OPINION:While we fret about our livelihoods, in other parts of the world people's lives are at risk, JAMIE DRUMMOND.
ON THE eve of the G20 summit, governments across the world, including that of Ireland, continue to grapple with extraordinary economic challenges. We are living in a new age of anxiety. As citizens we are preoccupied by concerns about work, salaries, mortgages and pensions. Our future is uncertain. We feel trapped between a challenging present and an uncertain tomorrow.
However, elsewhere in the world the current economic turmoil means even more than a harsh impact on livelihoods – it means an actual attack on lives.
While across Europe the meaning of hardship is being rediscovered, the impact of the financial crisis is felt hardest in the developing world. As with climate change, the countries that have contributed least to today’s massive problems are feeling the worst effects. This is a great global injustice.
The figures are stark. The World Bank recently estimated that last year 130 to 155 million people were driven into poverty because of the food and fuel crises. Now, a further 50 million may be beaten back into extreme poverty by the financial crisis.
The global economic situation is hitting the poorest of the world hard, and also undoing the progress that has been made in the last decade.
Consider Africa: with the support of the international community, through debt cancellation and increasingly effective aid, African leaderships have helped put 34 million more children in school in the last seven years. In the last five years, two million more have been placed on lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs.
In the last two years, new therapies and 60 million bednets treated with insecticide have helped drastically reduce malarial death rates in a dozen countries, with rates halved in Rwanda and Ethiopia. The aid innovations which have delivered these results, championed by Irish NGOs and campaigners like Bono, are increasingly dubbed “smartaid” to differentiate from older, less effective aid systems.
The results of these developments have been real and tangible. Democracy has been spreading, economies blossoming, and poverty waning as investment has been drawn to the continent. At the recent International Monetary Fund conference in Tanzania – which I attended – eloquent and passionate African policymakers have been describing recent breakthroughs with justified pride, even as we now analyse how our own profligacy in the west threatens to engulf their progress. We cannot allow that injustice.
Helping the developing world helps us too. Our lives are more interconnected than many realise, and more trade coupled with less illegal migration offers us all a more stable, secure world.
We need to see the bigger picture, and realise that our response to the global economic crisis must consider the needs of the world’s poorest along with our own.
Inclusion is key. If involved, the developing world can help reboot the global economy, beat global poverty and solve global climate change. Our help is crucial, however, and one of the most important ways that we can help is by preserving aid programmes and resisting the urge to cut back hard.
We are in the midst of a global crisis. It demands a global response. As well as maintaining aid programmes – in which Ireland has been a global leader – the EU and the G20 must put the globalised nature of this crisis at the heart of their search for a solution when they meet in London next month.
There are three ways this can be done:
- Resourcing:Firstly, the G20 should recognise – and commit to – the importance of effective aid, the most powerful example of global multilateral co-operation. Supplemental aid resources could be mobilised through IMF gold sales, a new issue of Special Drawing Rights ( which Ireland might find useful ) a better use of the capital of the World Bank and African Development Bank, auctions of carbon emission certificates, a currency transaction tax, and other innovative means.
- Regulating:Secondly, the G20 must do more to enforce better regulation of offshore financial centres to curb the transfer of the proceeds of crime. The Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative is sending a strong signal that there is no safe haven for stolen assets, but it needs more support. The upgrade of OECD and UN efforts to curb non-compliant tax havens, to boost domestic tax revenue and inward investment to the developing world, is crucial.
- Reforming:Thirdly, the G20 must also accelerate reform of the IMF and the World Bank to reflect better the needs of the majority world. This might be perceived as a net loss of European influence, but smart aid can foster smart power. Embedding our ideals of justice and democracy into global institutions of governance will be the best long-term guarantor of our own interests, delivering a sustainable future and a secure prosperous world.
Global problems demand a global response. Vocal advocates and activists are needed to remind policy makers and governments of this fact. As EU and G20 leaders meet over the next few weeks in the build-up to the London G20 summit, it is imperative they put the poorest who are now on the periphery firmly at the heart of a global new deal.
Jamie Drummond is executive director of One. In 2002, he cofounded the advocacy organisation Data (debt, Aids, trade, Africa) with Bono, Bobby Shriver, nephew of the late president John F Kennedy and son of 1972 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sargent Shriver, and others. In 2004, he started One which merged four years later with Data. One campaigns against extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa.