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| World leaders and top diplomats attend a development conference in Seville, Spain, on Monday. (Claudia Greco/Reuters) |
| While about 50 world leaders attended an international summit in Spain on alleviating global poverty, President Donald Trump had other priorities. On Tuesday, he opened a new migrant detention center surrounded by swamp in the Everglades that he dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” His Republican allies in the Senate narrowly pushed through major legislation that would devote many more billions of dollars to fund immigration enforcement and Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The bill would also gut various social spending programs, pushing about 17 million Americans off health care, while extending significant tax relief to the ultrarich. Also Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the official end of USAID, the decades-old aid and development agency that Trump set about gutting after starting his second term in January. The cuts to USAID, cancellation of its many programs and ensuing stop-work orders around the world have had cascading effects that could cost lives. My colleague Katharine Houreld recently reported from war-torn Sudan, where the evaporation of USAID funds has shuttered clinics and led to the disappearance of critical medicines and food aid. A surge in deaths related to child malnutrition, cholera and other maladies has followed. The British medical journal Lancet this week published a study that estimated the ending of USAID could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths globally during the next five years. That might be immaterial to a Trump administration that cast USAID as a font of waste and “left-wing” policies, but the ripple effects of the move to dismantle the agency will be felt for years. “The magnitude of USAID’s impact over the past two decades cannot be overstated,” Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and coordinator of the study, told my colleagues in an email. “These broader interventions have strengthened the resilience of communities, enabling them to thrive well beyond the scope of any single program. The dismantling of these programs now threatens to reverse decades of progress.” | ||||||
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| Rahma Kaki Jubarra and her sons, who are malnourished, receive aid on the outskirts of Omdurman, Sudan, on May 25. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post) |
| The specter of American retreat hung over proceedings in the Spanish city of Seville. The U.N. conference on international financing for development — the first of its kind in a decade — began Monday and will close Thursday. Dozens of heads of state and government are pursuing reforms of the world’s aid and financial architecture. Up for discussion are programs around global taxation, climate-focused funding and how to reckon with the ballooning public debt of numerous developing nations. Implicit in some of the leaders’ remarks was criticism of the Trump administration’s approach. French President Emmanuel Macron said more freedom and equity was needed in the international trade system, but that Trump’s protectionism was not the answer. “Bringing back a trade war and tariffs at this moment in the life of the planet is an aberration, especially when I see the tariffs that are being imposed on countries that are just beginning their economic takeoff,” Macron said. Kenyan President William Ruto welcomed calls at the summit to adjust trade rules so that African nations had a fairer playing field to support both their industrialization and decarbonization. “No country has achieved lasting prosperity without manufacturing and export diversification,” Ruto said. The Trump administration declined to attend the proceedings on ideological grounds, objecting to language in the conference’s uniting text around gender equality, debt reform or the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals. That enabled the forum’s drivers to focus on issues such as climate change and embark on projects that might have clashed with Trump’s agenda, including a joint Spanish, Brazilian and South African initiative to tax the global super-rich at a time when the world’s wealthiest 1 percent owns more than 95 percent of humanity combined. One plank of the effort includes a proposal to build a global wealth registry and platforms to better connect the databases of governments and their tax authorities to close loopholes. “We cannot tolerate the intensity of inequality, which has been increasing in recent years,” said José Gilberto Scandiucci, Brazilian Minister-Counsellor to the United Nations. “This is a moderate initiative to confront a very radical reality.” The reality is bleak. The United States is at the forefront of a wider trend of wealthy nations cutting back on their aid commitments, leading to funding shortfalls befalling ongoing humanitarian disasters around the world. “To have the United States on board would be excellent but it can be done in any case by those willing to do so,” said U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, putting on a brave face about the summit’s efforts. “Financing is the engine of development. And right now, this engine is sputtering.” Global advocacy organization Oxfam published a study last month that found the world’s richest 1 percent increased their wealth by almost $34 trillion in the past decade. That massive growth in private fortune came during a waning in public investments. “Whilst critical aid is cut, the debt crisis is bankrupting governments — 60 percent of low-income countries are at the edge of a debt crisis — with the poorest countries paying out far more to repay their rich creditors than they are able to spend on classrooms or clinics,” Oxfam noted.
“Over the last few years, money has actually been going from developing countries to private creditors in the advanced countries,” Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning economist, and Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS, wrote in Spain’s El País newspaper. “What enables the perverse flow of money is that the international financial institutions, the IMF and the multilateral development banks, are engineering a de facto bailout for private creditors with the money they are providing to the developing world.” The Trump administration’s legislative efforts will only accentuate this dynamic, activists say. “This bill with its draconian cuts and massive transfer of wealth from public goods to private pockets is not a solution to economic inequality or for managing immigration and asylum procedures,” Matt McConnell, an economic justice and rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said of Trump’s tax bill. “It is a blueprint for cruelty.” | ||||||||||||