UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the Davos Forum that the world is in a “deplorable state”.
By: Roberto Morejon
The club of millionaires par excellence, the Davos Forum, has resumed its normality after the acute part of the pandemic in Switzerland, amid the daily cold of this alpine city, the same temperature of the world economy threatened by bleak omens. .
With an agenda packed with world issues, more than 2,700 big businessmen and politicians, surrounded by exquisite comfort, balance the grim news.
The World Economic Forum has released a poll of presidents of large transnational corporations saying that two-thirds of them predict a global recession this year.
Private sector advocates who responded to the survey conceded that in the face of such a damaging scenario, a squeeze on production costs had to be applied.
The horizon for Europe is particularly pessimistic, where all respondents expect weak or very weak economic growth for this year.
Certainly these predictions are supported by the resonances of a global recession, inflation and rising interest rates.
But to the not rosy prospects for the economic direction of the planet, accepted by the participants of the exclusive meeting in Switzerland, there is no analysis of how calamity is affecting the lives of the most vulnerable.
In a world divided after the pandemic and conflict in Ukraine, and where the dominant order is being reassembled with a globalization setback, NG Oxfam has an eloquent report on inequality.
Earth is witnessing the simultaneous rise of extreme wealth and poverty for the first time in 25 years, the source warned.
One percent of the wealthiest population retains nearly two-thirds of the wealth created during the Covid-19 scourge.
More than 820 million people or one in ten people on earth now suffer from hunger.
Although the warning of an explosion in inequality attracted attention at the beginning of the Davos Forum, those present do not change their postulates and continue to recommend governments to apply the neoliberal recipes that have led to so many injustices in recent years.
Then the motto that characterizes the annual meeting of the richest is hard to believe: “Cooperation in a fragmented world”, because neoliberalism is precisely the cult of individualism that opposes the preached generosity.