Covid-19 and 'Green New Deal' - II

The developing countries are not doing much different from the rest. There is no discussion to plan even reform and support packages that bail workers out on a large scale, and not the big businesses; a reform plan that revisits the economic model towards ensuring cleaner, sustainable and more equitable economic growth, similar to the 'New Deal', and more so the proposed 'Green New Deal'. Pakistan, like many developing countries, is also not much different; there are no plans to approach a 'Green New Deal', with the government still playing the role of a nanny state for big corporate players like banks, media, and the energy sector. It has little or no will to use the 'dependency' factor of these players on government to bail them out as an opportunity to go ahead with hard reforms.

In fact, there is no discussion on these lines; there's no mention of how to use the crisis caused by pandemic to deal with its underlying neoliberal and climate change causes. At the same time, the government primarily remains a nanny state to the big businesses, while lockdowns are being prematurely eased, on a very weak pretext -funds could be diverted away from bailouts of big businesses, lesser important development projects, and even through printing domestic currency. The government has little financial and institutional capacity to provide relief to the poor and vulnerable in lockdown, allowing in turn the argument of 'livelihoods over lives' to prevail.

Underscoring the need for governments everywhere to focus more on workers than bailing out big businesses with deep pockets as governments are favouring oil companies over those working towards renewable energy, or bailing out big banks rather than supporting ordinary debtors in repayments, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has highlighted that around 1.6 billion people - almost half of workers worldwide - will be affected by Covid-19, and who are in 'immediate danger of having their livelihoods destroyed'. Moreover, an article in the Guardian reporting on ILO's this briefing, indicated that "Of the total global working population of 3.3 billion, about 2 billion work in the 'informal economy', often on short-term contracts or self-employment, and suffered a 60% collapse in their wages in the first month of the crisis. Of these, 1.6 billion face losing their livelihoods...It shows I think in the starkest possible terms that the jobs employment crisis and all of its consequences is deepening by comparison with our estimates of three weeks ago," the UN agency's director general, Guy Ryder, has been quoted as telling a briefing, foreseeing a "massive" poverty impact'.

It may be pertinent to highlight, with regard to the immense cost of not coming forth with a 'Green New Deal', something which Monbiot highlights as follows: "The current crisis gives us a glimpse of how much we need to do to pull out of our disastrous trajectory. Despite the vast changes we have made in our lives, global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to reduce by only about 5.5% this year. A UN report shows that to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding 1.5C or more of global heating, we need to cut emissions by 7.6% per year for the next decade. In other words, the lockdown exposes the limits of individual action. Travelling less helps, but not enough. To make the necessary cuts we need structural change. This means an entirely new industrial policy, created and guided by government."

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic, after eruptions of multiple coronaviruses epidemics over almost two decades now, serves many lessons about the consistent failure of policy, markets, and the political mindset, including the utter lack of preparedness of countries across the development spectrum to deal with such a crisis as being faced currently. Naomi Klein, for example, once pointed out in an article 'There is nothing natural about Puerto Rico's disaster' she wrote back in 2018, which fits quite aptly for the way in which countries overall are struggling to deal with the pandemic in terms of lack of preparedness and due to wrong policy choices made under the neoliberal mindset. According to her, "when you systematically starve and neglect the very bones of a society, rendering it dysfunctional on a good day, that society has absolutely no capacity to weather a true crisis." The world can no longer postpone shunning Neoliberalism, and adopting a 'Green New Deal' that helps build societies in a meaningfully resilient and sustainable way, and in a way that works for all, and not just a tiny segment of elites.

(Concluded)

(The writer holds PhD in Economics from the University of Barcelona; he previously worked at International Monetary Fund)

He tweets@omerjaved7