Poverty, Human Rights and the Global Economic Crisis: What Should Civil Society Be Doing?

We are in the midst of a systemic crisis that touches every aspect of human existence and creates, as usual, more damage to the poor and vulnerable than to others, particularly in the global South. When we say “systemic”, let’s try to visualise the crisis in concentric circles starting with the biggest circle of all, the biosphere and the planet. Here, climate change is taking place much faster than the UN experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC imagined even two years ago.

We already know the impacts of climate change will hit the South far harder than the North; for one thing, food production will fall. Access to water will be even further diminished. If women are already walking, say, 10 km a day to reach the nearest well, what happens when they must walk fifteen or twenty? There are limits to the conditions of life that can be borne and that means huge numbers of people are going to migrate because they have no choice. Diseases are going to spread further and faster, affecting the South of course but also people like us. Devastation of species which are our life-support systems is proceeding at a rate which scientists tell us is about 1000 times the normal background rate of species extinction.

Personal safety and health, access to food, water and medicine, geopolitical and strategic balance, social cohesion and peace itself are threatened by collapse of ecological systems strained to the breaking point. And please let’s stop talking about “future generations”. With accelerating climate change, we are talking about our own generation, there here and now. That’s the first circle, the planetary one

Let me move now to the next concentric circle, that of the international institutions that have the most influence on the fate of billions, institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation etc to which we should now add the G-20.  The most astonishing aspect of this international system is that not a single one of these formal or informal institutions foresaw the crisis, or if they did, they didn’t tell the rest of us.  But have the international institutions proposed any real solutions? Not at all. Unfortunately the G-20 decided to give a flood of fresh cash, $750 billion to the IMF where as we know, the South has very little power and the US has the votes to veto the most important decisions. The IMF along with its partner the World Bank is famous for its structural adjustment policies imposed for decades on poor countries. While we have not been told whether the IMF will be imposing the same conditions as before, we do know that the World Bank continues to insist on liberalisation and privatisation. Once more, the people least responsible for the crisis and least able to cope with its effects are going to be most affected.

The G-20 also placed much emphasis on resuming world trade, but civil society experts have proven that the Doha Round is not a “Development” round as it is touted to be but is in fact grossly unfair to developing countries. If they cut their tariffs in line with the most recent WTO negotiations, the poorest countries will lose twenty percent or more of their revenues which they get from tariff income because they can’t or won’t tax their wealthier citizens. Thus a conclusion of the Doha Round would be a threat to already meagre amounts spent on health and education.

Even worse are the Economic Partnership Agreements that Europe in particular is forcing on many poor countries, particularly the 78 ACPs, African, Caribbean and Pacific nations, many of which are among the poorest in the world. Trade agreements now concern far more than trade—they aim for deregulation of so-called “Behind Borders Barriers” and demand freedom of investment and freedom to bid for government procurement contracts. As soon as our transnational corporations are free to invest where and what they please, they quickly swallow local businesses along with thousands of jobs. As soon as our banks take over, they do not loan to small farmers and local entrepreneurs. In addition, developing countries are especially threatened by our trade rules on intellectual property rights (TRIPS).

In your daily work, you are probably most concerned with the innermost national and local concentric circles, for example the food riots in over thirty countries in the spring of last year when prices for basic staple foods doubled or tripled. Tens of millions of people were suddenly plunged back into hunger and extreme poverty. Although weather events played a part, the dizzying price increases were due mostly to two causes: a huge expansion of agro-fuel crops allocated to feeding cars, not people, and above all speculation on commodities.  When the subprime crisis scared investors out of the property-and mortgage-based securities markets, they flooded the markets for contracts in wheat, corn and soya as well as other raw materials like petroleum. Since these markets are almost totally unregulated, it was no surprise that billions in bets were placed in food contracts, so at one point, the price of wheat increased by 31 percent in a single day.

Because structural adjustment policies had also forced the poor indebted countries to concentrate on export crops and because major funders like the World Bank had drastically reduced their support for local agriculture, it was no surprise either that millions of poor people were suddenly obliged to buy food at inflated world market prices. Last year was the first time in history that food riots took place simultaneously throughout the world. They were also urban riots or at least urban periphery riots—many of the rioters were undoubtedly former farmers who had lost their land or failed because of dumping of agricultural goods from rich countries like the EU, the US and perhaps Canada. This is the national or local concentric circle and we can expect more of these unprecedented events as poor people in poor countries become more enmeshed in a globalisation over which they have no control.

Other things could be done in the rich countries that could considerably improve the lot of the poor in poor countries. For example, it is scandalous that ten years after the G-8 first promised that it would finally take debt cancellation seriously, this has still not happened. Sub-Saharan Africa is still paying back $19 billion a year on its official debt, which comes to about $33,000 every minute in debt service. You could save a lot of lives, grow food for a lot of people and educate a lot of children with $33,000 a minute.

Meanwhile, two researchers from the University of Massachusetts have shown that over a 35 year period, Sub-Saharan African elites have transferred $420 billion to Northern tax havens; much of this money came from loans and sixty percent of those loans left Sub-Saharan countries for private accounts the same year they arrived. With interest, the funds illegally transferred comes to over $600 billion not invested in the real needs of Africans. The loans, however, remain on the books as if they had actually been used in Africa, which is to say that poor people have been doubly robbed and are paying back non-existent debts with their sweat and tears.

But the North also has much to gain from acting immediately to prevent runaway, catastrophic warming. We in the North should offer debt cancellation in exchange for forest protection, reforestation and biodiversity conservation. We should also ask for more investment in local peasant agriculture to encourage food sovereignty. Northern countries have to stop dumping subsidised food on foreign markets which ruins local farmers. The funds freed by debt cancellation should be monitored closely by independent auditors so that more cash does not flow to our tax havens.

The best suggestion I can make to civil society organisations is to make alliances. Even if you don’t agree on every single word of someone else’s mission statement or programme, there are a great many constituencies in Canada and elsewhere who would like nothing better than to eradicate poverty and make sure that the rights of individuals, families and the environment are respected.  It seems increasing clear that single issue organisations can no longer win by themselves, at least not on the big issues. By that I mean that environmentalists by themselves can’t win the battle against ecological destruction; trade unionists by themselves can’t win on decent work for all, small farmers alone can’t prevent agribusiness takeover or the invasion of GMOs, women by themselves can’t ensure gender equality and so on.

Development–oriented organisations can’t win their fight alone either. We all need each other and on the whole, we agree on the basics. But we don’t necessarily have the same culture and it may take a bit of time and effort to get used to working together. Let’s make that conscious effort to build strong coalitions so that no government can resist. But look at it this way; we are already the majority, we have the numbers on our side, we have the will, the intelligence and we have the ideas. What we still lack is the organisation to make sure our ideas become policy; that our will and intelligence are put to best use.

Excerpt from the presentation by Susan George at the Canadian Council for International Cooperation Annual General Meeting in Ottawa, May 22, 2009.  Susan George is Fellow and President of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and the honorary president of ATTAC France (Association for Taxation of Financial Transaction to Aid Citizens).  She is the author of fourteen widely translated books including How the Other Half-Dies: The Real Reason for World Hunger and Another World is Possible If….