wage freezes, or limiting, or even cutting wages. These inevitably undermine government capacities and services. Fiscal consolidation has also involved raising more indirect, consumption taxes, and tax exemptions, e.g., for essential goods such as food.
In 38 countries with over a billion people, loan conditionalities during 2020-22, the three years of the Covid-19 pandemic, meant regressive tax reforms and public spending cuts. PSWB and fuel or electricity subsidy cuts are also common demands worsening economic contractions.
Austerity bound to fail But the IMF’s own research suggests such austerity policies are generally ineffective in reducing debt, their ostensible purpose. The April 2023 IMF World Economic Outlook acknowledged austerity programmes and fiscal consolidations “do not reduce debt ratios, on average”. Yet, its Fiscal Monitor still demands “fiscal tightening” of most developing countries.
The new IMF-World Bank debt sustainability framework sets the LICs’ external debt-to-GDP ratio limit at 30% or 40%. It insists debt-distressed economies must have lower ratios than ‘strong’ countries, effectively further penalising the weak and vulnerable.
Instead of enabling consistently counter-cyclical macroeconomic frameworks, the IMF’s current short-termist approach is mainly preoccupied with annual, or worse, quarterly balances, mimicking corporate reporting practices.
Such short-termism further limits fiscal space, effectively preventing or deterring public sector investments requiring longer-term macroeconomic frameworks to realise benefits. This discourages ‘patient’ medium- to long-term investments required for national economic planning and transformation, essential for sustainable development.
Restrictive debt and fiscal targets have meant even less public investment. This is typically required of borrowing countries as a credit conditionality. Annual IMF Article IV consultations cause other countries to also accept similar constraints to avoid Fund disapproval.
While a few better-off economies enjoy full employment, most countries face further economic contraction, not least due to interest rate hikes led by the US Fed and their many effects. Instead of being part of the problem, the IMF should be part of the solution.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Nov 3 2023 (IPS) – For many of Argentina’s voters the choice in the 19 November presidential runoff is between the lesser of two evils: Sergio Massa, economy minister of a government that’s presiding over a once-in-a-generation economic meltdown with a whopping 140-per cent inflation rate, or Javier Milei, a far-right libertarian who admires Donald Trump, wants to shut down the Central Bank and wields a chainsaw in public as a symbol of his willingness to slash the state. Many will rue that it ever came to this.
A peculiar outsider
A post-modern media celebrity, Milei’s performance style is a perfect fit for social media. He’s easily angered, reacts violently and insults copiously. He’s unapologetically sexist and mocks identity politics.
Milei bangs the drum for ‘anarcho-capitalism’, an ultra-individualistic ideology in which the market has absolute pre-eminence: earlier this year, he described the sale of human organs as ‘just another market’.
To expand his appeal beyond this extreme economic niche he forged an alliance with the culturally conservative right. His running mate, Victoria Villarruel, represents the backlash against abortion – legalised after decades of civil society campaigning in 2020 – and sexual diversity and gender equality policies, along with reappraisal of the murderous military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.
In the run-up to primary elections in August, the two mainstream coalitions – the centre-left incumbent Union for the Homeland (UP) and the centre-right opposition Together for Change (JxC) – displayed a notable lack of leadership and indulged in internal squabbles that showed very little empathy for people’s daily struggles. All they had to offer in the face of widespread concerns about inflation and insecurity were the candidacies of the current minister of the economy and a former minister of security. They made it easy for Milei to hold them responsible for decades of corruption, ineffectiveness and failure.
In Milei’s discourse, the hardworking, productive majority is being bled dry by taxation to maintain the privileges of a parasitic and corrupt political ‘caste’. His proposal is deceptively simple: shrink the state to a minimum to destroy the caste that lives off it, clearing their way for individual progress.
Milei gained traction among young voters, particularly young men, via TikTok. He found fertile ground among a generation that no longer expect to be better off than their parents. While many of his followers concede that his ideas may be a little crazy, they appear to be willing to take the risk of embracing the unknown on the basis that the really crazy plan would be to allow those long in control to retain their power and expect things to turn out differently. Milei has capitalised on the despair, hopelessness and accumulated anger so many rightfully feel.
Surprise after surprise
The first surprise came on 13 August, when Milei won the most votes of any candidate in the primaries.
