For the past year and a half, people everywhere have been in the grip of a pandemic – but not necessarily the same one. In the affluent world, a viral respiratory disease, Covid-19, suddenly became a leading cause of death. Richer nations and poorer nations differ in their vulnerabilities, reports The Guardian.
Realm of public health
A big way that Covid can kill is by hampering the management of other diseases, such as HIV, malaria and TB. In Africa alone, 26 million people are living with HIV and, in a typical year, several hundreds of thousands die of it, while malaria, which is especially deadly to infants and toddlers, claims almost 400,000 lives.
Those are big numbers, and yet they used to be much bigger – a major healthcare effort brought them down. Amid the pandemic, though, people stopped visiting clinics prenatal care visits dropped by two-thirds between April and September 2020; consultations for children under five dropped by three-quarters.
Public-health experts predict that, as an indirect consequence of the Covid pandemic, twice as many people around the world could be at risk of dying from malaria. Across much of the world, in short, the response to the coronavirus has ushered in a shadow pandemic. The coronavirus’s real death toll, then, has to be calculated not just in deaths from Covid, but also in deaths that would otherwise have been prevented, from malaria, TB, HIV, diabetes and more.
Global North Vs Global South
This shadow pandemic isn’t simply a story about disease – it’s about poverty, hunger, truncated education and stunted lives. A suggestive comparison can be made with the climate crisis. In the affluent world, some people think of climate breakdown as a matter of how long the air conditioning stays on, but for many in the developing world, it’s already a matter of floods, droughts and famine.
These disparities between the global north and south are likely to be a feature of crises to come. The tale of two pandemics, then, is a tale of two international orders. The post-pandemic challenge, in turn, is to take seriously the rhetoric of an “international community”, and integrate the two into one.
The economies of rich nations have, of course, been buffeted by the pandemic as well. Borrowing money is costly for them, and their tax base in the formal economy is a shallow, narrow plinth.
They found that the direct health impact of Covid in these relatively youthful countries was less than in richer (and, invariably, older) countries, but that economic vulnerability was decidedly greater. Households typically reported a drop in income.
Economic growth
Africa was on track to see economic growth of 3.2% in 2020; now that’s estimated to have been 0.8%. When you’ve got a population growth rate of about 2.5%, that means less food on the table for many, and outright malnutrition for some. In rich countries, Covid’s medical consequences killed elderly people. In developing countries, Covid’s economic consequences killed the poor.
The low-income nation of Mozambique, which has been identified as the African country most vulnerable to climate change, found its economy contracting in response to the pandemic, with depressed markets for its commodities and, of course, for tourism.
Kenya’s floriculture
Kenya’s biggest exports are cut flowers. In fact, Kenya has, in recent years, emerged as the main exporter of rose stems to the EU, supplying almost 40% of the market.
Over the past year and a half, as you might guess, those sales wilted. Social distancing meant fewer functions. Millions of rose stems were dumped into pits as flower farms found most of their orders cancelled. Workers were furloughed or saw wages reduced. Once the pandemic settled in, those sales disappeared.
The chocolate industry
Cocoa trees are picky about temperature, humidity and soil, and large swaths of these west African countries hit their sweet spot. Together, the two countries account for about two-thirds of the global cocoa supply. Economists have estimated that as much as a third of Ghana’s workforce depends on cocoa, directly and indirectly.
During the pandemic, though, chocolate consumption declined. Not mine, and maybe not yours. But it turns out that a lot of chocolate is bought at retail shops and vending machines.
Both countries had big plans for 2020. Ghana and Ivory Coast have state-run boards in charge of buying and selling the cocoa harvest, and had jointly agreed to impose a new surcharge on cocoa exports, amounting to $400 per tonne.
Chocolate is a $130bn-a-year industry, but only a few percentage points go to the millions of west African smallholders who do the cocoa cropping. And they have a tough time of it: on average, each cultivates about 3.5 hectares, while trying to support half a dozen or more family members.
Many cocoa farmers barely eke out a living; a 2018 Unicef report calculated that the average west African cocoa farmer made between $0.50 and $1.25 a day.
As Covid shrank the chocolate market, buyers in the west asked for their deliveries to be suspended. Local middlemen, known as pisteurs, demanded deep discounts to take the bean off the growers’ hands.
Development in other countries
In fact, the story of rising global interdependence is also one of rising equality among the nations. Over the past two decades, more than 30 countries have moved from the lower-income category to the middle-income category, to go by the official World Bank designations.
