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In the UK  and across the globe, debate, anger and  fear are raging over the austerity measures  that are being imposed to cure economic ailments. The World Cup has offered us welcome distraction from the constant scare mongering generated by governments’ PR machines that tell us the debt problem (or really any problem you can think of) must be solved by cuts, cuts, cuts. They all say tell us ‘We know what is best for you, shut your eyes, open your mouth, take the medicine it will cure all our ills. Watch the football, drink your beer, stay on the sofa there’s a good chap.’

But the World Development Movement and others don’t want you to stay on your sofa. We have campaigned for decades to stop institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank from forcing developing countries to introduce public service cuts, privatisation and reductions in government  spending. Sound familiar?

We campaign against these measures  because the evidence categorically shows that these policies hurt people in developing countries making them poorer, and the gap grows chasmic between the richest and poorest. We have been vindicated, in the late 1990s even the World Bank and IMF slowly slowly began to change their neoliberal tune.  Ok so they weren’t exactly singing the Internationale, but they introduced measures to try and provide a safety net to cushion people against the worst aspects of poverty that these policies brought. And ok it wasn’t that sucessful, but we were somewhere in the argument that more privatisation and less government spending on, let’s say schools and midwives salaries, do not in fact cure the debt crisis, do not cure poverty but do bring unemployment, more children and mothers dying in childbirth and plummeting literacy rates .

But somewhere along the line we’ve lost the argument again because those same policies are being introduced now in the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Spain, the UK…. read behind the spin of ‘free’ schools or of ‘efficiency savings’ in the NHS and you’ll see they are the same old policies with prettier names. So our governments are singing loudly that neoliberal anthem that’s been discredited and discarded by its inventors for over a decade.

Brazil is one of the many countries that had to undergo the structural adjustment or economic shock therapy imposed by the IMF during the 1980s and 1990s. This included the economic policies described above to try to reduce its debts. Analysis from Oxfam showed the results:

• 43% of Brazilians – over 60 million people – lack the essentials of a decent life
• One in three children drop out of school without completing primary education
• 90% of sewage is untreated

Brazil now is also being hit by the economic recession, but they are still a growing economy. Having seen his country decimated by the cuts agenda in the past, President Lula does not sing from the neoliberal song book, instead   Lula wants to invest in new roads, highspeed trains and new homes for people on low incomes.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the new coalition government will be bringing in austerity measures that Brazil eshews. The Guardian argued that people voted for austerity with a conscience. The argument seems to be that the coalition is softened, in a similar way to the UK, by the Dutch equivalent of the Lib Dems. Not so soft?

I can’t make predictions for the match, but my prediction for the countries that bring in austerity measures: inquality and poverty will increase. I feel like sitting on my sofa, having a beer, watching the match to forget that the next generation of kids might go to a school run by Tesco where they are trained to work for Tesco, they will live in a Tesco housing estate and they will eat Tesco food.

But I won’t – what I will do is check out No Shock Doctrine for Britain who are campaigning against the cuts, and work to force those in power and in wealth see that austerity is not the medecine that will cure us, it is the medicine that no matter how much sugar we pile on top of it will only hurt us.

Posted in: Brazil, Global injustice, Netherlands, Uncategorized, Who am I cheering for?

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Both Japan and Paraguay will be pleased to have made it to the second round and a fourth match in this World Cup. This is the fourth time Paraguay have made it to the second round, but on previous occasions they have always gone out. The South Americans will fancy their chances this time against a Japanese team who have qualified from the group stage for the first time away from home.

Although it’s not one of the glamour contests of the second round, Paraguay-Japan draws an interesting contrast in the Whoshouldicheerfor.com rankings. Japan is the most equal country taking part in the World Cup, Paraguay the most unequal.

One way to measure inequality is to contrast how much the poorest 10 per cent earn compare to the richest 10 per cent. In Japan, the rich get 4.5 times more. In Paraguay the rich get 65 times more. Japan is the most equal country in the world. Paraguay is almost off the scale in how unequal it is.

Inequality tends to be higher in developing countries. In our globalised world, there is increasingly an upper-middle class in most countries, but the absolute level of poverty is much greater in the developing world. The gap between rich and poor tends to be greater the poorer a country is.

For the past thirty years, policy across the world has been dominated by the view that inequality does not matter. New Labour Ministers in the UK to World Bank officials have argued that as long as absolute poverty is falling, it does not matter if some people are getting filthy rich at the same time. The rising tide of globalisation would lift all boats up, even if some are lifted up more.

This argument is fundamentally wrong for many reasons. The simple injustice of some people having so much in a world of such poverty is the main one, followed by that inequality allowing the rich to exercise power and keep the world spinning in their own interest.

But to tackle the ‘inequality doesn’t matter’ people head-on, there is little evidence that growth has helped the poor, but a lot that it has helped the rich. David Woodward, whilst at the New Economics Foundation showed that to get £1 more to the poorest 1 billion people in the world requires the global economy to grow by £166. That’s £165 for me, £1 for you… This is such an economically inefficient way to tackle poverty it is like trying to ride a square-wheeled bicycle up a hill. Meanwhile, the fortunes of inequality creating bankers and footballers ballooned.