Milei only entered politics in 2021, when the 17 per cent vote he amassed in the capital, Buenos Aires, sent him and two other libertarians to the National Congress. In the 2023 primaries he went much further, winning 30 per cent of the vote. He placed ahead of JxC, whose two candidates received a joint 28 per cent, and UP, the current incarnation of the Peronist Party, which took 27 per cent. The bulk of the UP vote, 21 per cent, went to Massa. That Peronism, once the dominant force, came third was a historic first.
The second surprise came on 22 October. Following the primaries, all talk was of Milei winning the presidency. He trumpeted his intent to win the first round outright. Measured against these expectations, his second place looks like an underperformance. But the fact that a candidate who wasn’t on the radar before the primaries has made the runoff shows how quickly the political landscape can shift.
In the October vote Milei took almost the exact share he’d received in the primaries. Massa finished above him with almost 37 per cent, displacing JxC, which lost four points on its second-place performance in the primaries.
The fact that the economy minister was able to distance himself from the government he’s part of – one often described as the worst in 40 years – to come first was viewed as a notable victory, even though his share was just about the lowest Peronism has ever received.
One explanation for Massa’s improved performance was turnout, which increased by eight points to almost 78 per cent – still low for a country with compulsory voting, but enough to make a difference. Much of the increase could be credited to the political machinery that mobilised voters on election day, aided by the minister-candidate pulling as many levers as he could to improve his chances. This included putting lots of instant cash into voters’ pockets, including through tax breaks benefiting targeted groups of workers and consumers.
An unpalatable decision
There’s still much uncertainty ahead. Economic failure is Milei’s best propaganda, so much will depend on how the economy behaves over the next couple of weeks. Milei and the destruction he represents can’t be written off.
Neither those currently in power nor those in the mainstream opposition recognise the obvious: Milei is their fault. They’ve held power for the best part of the past 40 years without effectively tackling any of the issues that concern people the most.
Many voters now feel they face an unpalatable choice between a corrupt and failing government and a dangerous disruptor. They fear that if they choose to keep Milei out, their votes may be misinterpreted as a show of active support for a continuity they also reject. What’s at stake here is more than one election. If Milei is kept at bay, the political dynamics leading to the current economic dysfunction will still need to be addressed – or the far-right threat to democracy won’t end with Milei.
A view of Caracas from the south side of the narrow valley where it sits, dotted with houses and residential buildings where full occupancy was the norm until a few years ago. As a result of the massive migration of young people and adults, more and more homes are left unoccupied or inhabited only by the elderly and young children. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
CARACAS, Oct 4 2023 (IPS) – Gladys swore she would not cry in front of her small children, but she still had to wipe away a couple of tears when she turned her head and looked, perhaps for the last time, at her dream house on Margarita Island in Venezuela, from where she migrated, driven by a lack of income and by fear.
“It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours (she works in administration, her husband is a mechanic, and they have two boys), but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate,” she told IPS from Miami, Florida in the U.S.
Due to the economic, social and political crisis, which gave rise to a complex humanitarian emergency, 7.7 million Venezuelans, according to United Nations agencies, have migrated from this country, the vast majority in the last decade, and the flow is not slowing down, especially to other countries in the region.
“It hurts to leave your own home, the most precious material asset for a family like ours, but we lost our jobs and were robbed in broad daylight in the middle of the city. That led us to decide to emigrate.” — Gladys
The family of Gladys, who like other people who talked to IPS preferred not to give her last name, tried their luck in Colombia, Panama and Spain, before finally settling in the United States, “and the worry about the house followed us like a shadow, but fortunately we made a deal with an enterprising young man who takes care of it, improves it and pays a modest rent.”
There are thousands like her. Migrants try not to leave their homes empty and abandoned, because they could lose them. For this reason, since most migrants are adults in their most productive age and young people, relatives of other ages remain in the homes, giving Venezuela the appearance of being a country of elderly people and children.
“I have to close up my home,” said Juan Manuel Flores, from San Antonio de Los Altos, a satellite city of Caracas with many middle class houses. “The neighbors will take care of it. It took us more than five years to build it and it cost between 150,000 and 200,000 dollars. Now I can’t get more than 60,000 dollars for it. We are not just going to give it away for that price.”
Flores, a teacher at a school where he earns less than 200 dollars a month, is preparing to travel to Spain, where his wife and adult daughters have gone ahead of him. “I will return to Venezuela when the country and its economy improve, and housing prices will rise again,” he told IPS, although without much conviction.
