Transcript (with light edits)

July 27, 2021

What we’ve been hearing from the panelists is how the global food system works right now. I want to emphasize that we indeed do have a global food system. It’s based on large multinational companies, private profits, and very low international transfers to help poor people (sometimes no transfers at all). It’s based on the extreme irresponsibility of powerful countries with regard to the environment. And it’s based on a radical denial of the economic rights of poor people, as we just heard. 

We’ve just heard from the Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Many point a finger of blame at the DRC and other poor countries for their poverty.  Yet we don’t seem to remember, or want to remember, that starting around 1870, King Leopold of Belgium created a slave colony in the Congo that lasted for around 40 years; and then the government of Belgium ran the colony for another 50 years. In 1961, after independence of the DRC, the CIA then assassinated the DRC’s first popular leader, Patrice Lumumba, and installed a US-backed dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, for roughly the next 30 years. And in recent years, Glencore and other multinational companies suck out the DRC’s cobalt without paying a level of royalties and taxes.  

We simply don’t reflect on the real history of the DRC and other poor countries struggling to escape from poverty. Instead, we point fingers at these countries and say, “What’s wrong with you?  Why don’t you govern yourselves properly?”

Yes, we have a global food system, but we need a different system. We cannot turn the global food system over to the private sector. We already did that about 100 years ago, and not only to the private sector, but to the private sector with the U.S. military behind it to defend these companies.  

We just heard from the Minister of Honduras.  Let us recall that United Fruit Company essentially ran his country for a long time. United Fruit’s attorney was US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and his brother Allen Dulles was the head of the CIA. On behalf of United Fruit Company, the two Dulles Brothers conspired to overthrow President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, next door to Honduras, in order to stop the land reforms that Árbenz was trying to implement.   

So, yes, we have a global food system, but we need a different system. That different system must be based on the principle of universal human dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the principle of national sovereignty in the UN Charter, and the economic rights in the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. In the Universal Declaration, all governments agreed that social protection is a human right, not merely a “nice thing,” or a pleasant thing, but a basic human right. That was 73 years ago. 

The Sustainable Development Goals are our generation’s pledge to honor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet I come from a country that not only doesn’t care about the world’s poor, it doesn’t even care about its own poor. One in seven Americans is hungry right now, but one political party cares about little more than cutting taxes for the rich and filibustering any real solutions to poverty.  

We’re in a world that’s really tough. The private sector is not going to solve this problem. I’m sorry to say this to all the private sector leaders here.  The key for the private sector is simply this: behave, pay your taxes, and follow the rules. That’s what businesses should do.  

What the governments should do is the following: 

First, the G20 should become the G21 by inviting the African Union to be the 21st member. The European Union is a member of the G20.  If we add the AU as the 21st member, making it the G21, we would add another 1.4 billion people to the G20 table.  

Second, we need an order-of-magnitude increase in development finance. According to the IMF, the rich countries have borrowed and spent around $17 trillion in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.  The poor countries have spent less than $2 trillion.  Rich countries can borrow on the capital markets at near-zero interest rates (or even negative rates for some countries in Europe). Yet the poor countries must pay 5% to 10% coupon rates, and many have no access to market borrowing at all.  

Covid-19 has exposed the grotesque inequality of access to market finance that poor countries face.  The US government spent roughly $7 trillion for emergency Covid-19 response with hardly any funds included for the rest of the world. It apparently didn’t cross the mind of the U.S. Congress to include even a few crumbs for the poorest of the poor of the world. 

The need for vastly more development financing is the message we should have just heard from the World Bank. Yet we didn’t hear that.  We didn’t hear any real numbers or financing solutions from the World Bank. 

The real financial needs of the developing countries in the coming decade are in trillions of dollars.  After all, the world economy is now at around $100 trillion a year of output.  Yet we don’t like to talk about the real financial needs of poor countries.  We need to massively increase the flow of development financing to the poor countries, and at near-zero interest rates like the rates paid by the rich countries.  With adequate financial flows to the poor countries, on adequate terms, we could get something done, including achieving the SDGs.  

By the way, in order to achieve universal coverage of Covid-19 vaccines in the coming months, what we really need is for the US Government to sit down with China, Russia, the European Union, and the United Kingdom to allocate the ongoing global monthly vaccine production in a fair and inclusive manner, rather than having a few rich countries hoard a disproportionate share of the vaccines (and then dispose of many vaccines when they hit their expiration date.) 

As a key outcome of the UN Food System Summit, we are going to have “national food system pathways.”  Such pathways are a wonderful idea, but the pathways are going to need adequate development financing. You want to increase access to electricity?  It will have to be financed. You want to promote access to digital services? This access will have to be financed.  You want to ensure access to safe water and irrigation?  It will have to be financed.  We need to link the SDGs – including universal access to healthy nutrition, safe water, green energy, and so on – with the requisite financing.  

The IMF has recently carried out some wonderful studies showing that the Low-Income Developing Countries (LIDCs) face an SDG financing gap of some $400 - $500 billion dollars a year.  Although the IMF has shown this gap, nobody has yet come up with a solution to close the financing gap. This wouldn’t be so hard to do, because $500 billion per year is not such a big number. It’s a mere 0.5% of annual world output.         If we really cared to find answers, we wouldn’t have the G7 promising to devote $3 billion to education, when UNESCO has shown that we need at least $30 billion dollars per year, minimum. But the rich-country governments don’t like to look at the real financial needs. They’d rather check the symbolic box that they’ve given some amount for education, even if it’s only a tenth of what is really needed.  We will need real financing, of the right order of magnitude, to back the national food system pathways. 

Third, we need the United Nations as the core and central institution of our world.  The only way we’re going to have a peaceful, civilized world is through a strong UN.  It’s absurd that the UN core budget is a mere $3 billion per year, when New York City’s budget is around $100 billion.  We chronically underfund the UN system and then ask, “Why don’t things work well?”  

The rich individuals are increasingly hoarding everything.  If the billionaires want to go to space, they could at least leave their money on Earth to solve the critical Earthbound problems.  We now have an estimated 2,775 billionaires with a combined net worth of around $13.1 trillion. I have it on good authority that you don’t need more than $1 billion to live comfortably.  Even if every billionaire kept $1 billion, that would leave around $10 trillion for ending hunger, poverty, and environmental destruction.  We should be taxing the vast and rapidly growing billionaire wealth to help finance a civilized world.