By David Ransom
The people who brought you the financial meltdown have been pouring the molten remains into the same broken mould.
The latest G8 finished with a promise of $20 billion over three years for agriculture in the ‘developing’ world. That’s less than $7 a year for each of the estimated billion people (and counting) who are now malnourished – even supposing that the cash materializes, and that G8 promises don’t come as cheap as they are.
No G8 leaders – even ministers – bothered to turn up at a UN conference on the financial crisis in June. Rather, they went out of their way to rubbish it. That was partly because a UN Commission, chaired by the Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, dared to propose modest reforms, including some sort of UN Economic Council to oversee the IMF, World Bank and WTO – and a new international currency to replace the US dollar.
Despite talk of ‘recovery’, so far it relates to little more than the continuing flow of public funds into private banks (now via ‘quantitative easing’ – or printing money). They’re still not lending, least of all to each other. An unknown quantity of toxic debt remains. General Motors is bankrupt – floating, with the banks, on public funds. The Millennium Development Goals disappear over a distant horizon. Beyond even there the ‘targets’ for reduced carbon emissions are invisible to our current political system and therefore useless.