Furthermore, inequality is a bad thing, and disadvantages everyone; rich and poor. In their book ‘Spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better’, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show that citizens of more equal countries have longer, healthier, and happier lives, whilst violence, imprisonment and addiction are lower. Furthermore, it is not just the poor who are affected by inequality. Men from the poorest Japanese social classes are healthier than those from the richest social classes in England. Inequality destroys the relationships between everyone in a society, to the detriment of all.

In 2000, the CIA made a prediction which reads more like a statement of the bleeding obvious:

“The rising tide of the global economy will create many economic winners, but it will not lift all boats. [It will] spawn conflicts at home and abroad, ensuring an ever wider gap between regional winners and losers than exists today. [Globalisation’s] evolution will be rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide. Regions, countries, and groups feeling left behind will face deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation.”

Posted in: Japan, Paraguay, Paraguay-Japan

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

I was surprised to find that that South Korea is ranked only 29th out of the 32 countries by ‘Who should I cheer for’ below even England and only two places above the US! The issue South Korea really loses out in the ranking is the amount it spends on the military (as well as its high carbon dioxide emissions). South Korea spends on weapons 2.6 times the amount that Argentina does and emits 9.7 tons of  carbon dioxide per person compared to just the 3.7 tons per person which Argentina emits.

With a nuclear armed North Korea as a neighbour, perhaps this high military spending is understandable? After all it is easy to put the blame on North Korea with the many horrendous human rights abuses committed by the fascist regime of Kim Jong-il. But to understand how we ended up in this precarious situation of a Korea split in to two heavily militarised states; which are still officially at war it is necessary to understand the history of the division. Korea was liberated in 1945 from Japanese rule, in the south of the country by the US and in the north by the USSR.

It is often held that the Korean War was started by the war mongering North Korea simply invading the South. This ignores the complexities of the issue. In his insightful book, Rogue State, William Blum highlights that under US occupation their progressive wartime allies (who were extremely popular) were violently suppressed and the US instead supported the conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. This made unification of Korea near impossible and essentially made the Korean War, in which 2.5 million civilians were murdered, inevitable.

The war would see many war crimes and not just ones committed by the North, which had a policy of assassinating all intelligencia located in the South. Just as horrific was the South’s mass killing of anyone suspected of being a communist sympathiser which led to up to 100,000 bodies being dumped in trenches, mines and the sea. The US too committed many war crimes. For example, concerned that there might be some northern soldiers mixed in with group of 400 civilians they decided to machine gun all of the unarmed civilians and massacred hundreds more by happily blowing up bridges packed full of fleeing refugees. Not only did the US repression cause the Korean War and cost nearly four and a half million people their lives, it also led to a long line of corrupt, reactionary, and ruthless dictatorships in South Korea.

The blame must be layed squarely at the door of the US, UK and other NATO countries, but given the memory of the dead and the many fears for the future; I will find it hard to cheer for anyone during the games which either of the Koreas are playing in.

Posted in: Argentina, Matches, South Korea, Teams

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.

Help! My home is already taken over by World Cup frenzy. My 7 year old, football obsessed son has posters all over the house, tracking the teams and their prospective games; he’s been collecting special world cup stickers of all the players with his best friend for the past month, comparing statistics. Meanwhile, the husband has marked key matches he’ll be in the pub for in the family diary. (our television screen is apparently WAY too small).

I must admit, I quite like the World Cup – having grown up in Canada, where American-dominated sport pretends to represent the world, it’s refreshing to be living in a country where a genuinely global sport is the norm. But at the same time, I have a negative reaction to pure nationalism – sport is one thing, but I don’t want to live in a world where we seek to look after ourselves, before thinking of others.

Unfortunately, that’s the way we’re going. Just looking at the comparative stats on this site, you find that most of the rich countries fall down on their long-standing commitments to providing more aid to developing countries; and have per capita carbon emissions that go far beyond their fair share of the world’s resources.

The Con-Dem nation coalition seems set to withdraw Britain internationally, too. While I’m no big fan of Gordon Brown, he did serve to put some social justice issues on the global political agenda – like aid and debt relief, and convinced other world leaders to follow. Unfortunately, we just found out that the new Prime Minister, David Cameron seems to bear no such global gravitas, given that the UK has lost its seat on the critical UN climate finance panel. Meanwhile, there are rumours that the UK’s Department for International Development will be merged with the Foreign Office – a retro-grade step that means we’ll only do something for the world if it’s in Britain’s immediate political interests – rather than what’s right for equity and justice. Will this mean a return to the bad old days of tied aid?

The World Cup isn’t about politics – it’s about friendly sport, putting players on a level-playing field. Unfortunately, for the world’s poorest, beyond the football extravaganza, the world simply isn’t a level playing field. Perhaps we should model all international institutions – from the UN to the World Bank, on World Cup processes? You would have to pass a qualifier to get to the end game, but in this case, countries would have to pass a social and environmental justice qualifier to join. It could end the domination of rich countries over poorer countries (would the US and Britain be out of the ‘tournament’?), and give a stronger voice to poorer countries, like Ghana, who are working hard to eradicate poverty.

So while my family dons England paraphernalia during the home team matches; I’ll be watching the World Cup this year with a different lens, with an eye on how to ensure Britain keeps its social conscience. It’s cheering for nationalism, with a global justice twist.

Posted in: Global injustice

Views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Development Movement.