HEALTH & WEALTH: HOW DO WE RESPOND TO THE EFFECTS OF RESTRICTIONS AND LOCKDOWN? There is good news and bad news. We can rejoice that the biggest lift out of poverty in the history of mankind has happened in our generation. Since 1990 more than a billion people have risen out of extreme poverty, and a large part of these in China and India, not through aid but trade, not by handouts or charity. Growing small and medium size businesses are key factors to this good news. The bad news is that due to the corona virus, restrictions and lockdown measures, we risk a major global setback. United Nations, World Food Program, International Labor Organization, International Food Policy Research Institute, Business Sweden, and others are painting horrifying scenarios on a macroscale: Around 50 million children could fall into extreme poverty. Hundreds of millions of jobs may be lost. 260 million face starvation, and three dozen countries risk famine. 2.7 billion workers are affected by the lockdown measures. Most vulnerable are people in the informal sector, and in India alone 400 million workers now face greater impoverishment. 50 – 70 percent of the population in 20 countries in Africa will run out of money and food after a 14-day quarantine. When sales in clothes retailers like H&M went down around the globe, two million workers in the garment industry in Bangladesh lost their jobs. Their fate is similar to a message I received from a friend in Myanmar: “What this (lockdown) has meant for poor people, who are part of the informal economy, is no work, no money and therefore no food. There is no government social security net and certainly no savings.” It may be, as the Stanford professor and Nobel Prize winner Michael Levitt recently stated, “When we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor.” 1 In the face of these grim predictions, there is more good news! People and nations have fought pandemics before, risen out of abysmal poverty and conquered dreadful diseases. So, what can we learn? |
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