The disparity between the North and South — you could substitute as rich and poor countries — is reaching dangerous levels. The warning comes from Antonio Gutierrez, the UN Secretary General. This would sound poignantly true with regard to where Sri Lanka is placed at the moment.
The country is in billions of dollars of external debt, and has no means of paying back until agreement is reached with the International Monetary Fund. (IMF.)
But also poignantly there weren’t many countries Sri Lanka could rely on when financial trouble became stark reality. Fuel couldn’t be purchased when we were out of dollars, but other than the Indian credit line there was nothing forthcoming as assistance from any nation. People queued up in lines that were insanely long, and sometimes they waited days to get petrol and diesel.
Of course there was mismanagement at the level of the politician and the bureaucrat, and this has been stated by IMF officials among others. But that’s small consolation for the Sri Lankan people. The fact is that there are several other countries which are perilously close to meeting this fate, and among them are Pakistan for instance, and Nepal from this region. Elsewhere, in other continents, the picture is grim too. Many nations could ‘go under’ in abysmal conditions the global economy is experiencing.
“Humanity is facing a ‘perfect storm’ of crises that is widening inequality between the north and south”, the UN secretary general has warned. (British Guardian). The divide is not only “morally unacceptable” but dangerous, further threatening peace and security in a conflicted world, he has said.
DOMINOES
A perfect storm of crises because of the widening inequality between North and the South? Who would have guessed? This situation would have been on the cards for years now, but the Ukraine war and the threat of global recession etc. means that the world is perilously close to several crises as a result of this inequality between rich and poor, as has been flagged by the UN Secretary General.
The Guardian article further states:
The global food, energy and financial crises unleashed by the war in Ukraine have hit countries already reeling from the pandemic and the climate crisis, reversing what had been a growing convergence between developed and developing countries, António Guterres said.
“Inequalities are still growing inside countries, but they are now growing in a morally unacceptable way between north and south and this is creating a divide which can be very dangerous from the point of view of peace and security.”
That’s a direct quote from the Secretary General’s speech last week at the UN Ocean Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
Peace and security in the world is endangered. But as in Sri Lanka’s case, countries that have found themselves facing dire circumstances have had little or no recourse. Is this morally acceptable, as Gutierrez asks? The people of Sri Lanka and similar countries are facing calamity and of course while a phalanx of rulers are to be blamed certainly as in Sri Lanka’s case, the world should take cognisance at least when it comes to all of the countries that are poised to fall like dominoes after Sri Lanka became the first victim of debtand the post-Covid economic caterwaul that the world is now experiencing.
The Head of the World Food Organization has warned recently that several countries may face acute food shortages due to the dependency on wheat from Ukraine, which they no longer have access to, due to the outbreak of war.
Certainly a perfect storm seems to be brewing, as Mr. Antoni Gutierrez says. But it seems that the people of countries that are caught up in this storm have nowhere to turn to.
They may be governed by regimes that got them into unenviable straits, but even so as in the African countries that are dependent on wheat from Ukraine, or the string of South Asian countries poised to go under in the circumstances of the world economy, people are condemned it seems, to a life of suffering.
The debt picture is certainly not pretty at all, and as in the case of Sri Lanka the debt that has been incurred latterly, among other things, has been rollover debt which means it has been a case of debt being incurred to pay previous debts. This is a situation that the people of the country cannot be held responsible for.
The people didn’t ask for this kind of debt burden. All these factors have to be taken into consideration when attempts are made to assist nations such as ours to come to terms with the enormous crisis that we are facing.
The countries of the global ‘North’ are sometimes benefitting from the massive quantities of debt that nations such as Sri Lanka have got themselves into, be it through the missteps of rulers or otherwise. It’s not the writer of this article that’s saying it after all.
If the Secretary General of the United Nations says a perfect storm of crisis is being brewed due to the inequalities between countries of the global North and the global South, somebody ought to be listening.
Reprimands
But sometimes the people of this country and similar ones do not hear much other than reprimands from creditor countries, that seem to rap the rulers on the knuckles for what they have done. This is not a humane response in many ways because the people of Sri Lanka as well as other countries that face imminent economic calamity are only technically stakeholders of this vast quantity of debt incurred and so on.
They did not ask that such massive debt be incurred — so it seems unfair that they have to suffer the consequences of such debt. A Sunday newspaper reported that international communiques of IMF and other organisations on Sri Lanka come with the caveat that a package of assistance is being contemplated for the ‘people of Sri Lanka.’
It means that there seems to be little trust in politicians, which is of course understandable. But, as we know in Sri Lanka the process for IMF assistance is a long-winded one and the people are ill-equipped in the immediate term to face the calamities that are resulting from the current economic meltdown.
At least some of the inequalities that Antoni Gutierrez is talking about are structural and have nothing to do with how badly the regimes in certain countries have mismanaged things. If that was the case he would have said ‘the regimes of these countries in the global South are to blame.’ He doesn’t say that.
MISCALCULATIONS
He is talking about structural inequalities when he says that disparities between rich and poor nations are approaching dangerous levels and would endanger peace and security in the world. In Sri Lanka the people would sorely wish that the lending agencies. would take these structural inequalities into consideration while asking the regime to take the blame as well.
The exigencies of the Covid-hit economy did count, even though of course the then regime in particular and bureaucrats may have made some spectacular miscalculations and policy errors. In other words the global situation was skewed against countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and a host of others that observers predict would fall like a string of dominoes due to the global economic situation that shows no sign of stabilising just yet.
Should the rich countries, in the West, and in the East, China, Japan and all others that are far better off that the crisis hit countries of the South watch idly by as nations such as Sri Lanka suffer from the ‘perfect storm’ that Gutierrez warns is brewing as a result of inequality between rich and poor nations?
In other words this writer thinks friends such as China and Japan and in the West should all step in and help arrest this trend of human suffering in Sri Lanka. This is notwithstanding how rotten regimes here can be, and have been over the years. Our country needs help and the global inequality that Gutierrez talks of is one of the hindrances that’s keeping the long suffering people from getting it. Here is a sincere invitation to friendly nations named and not named above to come to our aid before it’s too late and more people die here in Sri Lanka.