Solitude eats away at houses and buildings even in sought-after areas of the residential and commercial municipality of Chacao, in eastern Caracas. The real estate and construction market is suffering in Venezuela from the general economic crisis and in particular from the oversupply of housing created by those leaving the country. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
Why not rent out their house? “Because the laws and the authorities always favor the tenant, and if they have children it is impossible to get them out when the lease is up, whether they pay the rent or not, and they end up staying in the house for years,” said Nancy, a pastry chef, also from San Antonio, who left a niece in charge of her apartment when she moved to Brazil last year.
Selling is also not an option in most cases, because the magnitude of the exodus over the last decade has so depressed demand that the most that can be obtained for a property is 15 or 20 percent of the value it had 15 years ago, if you are lucky. So selling a home even if you want to is a long, difficult process that provides meager results.
Those who have no other choice say that they are not selling their home but “giving it away” for whatever they can get, with great regret, mostly to internal migrants from other parts of the country, who “take refuge” in Caracas because outside the capital there are recurrent power outages, and scarcity of water and fuel, in addition to other shortages.
“Real estate deteriorates, ceases to serve those who need it and remains an important asset that produces nothing for the owner, for example a migrant who needs to pay rent as soon as they arrive in another country,” Roberto Orta, president of the Venezuelan Real Estate Chamber, told IPS.
The businessman said “this is an issue that, we have proposed, should be addressed with political will in order to reform the laws that constrain the real estate market, to benefit both landlords and tenants. Up to 250,000 homes could be freed up in five years.”
A view of the working-class neighborhood of 23 de Enero on the west side of Caracas. In low-income barrios, closed, empty houses are almost non-existent, as those who decide to emigrate look for relatives to move in, to avoid the risk of the homes being invaded or robbed. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS
A trade is born
In the residential buildings located in Caracas and other cities, closing up an apartment and moving outside the country is not the same as leaving a house abandoned to solitude and neglect, because the neighbors, for their own safety and in order to pay the common expenses, keep watch and take care to prevent strangers from occupying the empty apartments.
But houses, especially middle-class homes, are an attractive and easy target for crime and even for people who want to occupy them by de facto means. That is why a new profession has appeared: the home caretaker.
“I have taken care of three houses in housing developments in the southeast (of Caracas), it’s the way I make ends meet,” said Daniel, who also works as a self-employed gardener. “I would go to one house twice a week, three times a week to another, and every day to another.”
He explains that in the last house “the owners were Portuguese business owners who went away and left three dogs. I would go to a pet food store to pick up the food, feed the dogs, check around the house and that was it.”
Family friends of the owners have now taken charge of the dogs and Daniel no longer receives payment for taking care of them. “I don’t have an account in dollars, I was paid through a restaurant friend of the owners, who does have an offshore account,” he said.
To pay for caretakers from abroad, intermediaries are indispensable, since in Venezuela, whose currency has been made nearly worthless by the economic crisis, there is a de facto dollarization, without agreement from the U.S. authorities, who also use sanctions to block the transactions of government bodies.
Daniel is saving up to join one of the groups forming in Antímano, the working-class neighborhood where he lives in the southwest of the capital, to migrate as well. He said that “I didn’t leave a few weeks ago because I hadn’t sold my motorcycle yet, otherwise right now I would be in the Darien,” the dangerous jungle between Colombia and Panama that thousands of migrants cross every day.
A more successful caretaker is Arturo, who is in charge of two houses with large living rooms, corridors, yards, a swimming pool and parking area. He is paid a modest fee to care for and maintain the homes, but is authorized to rent them out for social gatherings and parties.
“In both cases the owners are people with good incomes, they left with their children to study abroad and plan to return in a few years if conditions in the country change. They would like to find their homes as they left them,” he said.
When he rents out the property for a day or a night, guests can use the yards, swimming pool and even awnings, tables and chairs. But Arturo closes off access to the more private parts of the house and hires assistants to watch out for damages or disturbances. “I live well, I keep up the houses and each one brings me about 3,000 dollars in profits per month,” Arturo said.
President Nicolás Maduro delivers a batch of houses in the northwestern state of Falcón, which form part of the 4.6 million homes that the government claims to have built and provided to Venezuelan families since 2013. The figure is questioned by organizations dedicated to monitoring economic and social rights. CREDIT: Minhvi
No empty houses in the shantytowns
In the shantytowns of the cities and towns of this country – which has a population of 33.7 million according to government figures and 28 million according to university studies – the situation is different and there are hardly any empty or unoccupied houses.
