杰弗里·萨克斯 西方奴役非洲几百年 指责非洲失败

 

2021年7月27日 （有少量修改，文章仅代表作者本人观点）

Speech at the U.N. Food Systems Pre-Summit

https://www.jeffsachs.org/recorded-lectures/5jf86pp5lxch35e6z3nct6xnmb8zy5

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.  

杰弗里·萨克斯：西方奴役非洲几百年，还指责非洲发展失败

 杰弗里·萨克斯美国哥伦比亚大学教授 2022-01-13

【文/杰弗里·萨克斯 译/观察者网 宁栎】

今天，很多人指责刚果民主共和国这些非洲国家的贫穷。但是需要记住，从19世纪70年代开始，比利时国王利奥波德在刚果建立了殖民地，搞奴隶制。刚果被比利时国王奴役了40年，接着被比利时政府控制50年。二战后，刚果独立了，中情局就暗杀了受欢迎的领导人卢蒙巴，把独裁者蒙博托扶上台。蒙博托统治了30多年。嘉能可等跨国公司用很少的费用，就在刚果大肆掠取钴资源。

比利时殖民者在刚果用砍手等酷刑强迫刚果人劳动。(来源：ANTI-SLAVERY INTERNATIONAL)

这样，我们怎么能把问题归结于刚果自身呢？我们要改变做法，不能把刚果交给私人企业。

一百年前我们就是那样干的，让美国军事力量支持的私企到处掠夺，包括联合果品公司之类。联合果品公司的法律顾问是美国国务卿约翰·杜勒斯，他的兄弟艾伦·杜勒斯当中情局长，两人办公室就在隔壁。为了保证联合果品公司的利益，他们两人策动美国政府推翻了危地马拉政府。

现在我们需要改变。新的体制必须建立在人类尊严原则上，必须符合联合国人权宣言，符合主权原则，尊重经济权利。1948年，各国在联合国同意获得食品是基本权利、社会保障也是基本权利。

73年过去了，我们这一代人要达到可持续发展目标，履行对联合国人权宣言的承诺。

美国不关心世界的穷人，甚至不关心本国的穷人。七分之一的美国人现在挨饿，穷人在受苦。但是共和党只关心为富人减税，并阻挠任何真正的减贫方案。

这个世界现在很糟糕，私企不能解决问题。私企应该交税、遵守规定，而政府应该做更多。现在政府不想做，但它们应该做。

第一，20国集团应该邀请非盟加入，应该变成21国集团。欧盟是20国集团成员，所以非盟也应该加入，这样就能增加14亿人来共同解决问题。这将能改变讨论机制。

第二，大规模增加开发融资。根据IMF数据，富裕国家为新冠疫情融资并花掉了17万亿美元，而穷国花费很少。因为富国能在资本市场上用零利率融资，而穷国的融资利率高达5%至10%，甚至根本借不到。

这种不平衡很荒唐。过去一年，一半富国从来没有说要紧缩。美国花了7万亿美元紧急资金，其中没有一毛钱是帮助其他国家的。美国国会从来没有考虑帮助其他国家的穷人。穷国借不到钱，世行应该有所行动，但什么也没有做。

富国能以零利率融资，穷国也应该能，我们应该增加融资规模。要是有充裕资金，穷国就能做点什么。在疫苗问题上，美国应该和中国、俄罗斯、欧盟、英国合作，分配而不是囤积疫苗。我们制定了联合国国家粮食系统途径，但这些都要用钱。用电要花钱，网络要花钱，供水也要花钱。IMF过去2年的研究表明，要达到可持续发展目标，目前融资缺口高达每年4千亿到5千亿美元。IMF提出了缺口，但没有融资方案。这并不难做到，这个数字其实只占全球总产出的大约0.5%到1%。

如果我们真的重视教育，七国集团就不会只承诺花30亿美元用于教育。联合国教科文组织已经表明，每年至少需要300亿美元。但发达国家不在乎，他们只是假装投资了教育。我们需要投入巨资，来支持联合国国家粮食系统这一路径的发展。

第三，联合国应该作为世界的核心和中心机制。要促进世界和平和文明，就需要促进联合国的强大。但是联合国的基本预算只有每年30亿美元，远少于邻近的纽约市的每年1千亿美元。有人经常问怎么联合国没干成事情，问题就在于资金不足。

最后，富人占有了太多资源。现在富人纷纷飞上太空，要是富人留在太空不回来，把钱留在地球，那会好很多。现在估计资产亿万的富翁有2775位，总资产约13.1万亿美元。一个人有10亿美元就能生活得很舒适了，要是他们每个人留给自己10亿美元，那还有11万亿美元能用于发展。我们应该对富人征税，让世界更美好。

（本文译自2021年7月27日杰弗里·萨克斯在联合国粮食系统峰会预备会议的演讲）