Multinationals make obscene profits out of global crises — tax them to defend human rights

For many, it began with cancelling a doctor’s appointment, not buying clothes for their children, giving up on visiting relatives because of the cost of transportation, and paying only the most urgent bill. Quickly, they were forced to cut back on food, by reducing first quality and then quantity, and then even skipping meals. Even though they are working and receiving a salary, today they find themselves lining up at food banks to feed their children and themselves.

Everywhere, families are losing the inflation battle. Once their coping mechanisms are exhausted and nothing more can be dispensed, what remains are feelings of anguish, and lack of control. They no longer have a say in decisions affecting their lives, they are forced to depend on others resulting in a loss of dignity. This is, in fact, a violation of their human rights.

At the forefront of the victims of the cost-of-living crisis are, as always, the most vulnerable: children, women, the elderly, people with disabilities, minorities, and migrants. In England, for example, 2.2 million more people are forced this year to sacrifice expenses that are essential to their well-being.

The New Economics Foundation calculates that soaring costs weigh nine times more on the poorest people than on the richest 5% in proportion to their income. In the US, while 38% of white households say they are facing serious financial problems, among Latino families the proportion rises to 48%, with 55% for their black counterparts and peaks at 63% among Native Americans.

Worldwide, women — especially when also single parents — are the primary victims of the price spike, which the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in the US calls “she-flation”. And the impact on children is devastating: a recent report by Unicef and the World Bank calculates that, worldwide, three-quarters of households with children have experienced a drop in income since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In one in four households, adults have gone without food for days at a time to try to feed their children.

It is obviously in developing countries which are even more exposed because of the pandemic, the rise in interest rates on their debts, and the volatility of capital, that the situation is most worrying. In sub-Saharan Africa, at least 12% of the population is now acutely food insecure — i.e. when lack of access to adequate food puts a person’s life in immediate danger. And even in Brazil, a country that had been off the UN hunger map since 2014, 33 million people now have nothing to put on their plates.  

Let’s be clear: economic recovery, which is highly hypothetical, will not be enough. And it is just as obvious that the austerity programmes that several states are implementing will only make the situation worse by reducing the resources of public services that are already very fragile.