“In the shantytowns, no house is left empty. The very next day someone can invade it, occupy it, or take what is left inside by those who left, furniture or household goods. Someone stays in charge, the grandfather or in-laws, a trusted neighbor, or a relative is brought from the interior of the country,” explained Alejandra, from the Gramoven area.
She lives in a shantytown of informally constructed dwellings in the northwest of Caracas, similar to the ones that cover most of the many hills and hollows occupied by the capital’s most disadvantaged inhabitants.
“Many people leave, the young people emigrate, my children want to leave through the Darien jungle. But nobody leaves their house empty. If you do, you lose it,” Alejandra said.
In Santa Bárbara del Zulia, on the hot plains south of western Lake Maracaibo, “the situation is the same,” Julio, a bricklayer who migrated to Colombia for four years and has returned to care for his elderly parents, told IPS.
“You can’t leave your house alone in these towns,” said Julio. “When my parents went to Maracaibo and Caracas for medical treatment, they went and came back quickly, because the Community Council warned them not to leave their house empty for too long, because they would not be able to ward off people who wanted to occupy it.”
The Community Councils are committees set up by the government to represent and manage community affairs – such as the distribution of bags of subsidized food to poor families – and they channel decisions by the government.
“But people are leaving anyway. It’s something that won’t stop as long as people here earn only a pittance and can’t even eat properly (the minimum wage and official pensions in Venezuela are equivalent to four dollars a month). People care about their houses, but food has to come first,” said Julio.
View of a row of houses practically abandoned by most of their inhabitants in a town in eastern Venezuela. Migration from the countryside and small towns to large cities and oil producing areas marked the 20th century in Venezuela. And today, migration from this country mainly to other Latin American nations has become a regional crisis. CREDIT: VV
A matter for the government and the business community
While the plight of people leaving their homes continues to drag on, the government of President Nicolás Maduro announces more or less twice a year the construction of hundreds of thousands of new homes, in a program initiated by his late predecessor Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), called “Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission”.
According to official figures, since 2011, 4.6 million homes have been built and delivered by the Mission, mostly residential complexes to which the president goes to personally hand over the keys of one or more houses to their new inhabitants.
In accordance with the Mission, the occupants are tenants, not owners, so they cannot sell the homes. If they leave, the home can be reassigned to new tenants. To avoid this, those who choose to move to another city or country first look for relatives who can move into the house, and thus keep it.
However, the official figures on the number of homes built is not borne out by anecdotal evidence, to judge by the myriad of informal self-built houses still occupied in the slums, and by reports from business and civil society organizations.
The Chamber of Construction reports that the sector has decreased 96 percent in the last 10 years, and that its members employ 20,000 workers, down from 1.2 million in better times, while cement companies are working at 10 percent of their capacity and the steel industry at seven percent.
The civil society organization Provea, which specializes in the study of economic, social and cultural rights, has compared and contrasted the figures of the Housing Mission – which have not been audited, according to Provea – with independent studies, and reached the conclusion that the government has built and delivered only 130,856 housing units in 10 years.
In 1955 the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva (1908-1985) published his famous novel “Casas Muertas” (Dead Houses), describing the decline of Ortiz, a town in the central plains, caused by the loss of its population due to malaria and emigration to the big cities and oil production centers.
The flow of Venezuelan emigration in this century has not been enough to turn this into a country of dead houses. But its many closed doors bear witness to a collapse that has pushed millions of its inhabitants abroad, as do the small number of lights that are lit at night in the buildings of Caracas and other cities.
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jul 26 2021 (IPS) – Undoubtedly, the world needs to reform existing food systems to better serve humanity and sustainable development. But the United Nations World Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) must be consistent with UN-led multilateralism.
For the first time ever, the World Economic Forum (WEF), a partnership of some of the world’s most powerful corporations, is partnering the UN in launching the Summit, now scheduled for September, with its ‘Pre-Summit’ beginning today.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
Food insecurity is primarily due to inequalities and deprivations as victims lack the means to obtain the food they need. The UN should not serve those who cynically use hunger, starvation and deprivation to advance private commercial interests.