In recent years, most of the world’s fastest-growing economies were in Africa. And many of the pandemic-linked economic shocks are short-term ones: the market for flowers and chocolate – and timber and bauxite – is rebounding.
Morals to be drawn from the vulnerability of the global south
The self-directed programmes of national development don’t work when they simply ignore market realities or leave internal impediment unaddressed.
Conflicting demands and interests
Yet Ghana, like most developing nations, has been trammeled by conflicting demands and interests.
Because Ghana’s central bank needs US dollars – foreign-exchange reserves – the state cocoa boards must sell the commodity to multinational companies. In the meantime, the country is stifling local production by imposing a 60% tax on domestic sales of chocolate and “semi-finished” cocoa products.
There are other impediments. A patchwork-quilt land-ownership system makes it hard for smallholders to gain title to their farms. And west African cocoa yields have scarcely improved in the past century. There are now programmes that promote more sophisticated and sustainable cocoa-growing methods – including “smart irrigation” – but they’ve had a late start.
Schooling and skills
School closings have obviously been a big problem everywhere. Around the planet, schooling has been interrupted for 1.6 billion students. Yet classrooms in Africa have been shut longer than the global average.
For many families, the problem isn’t access to the internet – it’s access to electricity. Even when a school had managed to put its lessons online and a parent had a smartphone, the parent might not have a sufficiently generous data plan to make use of them.
When classrooms close, researchers say, female students are hit especially hard: they’re at an elevated risk of child marriage, early pregnancy, domestic abuse and child-labour exploitation. For all these reasons – along with the simple fact that girls are regularly asked to take on child-rearing duties and household chores.
That gender disparity is worrisome for a variety of reasons. It has been estimated that women’s wages go up by 11.5% for each additional year of schooling, a couple of percentage points more than for men. As the notably unsentimental economist Lawrence Summers once observed, “investment in the education of girls may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world”.
Loopholes in our system
Covid is the tide that went out and exposed our nakedness,” a well-known Lagos-based business consultant, Sanyade Okoli, told me.
“It revealed all the weaknesses in our health system, educational system, governance structures etc.” Those regional weaknesses can be seen in the spreadsheets; they can also be seen in the streets.
Globalisation
Catastrophes are fractal. They have to be understood – and addressed – in macro and in micro ways. When affluent nations in Europe and North America shut down in order to slow the pandemic, their governments offered their citizens targeted relief.
Something like this approach is needed on an international scale. The affluent world, in the aggregate, gains enormously from globalisation. We cherish our chocolate and roses. In many respects, it’s a common enterprise – a system of cooperation – from which we all benefit.
Yet, as we all know, its yields are greater for some than for others. If the trading partners of the rich nations lose faith in the system, they might be tempted to give up on it. That would be costly to them, but it would be costly to those rich nations, too.
That’s why the system is sustainable only if it involves a sense of shared responsibility. When public-health measures to “flatten the curve” in rich countries can push people elsewhere on the planet into penury, it’s our problem, too. An integrated global system is imperiled when risk is shifted to those most vulnerable.
Vaccine shortages
Our international responsibilities in the age of Covid have often been discussed in absurdly narrow ways. Yes, programmes such as Covax, the international vaccine distributor, need to be better supplied, but all the vaccines in the world won’t remedy the moral and practical perils of inequality.
In richer nations, economic turbulence puts more people on the dole. In poorer ones, it puts more people in the grave. If the gains in alleviating global poverty over the past generation were heartening, they have also proved perishable. Okoli, in Nigeria, recalled that, early in the pandemic, people with means took care to feed those in need.
Global inequality
To come to grips with global inequality on a post-pandemic planet, we’ll need more sensitive measures of fragility. No simple jab will resolve the vulnerabilities and inequities that arise from our global interdependence.
When, earlier this year, the UK decided to cut foreign aid by $4bn, it was signaling a retreat at a time when history is calling for an advance. The most thoughtful critics of foreign aid make an important point: we want governments that are principally accountable to their people, not to foreign donors and lenders.
Science and the pandemic
“Science is the exit strategy,” the head of the Wellcome Trust famously said, early in the pandemic. But, though science is necessary, it’s hardly sufficient, particularly when we’re interested not simply in exit but in re-entry.
As raucous, inward-turned nationalisms continue to claim followers, we’ll need to resist the go-it-alone fantasies of autarky. Rather, a post-pandemic era calls for a richer sense of our mutual obligations.
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Source: The Guardian
