A recent UN report fails to challenge global policies that are designed to channel the world’s wealth and resources to a tiny, obscenely wealthy minority
JUN 12 -
The whole world is now talking about economic growth. The global financial crisis initially opened space to recognise that economic systems were unfair and dangerous and were working for the wealthy at the expense of the poor. But now, governments and economists have gone back to business as usual. Enormous wealth inequalities are the biggest issue facing our world. Nepal, which is plagued by inefficiency, corruption and political infighting, is also keen to get a piece of the growth pie. It seems that this year, political parties are running election campaigns around economic prosperity and growth. This might sound good during speeches but whether growth can be achieved for all and equally shared is doubtful.
Is it possible for Nepal to go against the global trend and find a way to make economic growth fair, particularly for the poorest? Our political parties can’t form a government and rarely make policies without the influence of other governments, international agencies, banks or corporations. Our economy is largely dependent on external international forces including remittances sent by migrant workers, and so we must actively engage in global economic policy making and demand a fairer and just system.
Currently, most Nepali labourers make less in an entire year than Gina Reinhardt, one of the world’s wealthiest people, makes in a single second. Six people in the Walmart family own more wealth than the annual budget of Bangladesh’s government. One percent of the world’s population owns more wealth than the bottom 95 percent, and the global financial crisis has increased inequality even further.
Last Friday, a group of UN appointed ‘eminent persons’ presented UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with a report that could have provided bold and desperately needed solutions to shift these perverse wealth differences. It could have aimed to redistribute some of the world’s resources to promote dignity for the 40 percent of the people who exist on less than $2 per day. Instead, they presented a report that largely reinforces existing economic systems. The report recommends 12 laudable goals aspiring to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, incorporating sustainable development, governance and some human rights.
But what would these goals mean to women who are still working as bonded labourers in the households of feudal landlords as kamlaris, forced to tolerate all forms of abuse and give birth in their teenage years, stigmatised for being unwed mothers and thrown out of communities without food and shelter and forced to do things that they find degrading?
What would these goals mean to indigenous communities evicted from their lands to make way for more extractive industries, eroding their lands for generations? What would these goals mean to our migrant domestic workers who are denied wages, time off, personal space and subjected to harassment? And what do these goals mean for the obscenely rich who earn more in one second than those who have been “lifted out of extreme poverty” earn in an entire year?
The report fails to challenge the world’s biggest problem: global policies are designed to channel the world’s wealth, resources and power to a tiny, obscenely wealthy minority. The report aims to eradicate extreme poverty but continues to measure poverty at the obscenely low rate of $1.25 Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) per day. This amount measures how much could be purchased in the US with $1.25. The converted PPP is Rs 56. This is not a poverty rate; it is a starvation rate. No one can live with dignity on this amount, which includes being able to afford food, water, clothing, energy, health, education and other services.
Not surprisingly, there is good and bad in the report. For women’s rights movements, there is good news. A stand-alone gender goal was included as well as disaggregated indicators in other goals. Eliminating violence against women and ending child marriage are included as indicators and the panel has gone beyond previous commitments to recommend universal access to contraception. While these are significant, the report fails to fully recognise that women constitute the majority of the world’s poor, make up the majority of workers in the most vulnerable sectors—domestic workers, garment industry and subsistence farming—and suffer disproportionately from the climate disasters that they are least responsible for. Women need to have a genuine say over development, their bodies, their communities and global systems.
One of the most alarming parts of the report is the suggestion that the Decent Work agenda of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) (already agreed to by governments, employers and trade unions) is aiming too high for developing countries. While developed countries can aspire to Decent Work, developing countries can make do with good jobs. Good jobs are defined glibly as “fair pay and security”. We’re left wondering what fair pay might look like. Is it simply more than $1.25? The panel should have recommended a living wage calculation. But rather than aspire to really transform the lives of workers, the report promotes labour force flexibility and productivity and ignores the fact that wages have effectively decreased while profits have risen.
In Nepal, we know that landlessness is a more important measurement of poverty than income. But land-grabbing and forced evictions are increasingly making poor people landless. More than 80 million hectares of land have been grabbed by corporations and governments in the Global South, including Nepal, most of them in the past three years. The report proposes measuring security of land and includes businesses as one of those that currently lack security. Including business as a rights holder with people is very telling and shows that the concern for land is only over profit making, not livelihoods or rights.
Throughout the report, there are some laudable inclusions but little to ensure accountability of governments or the private sector to make change. The target of keeping global warming to less than two degrees Celsius is included but no targets for countries to cut carbon emissions. The report includes aspirations to reduce violence and increase peace but no targets to reduce military spending or measure militarism. It includes addressing tax evasion but doesn’t propose concrete ways to ensure accountability for the $32 trillion dollars in off-shore havens carefully guarded by the super rich.
In short, the authors of the report failed to utilise the opportunity to provide a new vision of a fairer, more sustainable world and instead hope to make the existing world a little more palatable to the 99 percent without rocking the yachts of the 1 percent. We, as one of the world’s least developed countries, must demand more. We must make sure our voices are heard internationally, that we no longer accept being governed by the wealthy, simply providing cheap labour and getting small pockets of aid. We want no less than human rights.
Rajbhandari is chair of the National Alliance of Women Human Rights Defenders, Nepal and Lappin is the regional coordinator of the Asia Pacific Forum on Women Law and Development.
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