UN-led multilateralism threatened The collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and seemingly unchallenged US dominance in the 1990s posed new threats to UN-led multilateralism. The World Trade Organization was set up in 1995 outside the UN system. Later, ‘recalcitrant’ Secretary-General (SG) Boutros-Ghali was blocked from a second term.
The four UN Development Decades from the 1960s ended with the lofty, Secretariat-drafted Millennium Declaration, bypassing Member State involvement. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were then elaborated by the UN Development Programme with scant Member State consultation.
Growing corporate sway in the UN system got a big boost with the UN Global Compact. Such influences have affected governance of UN agencies, now better known as the World Health Organization struggles to contain the pandemic.
Difficult negotiations followed growing developing country disappointment with the MDGs, not delivering on climate finance as promised in 2009, and failure to better address the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath.
Hence, the negotiated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) compromise enjoys greater legitimacy than the MDGs. However, achieving Agenda 2030 was undermined from the outset as rich countries blocked needed funding at the third UN Financing for Development summit in mid-2015.
Summit bypasses UN processes In the last dozen years after the 2008 world food price spike, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has become an inclusive forum for civil society and corporate interests to debate how best to advance food security. Unsurprisingly, CFS has long addressed food systems.
CFS’s High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) is widely acknowledged as competent, having prepared balanced and comprehensive reports on matters of current and likely future concern. In the UN system, CFS is now seen as a ‘multistakeholder’ engagement model for emulation. Yet, the Summit bypassed CFS from the outset.
Nominally answering to the UNSG, Summit processes have been largely set by a small, largely unaccountable coterie. UNFSS organisers initially moved ahead without representative stakeholder participation until his intervention led to some consultative processes.
Mainly funded by the WEF and some major partners, they remain mindful of who pays the piper. Hence, they mainly promote supposedly ‘game-changing’, ‘scalable’ and investment-inducing solutions claiming to offer technological fixes.
Agroecology innovation An HLPE report has approvingly considered agroecology or ‘nature-based solutions’. Many scientists have been working with food producers for decades to increase food productivity, output, diversity and resilience through better agroecological practices, thus cutting costs and enhancing sustainability.
The evidence is unambiguous that agroecology has delivered far better results than ‘Green Revolution’ innovations. A survey of almost 300 large ecological agriculture projects in more than fifty poor countries reported rising farmer incomes due to lower costs and a 79% average productivity increase.
This contrasts with the record of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) launched in 2006. With funding from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, it promised to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farm households by 2020. Despite much government spending, yields hardly rose as rural poverty grew.
Agroecological innovations have proved effective against infestations. Thus, safer, more effective biopesticides that do not kill useful insects and microbes, and non-toxic alternatives to agrochemical pesticides have been created.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hosted its first International Agroecology Symposium in 2014, before committing to ‘Scaling Up Agroecology’. But for Kip Tom, President Trump’s representative, FAO was no longer “science-based”.
Demonising agroecology The Gates Foundation has been funding the Cornell Alliance for Science, ostensibly to “depolarize the GMO debates” by providing training in “advanced agricultural biotechnology communications”. Why traditional agricultural practices can’t transform African agriculture is only one instance of such sponsored propaganda masquerading as science.
Well-resourced lobbyists are using the UNFSS to secure support and legitimacy for commercial agendas. With abundant means, their advocacy routinely invokes ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘science, technology and innovation’ rhetoric.
Forced to be more inclusive, Summit organisers are now using ‘solution clusters’ for advocacy. They then build broad ‘multi-stakeholder’ coalitions to advance purported solutions with the UNFSS mark of approval.
With strong and growing evidence of agroecology’s progress and potential, propaganda against it has grown in recent years. Agroecology advocates are caricatured as ‘Luddite eco-imperialists’, ‘Keeping Africa on the Brink of Starvation’, and condemning farmers to ‘poverty, malnutrition and death’.
A public relations consultant has accused agroecology advocates of being “the face of a ‘green’ neocolonialism” “idealizing peasant labour and retrograde subsistence farming” and denying “the Green Revolution’s successes”.
Agroecology solutions are the main, if not only ones consistent with the UN’s overarching commitment to sustainable development. But the propagandists portray them as uninformed barriers to agricultural and social progress. Such deliberate deceptions block needed food system reforms.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri alerted UNFSS Special Envoy Agnes Kalibata that agroecology is being dismissed as backward when it should be central to the Summit. Concurrently President of AGRA, with its particular commitment to needed food system reform, she is in an impossible position.
