The wheat crisis exploded with the blockade of Ukrainian crops by the Russian fleet on the Black Sea threatens to starve millions of people. Alongside them, a host of billionaires have benefited even more from their wealth, despite the pandemic first and then the war. It is the paradox of the widening scissors, in the denunciation of the NGO Oxfam that arrives just as the World Economic Forum in Davos is starting.
“As consumer prices for food and energy goods soar and the spiral of extreme poverty threatens to engulf 1 million people every day and a half in 2022, the super rich who control large companies in the food and energy sectors they continue to grow their fortunes, which have increased by 453 billion dollars since the beginning of the pandemic, at the rate of 1 billion dollars every two days “, reconstructs Oxfam. “Billionaires in Davos will be able to toast to the incredible boost their fortunes have received thanks to the pandemic and rising food and energy prices – he commented in a statement. Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International – but at the same time decades of progress in the fight against extreme poverty risk being wasted with millions of people left without the means to simply survive “.
According to the reconstruction given by the organization “the pandemic has produced 573 new billionaires, one every 30 hours, while, this year, one million people every 33 hours could end up in conditions of extreme poverty, or 263 million”. On the one hand, the wealth of the Scrooge has grown in real terms more in two years of the pandemic than in the first 23 years of Forbes’ surveys: it now accounts for 13.9% of GDP compared to 4.4% in 2000. Concentrated wealth in the hands of little, the result for Bucher of “decades of liberalization and deregulation of finance and the labor market” that have led to a situation in which millions today do not have enough food or money to keep warm. In East Africa, a person is in danger of starvation every minute. We are facing a paradoxical, toxic inequality that risks breaking the bonds that hold our society together “.
The bottom line is that the 2,668 billionaires today (573 more than in 2020) have a net wealth of 12.7 trillion dollars, with a pandemic increase, in real terms, of 3.780 billion dollars. If you take the twenty highest Scrooge in the ranking, “they have assets that are worth more than the entire GDP of sub-Saharan Africa”.
Oxfam’s campaign therefore focuses on the two hot sectors of the moment: energy and food. Areas “characterized by situations of strong monopoly” in which companies “record record profits, while wages remain stagnant and workers are exposed to an exorbitant increase, compared to the last decades, in the cost of living. Five of the largest energy multinationals (BP, Shell, Total Energies, Exxon and Chevron) are making $ 2,600 in profit per second, “exemplifies Oxfam. And in the food sector, the NGO counts 62 new billionaires, cites the Cargill family that “controls 70% of the global agricultural market, and last year made the largest profit in its history ($ 5 billion in net profit), a record that could be broken in 2022 “.
While Sri Lanka is in the midst of a catastrophic crisis, Oxfam recalls (as the IMF has already done) that six out of ten low-income countries are in debt crisis. And in the dossier the pharma chapter is not missing: “Companies like Moderna and Pfizer have made $ 1,000 in profit per second thanks to the COVID-19 vaccine alone and, despite having used huge public resources for its development, they make governments pay doses up to 24 times more than the estimated cost of production, putting profits before protecting global health in a world where 87% of citizens in low-income countries have not yet completed the vaccination cycle “.
In light of these considerations, Oxfam details its requests:
- put an end toapartheid vaccination by suspending patents, promoting the sharing of know-how and technology on COVID-19 vaccinesinvesting in vaccine production centers in the global South, redistributing existing doses immediately and equally and keeping the donation promises made, according to an agreed schedule that allows the implementation of an effective vaccination campaign in low-income countries;
- reallocate, in favor of vulnerable countries, a generous share of special drawing rights (DSP), ensuring the usability without conditionality of these resources by the beneficiary countries, recognizing their concessionary nature and their additional character with respect to other financial commitments;
- introduce extraordinary taxes on pandemic extra-profits (and on the extra-profits of energy companies) to finance public transfers to families in difficulty; alongside similar solidarity interventions it must also be insured a serious rebalancing of tax burdens with a marked shift of the tax burden from labor income to capital incomestrengthened the redistributive function of tax systems and pursued compliance with the principle of horizontal equity.