The year 2021: hopes, despairs and optimism

Anis-Chowdhury

Anis Chowdhury

After living 2020 dangerously, 2021 began with hopes. In the US, Trump and Trumpists assault on democracy seem buried with Biden-Harris victory. Biden’s declaration, “The US is Back” to return to the World Health Organization (WHO); to the Paris Agreement; to support developing countries’ proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily suspend Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to enable affordable access to COVID-19 vaccines, and his administration’s proposal for a global minimum corporate tax rate – understandably generated the hope in the US leadership and for a genuine multilateralism in addressing global issues.

Then there was the big news of COVID vaccines finally to end the pandemic that affected over 100 million people and caused nearly half a million deaths globally during the year. The “debt-Hawkes” were proven wrong about their warning of an “impending” debt crisis despite any meaningful debt relief from the G20 countries, in particular rich nations and private creditors. Thus, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was upbeat about global economic recovery with the defeat of the pandemic, even though it was warning of a “dangerous” divergence between the rich and poor worlds, with developing countries falling further behind.

Alas, soon despairs replaced hopes as global leadership failed miserably – “a catastrophic moral failure” in the words of Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesusthe, the WHO Director-General. In the first six months of 2021, the officially recorded global COVID-19 death toll rose by about 50% and is now over 5 million, and The Economist estimates that the actual death toll is several times higher. Vaccine and health apartheid ensured that COVID-19 turns into a developing country pandemic with developing countries accounting for more than 80% of the global COVID deaths. The divergence is a consequence of wide disparities in vaccination rates (which the IMF calls “the great vaccine divide”) and policy support – with severely fiscally constrained developing countries, exacerbated by the lack of adequate debt relief, cuts in aid and falls in revenues. As of the end of October 2021, among rich countries, about 65% of the population was fully vaccinated, and booster shots were available in many of them. By contrast, the vaccination rate was less than 2% among low-income countries.

Yet, the rich countries (EU in particular) are still blocking the temporary WTO TRIPS waiver, enabling the virus to mutate freely and Big Pharma to make obnoxious amount of profit, instead of enabling developing countries to produce and affordably access vaccines, drugs and other COVID tools. The creator of polio vaccine Jonas Salk’s famous reply to who owns its patent, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” was certainly from a different world.

A new cold war is undermining multilateralism and cooperation among nations to tackle global challenges and injustices, including the rise of ethno-centric extreme right. In contrast, at the height of the old cold war, an unprecedented cooperation between the US and Soviet Union succeeded to defeat small pox, a leading cause of deaths and blindness For the wealthiest people on the planet, 2021 was a year of enormous gains as the collective fortune of the world’s 500 richest people increased by more than $US1 trillion even as the COVID-19 pandemic roiled the globe for a second year. The enormous fortunes amassed by the 0.001% also underscored how the uneven recovery from the economic shock of COVID-19 has become more entrenched. As the very richest benefited, the pandemic pushed as many as 150 million people into extreme poverty, according to World Bank estimates, a number that stands to increase if governments react to debt Hawkes and inflation bogey by tightening fiscal and monetary measures.

While we saw when COVID-19 first hit, low-income and disadvantaged people were disproportionately impacted and at highest risk, the conservative, “business friendly” Prime Minister of Australia asserts about rapid antigen tests, “you can’t just make everything free” in a deep and callous misunderstanding of people’s bank balances, how the COVID-19 disease moves through families and communities. He reiterates, he won’t “undercut business” by providing free rapid antigen tests, shamelessly prioritising profit over people.

Alas, this blind faith in the free market has led us into a dangerous and precarious situation. Meanwhile, we are seeing price gouging of tests and other tools by businesses who are making sizable profits from those who can afford them. This is why medical essentials should not be left to the free market. We need governments to source, regulate and distribute them. Being healthy and safe should not be dependent on one’s bank balance or postcode.

People should not be punished for being poor. Yet at the moment their lives and the lives of their loved ones are put at risk. 

Governments around the world missed the opportunity to use the pandemic to redesign economies by coordinating fiscal and monetary measures for green transformation, and to re-generate rural and regional economies away from urban-centric development. 

Instead, it is business as usual; you hear “economists” (e.g., Ken Henry, former Treasury Secretary of Australia) supporting more tax cuts as well as more labour market “flexibility”.

Some other leading economists are scaring policymakers with inflation and debt bogey. They see wage gains by workers as a leading source of inflation while ignore fattening profit and mark-ups or price gouging by colluding businesses. The G7 rich nations could only agree on a less ambitious global minimum corporate tax rate of 15% and a distribution formula that favours the rich countries as acknowledged even by The Economist (12 June 2021) while experts called for at least 25% and a fairer distribution formula.

The IMF’s call for US$50 billion to vaccinate the world fell on deaf ears, while new COVID variants are spreading like a wild-fire. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson spent billions for a few minutes joyride in space in vulgar display of wealth, and causing a lifetime’s worth of emissions for the world’s poorest, which perfectly encapsulates the unequal distribution of between those who cause climate damage and those who suffer from it.

Rich countries failed to fulfil their aid commitment made more than half a century ago as well as the decade old promise of US$100 billion a year for climate finance; Australia and UK cut their aid budget; the US and EU refused to fund “loss and damage” caused by climate change in poor vulnerable countries which played no role in climate change. The Glasgow climate Summit has failed to deliver urgently needed “net reduction” of greenhouse gasses, vaguely and misleadingly promising to achieve “net zero”, with an unblemished faith in the market mechanism.

The list of injustices grows; and governments around the world are introducing draconian laws to restrict protests and to avoid democratic accountability, while sadly the government in the largest democracy is openly encouraging ethnic cleansing, and politicians in the democratic West are thriving on anti-migrant backlash.

Nevertheless, I do not want to end this year in review entirely with pessimistic notes.

Following Newton’s third law, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”, I believe every injustice will create a force to demand justice. 

Thus, we see some rays of hope – Chile has recently defeated fear to elect a millennial socialist President; earlier Peru elected a progressive teacher President; in November, the people of Honduras elected leftist Xiomara Castro as their first female president rupturing with the country’s recent right-wing – even fascist past installed by the US; two years ago in Argentina, the moderate-left Peronist candidate, Alberto Fernandez, ousted the market-friendly incumbent, Mauricio Macri, whose austerity measures triggered an economic crisis; in October 2020, Bolivia returned the Movement Toward Socialism to power in the first presidential election since Evo Morales was ousted in a US engineered right-wing coup. Even though bickering among the progressives in Ecuador was a setback, the region’s left has been showing signs of revival, while Venezuela’s regime survives despite unilateral illegal sanctions by the US and its allies, and hope rises in Colombia for a socialist victory in next year’s election following massive protests against a proposed regressive tax reform, tragically ending the lives of more than 50 protesters and injuring thousands; however, forcing the government to revoke the tax reform bill.

Let us hope that the progressive tide in Latin America crosses it’s both Pacific and Atlantic shores to reach elsewhere.

I end the year in review with my homage to Desmond Tutu, the world’s moral conscience, an uncompromising foe of apartheid, and an advocate of human dignity, and an inspiration for all those struggling to establish exploitation free societies and a just world order.

Anis (Anisuzzaman) Chowdhury is the Co-editor, Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy and 

Adjunct Professor, School of Business, Western Sydney University.