Best Summit money can buy? Investing in the Summit is securing legitimacy and more resources from governments, the UN system, private philanthropy and others to further their commercial agendas. Meanwhile, many are working in good faith to make the most of the UN Summit.
Nevertheless, it is setting a dangerous precedent for the UN system. It has rashly opened a back door, allowing corporate-led ‘multi-stakeholderism’ to undermine well-tested, inclusive ‘multi-stakeholder’ arrangements developed over decades under multilateral Member State oversight.
UNFSS Science Days on 8 and 9 July indicated the Summit is being used to push for a new food science panel. This will undercut the HLPE, and ultimately, the CFS. Hence, the UNFSS seems like a Trojan Horse to advance particular corporate interests, inadvertently undermining what UN-led multilateralism has come to mean.
As both CFS and HLPE are successful UN institutions, the Summit will inevitably undermine its own achievements. Hence, for many Member States and civil society, UNFSS represents a step backward, rather than forward.
Map of countries with projected austerity cuts in 2021-2022, in terms of GDP, based on IMF fiscal projections. Credit: I. Ortiz and M. Cummins, 2021
NEW YORK and NAIROBI, Apr 15 2021 (IPS) – Last week Ministers of Finance met virtually at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to discuss policies to tackle the pandemic and socio-economic recovery.
But a global study just published by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, international trade unions and civil society organizations, sounds an alert of an emerging austerity shock: Most governments are imposing budget cuts, precisely at a time when their citizens and economies are in greater need of public support.
Analysis of IMF fiscal projections shows that budget cuts are expected in 154 countries this year, and as many as 159 countries in 2022. This means that 6.6 billion people or 85% of the global population will be living under austerity conditions by next year, a trend likely to continue at least until 2025.
The high levels of expenditures needed to cope with the pandemic have left governments with growing fiscal deficit and debt. However, rather than exploring financing options to provide direly-needed support for socio-economic recovery, governments—advised by the IMF, the G20 and others—are opting for austerity.
The post-pandemic fiscal shock appears to be far more intense than the one that followed the global financial and economic crisis a decade ago. The average expenditure contraction in 2021 is estimated at 3.3% of GDP, which is nearly double the size of the previous crisis. More than 40 governments are forecasted to spend less than the (already low) pre-pandemic levels, with budgets 12% smaller on average in 2021-22 than those in 2018-19 before COVID-19, including countries with high developmental needs like Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, Kiribati, Liberia, Libya, Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The dangers of early and overly aggressive austerity are clear from the past decade of adjustment. From 2010 to 2019, billions of people were affected by reduced pensions and social security benefits; by lower subsidies, including for food, agricultural inputs and fuel; by wage bill cuts and caps, which hampered the delivery of public services like education, health, social work, water and public transport; by the rationalization and narrow-targeting of social protection programs so that only the poorest populations received smaller and smaller benefits, while most people were excluded; and by less employment security for workers, as labor regulations were dismantled. Many governments also introduced regressive taxes, like consumption taxes, which further lowered disposable household income. In many countries, public services were downsized or privatized, including health. Austerity proved to be a deadly policy. The weak state of public health systems—overburdened, underfunded and understaffed from a decade of austerity—aggravated health inequalities and made populations more vulnerable to COVID-19.
Today, it is imperative to watch out for austerity measures with negative social outcomes. After COVID-19’s devastating impacts, austerity will only cause more unnecessary suffering and hardship.
Austerity is bad policy. There are, in fact, alternatives even in the poorest countries. Instead of slashing spending, governments can and must explore financing options to increase public budgets.
First, governments can increase tax revenues on wealth, property, and corporate income, including on the financial sector that remains generally untaxed. For example, Bolivia, Mongolia and Zambia are financing universal pensions, child benefits and other schemes from mining and gas taxes; Brazil introduced a tax on financial transactions to expand social protection coverage.
Second, more than sixty governments have successfully restructured/reduced their debt obligations to free up resources for development. Third, addressing illicit financial flows such as tax evasion and money laundering is a huge opportunity to generate revenue. Fourth, governments can simply decide to reprioritize their spending, away from low social impact investments areas like defense and bank/corporate bailouts; for example, Costa Rica and Thailand redirected military expenditures to public health.
