The pandemic has shown the fragility of our world, said the UN. (File)
Johannesburg:
The coronavirus has exposed the “fragile skeleton” of societies and could plunge 100 million people into extreme poverty, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Saturday.
Speaking on the 102nd anniversary of the death of Nelson Mandela – the first black president of South Africa – Guterres said that the coronavirus “highlighted” global injustice.
“We have been brought to our knees – by a microscopic virus. The pandemic has demonstrated the fragility of our world.”
“Whole regions that were progressing in eradicating poverty and reducing inequality have gone back several years, in a few months,” he warned during a virtual commemorative conference organized by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, based in Johannesburg.
The economic fallout from the pandemic, which has infected more than 14 million people and killed nearly 600,000 people worldwide, is being felt disproportionately among informal workers, small businesses and women, said António Guterres.
“We are facing the deepest global recession since the Second World War,” he said. “One hundred million more people could be plunged into extreme poverty. We could see famines of historic proportions.”
The coronavirus is an “x-ray” that has revealed that “fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built”, he added, citing unequal health care, unpaid care work, the disparity of income and climate change as some of the concerns.
“It exposes errors and lies everywhere … The illusion that we live in a post-racist world. The myth that we are all in the same boat.”
He said that the 26 wealthiest people in the world hold as much wealth as half the world‘s population.
“But income, wages and wealth are not the only measures of inequality,” he added.
Guterres said that people are exhausted in the face of glaring disparities and discrimination between societies.
He singled out the global anti-racism movement fueled by the death of George Floyd – an African-American man killed by a white police officer in May – as simply “one more sign that people are fed up”.
Enough “inequality and discrimination that treat people like criminals on the basis of their skin color”, enough “structural racism” and “systematic injustice”.
The coronavirus, he said, has also enabled world leaders to build a “more egalitarian and sustainable world“.
“We are at the breaking point. But we know which side of the story we are on.”
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
