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Ruhiira, Uganda, is one of the villages that served as a laboratory for Sachs’ theories about aid. (Photo: Guillaume Bonn)
Jeffrey Sachs is an American professor of Economics best known for his campaign to end global poverty. In one of his books, The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs argues that with proper planning and funding, extreme poverty can be eliminated from planet earth by 2025. If this is possible then who is stopping it from happening and why?
Sachs gave a very famous speech at the UN food systems pre-summit on July27, 2021. However, the global north media went silent and simply mentioned it in passing without divulging the details. Jeffrey Sachs was applauded for his honest account of the massive market failure of the privatized global food trading and commodity markets. The UN declared the Pre-Summit held in Rome as a People’s Summit which attracted delegates from more than 100 countries.
The silence by the global north media to tell the world how top world leaders, CIA and the World Bank conspire to destroy Africa was viewed by analysts as the western conspiracy to keep the rest of the world in hunger and poverty for their own profit gains. The independence of the western media was compromised and no longer serves the interests of all humanity.
Below is the full speech by Jeffrey Sachs.
Thank you very much, what we have been hearing is how the system actually works right now and I want to emphasize that we have a world food system, It is based on large multinational companies, it is based on private profits, it is based on a very very low measure of international transfers to help poor people sometimes none at all, it is based on extreme irresponsibility of powerful countries with regard to the environment and it is based on a radical denial of rights of poor people as we just heard, it is interesting, we ask we heard from the minister of DRC what is wrong with your country, well, we do not even start by saying the king of Belgium created a slave colony for 30 years.
The government of Belgium ran the slave colony for another 40 years, the CIA assassinated your first popular leader Mr Lumumba and then installed another dictatorship for the next 30 years; and then glencore and others now suck out your cobalt without giving you tax income. We do not reflect on that we say what is wrong with you? Why do not you govern properly? And so, we have a system but we need a different system.
We cannot turn this over to the private sector; we already did about a hundred years ago, not only to the private sector with the US military behind it. With the defence of these property rights in the minister of Honduras the country where united fruit ran the country for a long time and their attorney was the foreign minister of the United States, Secretary Dulles, and his brother was the head of the CIA and overthrew the next-door neighbour Mr. Arbenz to make sure that united fruit could have its property.
So, we have a system but we need a different system and the different system has to be based on principles of human dignity in the universal declaration, principles of sovereignty, principles of economic rights because these are not nice things to do. in 1948, all the government said that food is a right, social protection is a right not a nice thing, not a pleasant thing, a right that was 73 years ago. The SDGs are nothing more than our generations attempt to honour the universal declaration of human rights.
I come from a country that not only doesn’t care about its own poor one in seven Americans is hungry right now, and they do not care I mean the poor people care but not one political party, all it cares about is cutting taxes for the rich and filibustering any solution, so we are in a world that is really tough, the private sector is not going to solve this problem, I am sorry to say to all of the private sector leaders behave “pay your taxes, follow the rules, that is what you should do and what the government should do is the following, ….”
They won’t but they should. First the G20 should become the G21 by inviting systematically the chairperson of the African Union and the African Union to be the 21st country, the European Union is a member of the G20 as the EU if you add the AU as the 21st for the G21 you add 1.4 billion people to representation at that crucial event that will change decisively the discussion, because 1.4 billion people are not at the table for finance right now and they need to be. So, my first recommendation is the G21, I love the G20 add one seat 1.4 billion people with the AU represented.
Second, we need an order of magnitude change of development finance the rich countries just borrowed 17 trillion dollars for COVID. The poor countries, nothing. Because the rich countries can borrow at zero. And the poor countries pay five or ten percent coupon rates or have no access at all. So, the world exposed its grotesque inequality, this past year and a half, rich countries didn’t say we tighten our belts, why don’t you? My country spent seven trillion dollars of emergency funding, not one penny for anybody else by the way. Seven trillion, it didn’t even cross the imagination of the US congress to include a few crumbs for the rest of the world. But the poor countries cannot borrow that’s what we should have heard from the World Bank.
I didn’t hear that from the World Bank, I didn’t hear real numbers. Real numbers are in trillions right now, because the world economy is a hundred trillion a year. But we don’t talk about real numbers. But my job, all I know in this world is long division divide by a hundred trillion and then see whether you’re talking about something real or not. So, that’s the second thing we need massively to increase the lending and borrowing capacity of poor countries.
At near zero interest rates like the rich countries have, then they could get something done. By the way, for COVID vaccines what we really need is for the United States to sit down with China, with Russia, with the European union and the UK, one day around the table and allocate these vaccines, rather than hoarding them. That’s all it would take and then we’re going to have national pathways.
This is a wonderful idea, but they’re going to need financing and so everything that I’ve been saying. I know the numbers, that’s all I do for 40 years is add up what’s missing. You want electricity it has to be purchased. You want digital access; it has to be purchased. You want safe water irrigation; it has to be purchased. This is what I do for a living is add up these numbers and then find out that, then somebody makes up something and names one hundredth of what’s really needed.
It’s not even hard by the way, the IMF has done wonderful studies in the last two years showing that we have a financing gap of about 400 to 500 billion dollars a year for the basics for the SDGs. They showed the gap but they don’t. Nobody comes up with the number.
The solution which wouldn’t be so hard because that’s just not a big number, it’s point five of one percent of world output. So, if we really care we wouldn’t have the G7 saying we love education. Therefore, we are going to give three billion dollars for education, that’s what they said at the summit.
But what UNESCO has shown is that you need at least 30 billion dollars a year minimum, but nobody looks at numbers they just make up nice check the box. So, we need the real numbers of finance to back the national pathways.
The final thing is we need the UN as the core and central institution of this world, period. Because this is the only way we’re going to have a civilized world is a strong UN. And it cannot be that the whole UN budget, is less than my neighborhood’s budget in the New York.
The UN core budget this year is three billion dollars. New York city’s budget is a hundred billion dollars and then we say why don’t things work well because the rich are hoarding everything.
Final point rather than our three billionaires going in space well, they would go into space and stay there and leave their money behind that would be one idea. But another idea is we have 2 thousand, seven hundred, 75 billionaires on the current list. Their combined net worth 2700 is 13.1 trillion dollars. Now I have it on good authority. You don’t need more than a billion dollars to be comfortable
But they have an excess of 11 trillion dollars over just the 1 billion. So, we should be taxing that and having a civilized world.
THANK YOU, JEFFREY Sachs!
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