Fifth, another financing option is to use accumulated fiscal and foreign reserves in Central Banks. Sixth, attract greater transfers/development assistance or concessional loans. A seventh option is to adopt more accommodative macroeconomic frameworks. And eighth, governments can formalize workers in the informal economy with good contracts and wages, which increases the contribution pool and expands social protection coverage.
Expenditure and financing decisions that affect the lives of millions of people cannot be taken behind closed doors at the Ministry of Finance. All options should be carefully examined in an inclusive national social dialogue with representatives from trade unions, employers, civil society organizations and other relevant stakeholders.
#EndAusterity is a global campaign to stop austerity measures that have negative social impacts. Since 2020, more than 500 organizations and academics from 87 countries have called on the IMF and Ministries of Finance to immediately stop austerity, and instead prioritize policies that advance gender justice, reduce inequality, and put people and planet first.
Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, former Director at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF Matthew Cummins is senior economist who has worked at UNDP, UNICEF and the World Bank.
Isabel Ortiz is Director of the Global Social Justice Program at Joseph Stiglitz’s Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, former Director at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, and senior official at the UN and at the Asian Development Bank.
Matthew Cummins is senior economist who has worked at UNDP, UNICEF and the World Bank.
WASHINGTON DC, Oct 11 2019 (IPS) – While this week Ministers of Finance and economists meet in Washington to confront global economic challenges at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings, the majority of the world population lives with austerity cuts and see their living standards deteriorating. World leaders must reverse this trend.
Isabel Ortiz
Since 2010, most governments in both high income and developing counties have been implementing austerity policies, cutting public expenditures. Surprisingly, this trend is expected to continue at least until 2024, according to a global study just published by the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, global trade unions and civil society organizations. Austerity has become “the new normal.”
Based on IMF fiscal projections, the study finds that a new fiscal adjustment shock will start in 2020. By 2021, government expenditures as a share of GDP will be declining in 130 countries, nearly three-fourths of which are in the developing world. The reach of austerity is staggering: nearly 6 billion persons will be affected by 2021.
How are governments cutting their budgets and implementing austerity reforms? In practice, the most commonly considered adjustment measures in 2018-19 include: pension and social security reforms (in 86 countries); cutting or capping the public sector wage bill, including the number and salaries of teachers, health workers and civil servants delivering public services (in 80 countries); labor flexibilization reforms (in 79 countries); reducing or eliminating subsidies (in 78 countries); rationalizing and/or further targeting social assistance or safety nets (in 77 countries); increasing regressive consumption taxes, such as sales and value added taxes (in 73 countries); strengthening public-private partnerships (PPPs) (in 60 countries); privatizing public assets/services (in 59 countries); and healthcare reforms (in 33 countries).
All of these measures have negative social impacts. As a result, in many countries older persons have lower pensions; there are not sufficient teachers, medical and care staff, and the quality of public services suffers; there are less jobs, and people work under more precarious conditions; prices increase while wages are stagnant; and the low and middle classes are squeezed and under pressure.
Matthew Cummins
In perspective, the macroeconomic and fiscal choices made by governments over the last decade are alarming. The G20 alone committed US$10 trillion to support the financial sector in response to the global financial crisis, and then passed the costs of adjustment to populations, with millions of people being pushed into poverty and lower living standards.
The worldwide drive toward austerity or fiscal consolidation can be expected to aggravate the growth and employment crisis and diminish public support at a time of high development needs, soaring inequalities and social discontent.
Austerity is also being used as a trojan horse to induce “Washington Consensus” policies to cut back on public policies and the welfare state. Once budgets are contracting, governments must look at policies that minimize the public sector and expand private sector delivery, including PPPs. There are clear winners and losers from this renewed Washington Consensus, and governments must effectively assess and question these policies.
Austerity and budget cuts do not need to be “the new normal.” There are alternatives, even in the poorest countries. Governments can find additional fiscal space to fund public services and development policies through at least eight options, which range from increasing progressive tax revenues, cracking down on illicit financial flows, improving debt management and using fiscal and foreign exchange reserves, to adopting more accommodative macroeconomic frameworks, reprioritizing public expenditures and -for lower income countries- lobbying for greater aid. All these options are endorsed by the United Nations and the international financial institutions.
It is time for world leaders to abandon the myopic scope of macroeconomic and fiscal policy decisions that benefit few and, instead, look for new fiscal space and financing opportunities to foster a robust global recovery and the achievement of long-term global prosperity for all.
