In gioco c’è parecchio più che non le banche
● Mentre a Londra, Washington e Parigi si discute sui bonus in alcune aeree di Africa, Sud Asia ed America Latina la lotta è per il cibo (Robert Zoellick, presidente Banca Mondiale BM).
● Stime BM: in tutto il 2009 la crisi farà morire altri 22 bambini all’ora (nel caso migliore), ma è possibile che siano in totale 400mila in più, vale a dire un bambino in più ogni 79 secondi.
● Le società finanziarie internazionali avrebbero già ricevuto (o ricevuto la promessa per) $8 400 MD di aiuti; una sola settimana di interessi su questa cifra basterebbe a salvare la maggior parte delle donne che muoiono per parto ogni anno nei paesi poveri (stime Oxfam).
● Le 500 persone più ricche del mondo hanno guadagnato più delle 416 mn. più povere; le prime, pur avendo la loro parte di responsabilità per la crisi economica, se la caveranno solo con una multa, mentre le seconde, che non hanno alcuna responsabilità della crisi, ne soffriranno le peggiori conseguenze.
● Conclusioni NYT: il prezzo maggiore per l’incompetenza lo pagano i più poveri del mondo. Mentre il Giappone ha tratto lezioni dal “decennio perso”, gran parte dell’Europa non ha imparato dal passato, è titubante sugli stimoli statali … solo la GB fa eccezione avviando la nazionalizzazione di banche.
Dati ONU: in alcuni paesi la mortalità infantile durante una crisi economica è 5 volte maggiore per le femmine, perché i genitori tolgono loro il cibo per cercare di far vivere i figli maschi.
– As world leaders gather in London for the Group of 20 summit meeting, the most wrenching statistic is this: According to World Bank estimates, the global economic crisis will cause an additional 22 children to die per hour, throughout all of 2009.
– And that’s the best-case scenario. The World Bank says it’s possible the toll will be twice that: an additional 400,000 child deaths, or an extra child dying every 79 seconds.
– “In London, Washington and Paris, people talk of bonuses or no bonuses,” Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, said this week. “In parts of Africa, South Asia and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food.”
– That’s what makes the G-20 summit — and Europe’s penchant for sniping at the United States instead of doing more to resolve the mess — so frustrating. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is obstinately resisting a coordinated global stimulus package, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France threatened to walk out if he didn’t get his way and the Czech leader threw a tantrum.
For Americans like me who deeply believe in multilateralism, all this is enormously disappointing and makes us doubt Europe’s seriousness.
Granted, there are some exceptions here. The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has a steady hand on his economy and has pioneered approaches to bank nationalization that we could learn from. But much of Europe seems paralyzed.
– Japan’s prime minister, Taro Aso, drew on the lessons of Japan’s “lost decade” to scold Germany in an interview with The Financial Times for its dithering about a stimulus. When a Japanese prime minister scolds you for passivity, you know you’re practically a zombie.
– As usual, the greatest price for incompetence at the summit will be borne by the poorest people in the world — who aren’t represented there and who never approved any bad loans.
I’m just back from Haiti and the Dominican Republic where I saw the impact of the crisis firsthand. In the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil, ravenous children tore at some corncobs that my guide had brought; it was their first food that day.
In a slum hospital, where admissions for malnutrition have doubled since September, I met a woman who used to sell shoes on the street. Shoe sales dropped with the sagging economy, so the woman was forced to use her sales revenue to buy food for her child instead of to replace inventory. Now she has no more merchandise to sell, no food to eat and the child she cradled was half dead with starvation.
Ann Veneman, the executive director of Unicef, says that reports coming in from the field suggest that malnutrition rates are rising.
“If you have prolonged malnutrition in kids, it will have a long-term impact on cognitive abilities,” she said. “It impacts your ability to learn in school and to earn as an adult.”
– Impoverished parents in developing countries often try to keep their sons alive in famines by taking food from their daughters, so mortality is disproportionately female. The United Nations Development Program says that in some countries, the increase in child mortality during an economic downturn is five times higher for girls than for boys.
One of the most preposterous ideas floating about is that the world’s poor feel “entitled” to assistance. Entitled?
Wall Street plutocrats display a sense of entitlement when they demand billions for bailouts. But whether at home or abroad, the poor typically suffer invisibly and silently.
– Oxfam has calculated that financial firms around the world have already received or been promised $8.4 trillion in bailouts. Just a week’s worth of interest on that sum while it’s waiting to be deployed would be enough to save most of the half-million women who die in childbirth each year in poor countries.
– The 500 richest people in the world, according to a U.N. calculation a few years ago, earned more than the 416 million poorest people. It’s worth bearing in mind that the first group bears a measure of responsibility for the global economic mess but will get by just fine, while the latter group has no responsibility and will suffer the worst consequences.
If the G-20 leaders want to address these needs, there are many ways they can do so with negligible sums. Mr. Zoellick at the World Bank is pushing a trade support program to help developing countries sustain their trade. Muhammad Yunus, the microfinance pioneer who won the Nobel Peace Prize, urges the G-20 leaders to create a fund to invest in organizations that offer small loans or otherwise bolster commerce in poor countries.
So what will it be? More squabbling and recalcitrance, or something constructive for those whose lives are at stake in this downturn?