The annual UN Human Development Report is now ten years old. The latest edition published this July, like its predecessors, reads as a crushing indictment of capitalism, yet still its authors foresee no way forward but to reform the institutions and the system that blights the lives of billions of us each day.
As ever, its observations, facts and statistics reveal a world increasingly divided between rich and poor and in which there is little prospect for improvement.
While the world’s richest 200 people have doubled their wealth to over $1 trillion in the past four years, the number of people existing on less than a dollar a day remains the same at 1.3 billion (incidentally, the number of humans estimated to go without a meal on any given day).
The wealthiest three people in the world continue to increase their fortunes. Between them, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Paul Allen have assets (according to Forbes magazine) of $156 billion. This figure is greater than the combined GNP of the world’s 43 poorest countries—of which some 600 million inhabitants can be found in sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, some 80 countries now have a lower per-capita income than when the report first appeared in 1989, and in spite of all the wise UN recommendations put forward since then.
The New World Disorder.
There is much in the report that criticises the power of the multinationals. It points out that of all world patents, 97 percent are held by companies based in the industrialised countries. The report highlights the way the rules permit multinationals to hog intellectual property rights and traditional remedies and cites an example. Two years ago, a University of Mississippi research team was granted a US patent for using turmeric to heal wounds, in spite of this having been an Indian remedy for thousands of years. When ancient Sanskrit evidence was presented, the patent was withdrawn.
In a section on technology, the UN reveals the myth of the trickle-down effect of the hi-tech revolution which was supposed to ease globalisation and be to the benefit of all. While access to the Internet is said to speed growth, we find that 88 percent of users live in the West, and whereas a Bangladeshi would have to save his wages for eight years to buy a computer, the average American need only sweat for a month. As the report points out: “The literally well connected have an overpowering advantage over the unconnected poor, whose voice and concerns are being left out of the global conversation.”
Ted Turner, owner of CNN and the man who donated $1 billion to the UN last year, is afforded space for a special message in the report, which re-emphasises the UN’s demand for poverty reduction:
"Even as communication, transport technology are driving global economic expansion headway on, poverty is not keeping pace . . . it is as if globalisation is in fast forward, and the world’s ability to understand and react to it is in slow motion.
Those supposedly in the know, whose words carry weight, certainly do not seem to understand the nature of capitalism, for they react in the same reformist manner as always. The UN itself in the report makes a number of proposals to counter the dire effects of “globalisation”.
The UN recommends a World Trade Organisation capable of enforcing a code of conduct for multinationals, of having the power to curb their monopolistic tendencies; it suggests the establishment of a global central bank—as if the IMF is not enough—and a world investment trust that could redistribute incomes globally and a world forum of businesses, trade unions, environmental and development groups to counter the power of the G7 in global decision-making. Hope again triumphs over experience.
We approach the 21st century with the problems facing humanity many times greater than those that faced us at the start of the 20th century. There are more starving, more homeless, more impoverished people on the face of the earth than at any time in human history. Moreover, the threat of all-out war and environmental catastrophe that threatens the very existence of our planet and every living creature upon it is as real now than ever before.
The facts and statistics that bear out the glaring contradictions of capitalist society are churned out seemingly without end and by the very organisations set up to help rectify them. Still, the reformist logic prevails. Still, a little tampering with the system is all that is envisaged.
After ten years of UN reports, we would think the authors would have got the message. They system can’t be reformed in the interest of the majority. It works as it was always meant to work—to the benefit of a minority. Change is indeed needed, but it is so big a change it is beyond the ken of the likes of Ted Turner of CNN. It involves the total abolition of the money system and a freeing of the productive processes from the artificial constraints of profit. It involves the abolition of all borders and frontiers and the taking-away of power from all who use it to serve their own selfish ends. Simply, it involves the establishment of a global system of society in which we each have free access to the benefits of civilisation.
As we approach the beginning of a new millennium, with a century of raw capitalism behind us, these are the recommendations a Human Development Report would be making.
John Bissett
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