Participation by Roberto Bissio at the Social Watch Report 2009 launch in New York

Social Watch Report 2009 – Launch in New York

The launch of People First, the Social Watch international report 2009, took place on September 25 in New York during the high level segment of the United Nations General Assembly. The event was followed by a lively discussion about the effects of the crisis at the global level. In this presentation Roberto Bissio, Social Watch Coordinator, speaks of the content of the publication as informed by 61 national reports included in it. His presentation focused on how these reports, that show the facts on the ground, differ from the modelling that ignores those facts, as well as on the proposals from civil society to deal with the crisis.
Listen to Roberto Bissio presentation.

listen to the audio file (mp3)

Roberto Bissio – Lisa, thank you very much for the introduction and to NGLS that together with the other co-sponsors (Amnesty International, Global Policy Forum, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung) helped put this meeting together in a difficult week, where there is enormous demands for the attention of everybody here, for room spaces, and even with difficulties to get from one place to the other. Thank you very much for the support provided to Natalia Cardona. Natalia is the new Social Watch permanent representative here in New York, and we hope that you all help her. I also want to thank the funders of the report: Oxfam Novib, the European Commission and the Ford Foundation, none of which are responsible for what the report says, that’s the disclaimer that we have to put everywhere, but really, thanks to the people that believed that this is a worthwhile exercise.

As far as I know, this is probably one of the first attempts to look at the crisis from the other angle, even when in these very days the Secretary General has just come out with their own report “Voices of the vulnerable”, that’s the official name. We are very proud that it’s so similar to our “People’s voices” event that we organized in June, parallel to the High Level Conference on the Crisis, because those efforts to reflect people’s voices and not just people as victims of the crisis are really worthwhile and it’s important that the angle is in that direction; and in that sense I think the UN is on the right path.
Now, when we look at the crisis from below – and you will find in the Report 61 different national reports coming from as many countries, done by the SW coalitions from around the world with a variety of different expertises and experiences, they are bringing their testimonies about the crisis, the impacts, and their proposals around it ­– one thing I found very interesting in reading through all those 61 reports is that the world is not as orderly as how it looks like when you see it from here, or from Washington or Brussels or Geneva or whoever is analyzing the crisis. The analysis of the impact of the crisis on the poor so far has been a kind of exercise – which is, I think, very important – of saying “Ok, if the economy is suffering recession and GDP is shrinking so much, therefore so many jobs will be lost at the other end of the chain”, which is fine, or “trade will be reduced in so and so per cent, or poverty of under one dollar a day will increase in that many millions of poor people, etc.” You have all kinds of those figures being thrown around and circulated, but basically it’s the same exercise: you put some global numbers on one end and you get results on the other one.

Now, we don’t have similar numbers to propose, we don’t have a similar accounting coming up from the grassroots, but we have the strong impression that it’s even worse. And also the impression is: it has to be much worse than what is being told from those exercises.

Of course, now I should explain why. And that comes from our analysis and the reports that are coming from the people as to how it actually works on the ground.

Social Watch Peru says that when commodity prices were up and we were having growth and the economy was booming, we were being told to be patient for that to trickle down to the people. Now that all of this has collapsed, we are being told to tighten our belts (laughs).

When you see the policy responses as reported here by the people in the countries, which have the crisis as an excuse: there is a crisis, therefore we do this, we do that. There is an enormous variety of real policy responses in the real countries.
In Thailand, for example, which should know about financial crises, because that’s where the crisis started in Southeast Asia not that many years ago, they came to the conclusion that there was a problem with the regulation of the financial sector. Therefore, we will deregulate (laughs). That was the policy response!

So, many countries, with the excuse of the crisis, are deregulating, privatizing, speeding up the process to join the WTO, which implies liberalizing even more; while other countries are stopping privatization plans, are trying to get hold of the financial sector, are trying to regulate, are trying to look at how the contagion happens and address those issues. Internally in the countries, which is, policies at the end of the day are a result of society, and the forces struggling in that society. Of course, this ……… mobilizes all kinds of different forces, which then demand policies to address that.

And so we have, for example, in Paraguay, the soybean planters mobilized very rapidly to demand from the government subsidies and support because the prices of soybean had fallen down from 600 dollars per ton to 400 dollars per ton, which is a dramatic drop in the prices. Poor people! poor guys! Until you learn that their production cost is 20 dollars per ton. They are still making lots and lots of money selling at 400 and, like in Argentina, they don’t pay any taxes! And they are expanding over agricultural lands and making the food products that people actually eat more expensive because they are less abundant now. And still they pressure. They didn’t get in Paraguay the subsidies they had requested, but in Argentina they did get tax exemptions, for example.

Recently I met, with other social watchers, with the prime minister of an African country. And the prime minister was saying, well, you know, because of the crisis I am meeting every day with delegations of the business sector and what they are complaining is that they are lacking competitiveness. Now all around the third world and also in many developed countries everybody knows what that means: when the business sector complains about lack of competitiveness that means salaries have to come down, or that there has to be flexibility, reductions in workers ……… or what have you.

And so we come to a situation like the one we had in Uruguay, for example, in a roundtable debate on the crisis with social movements and so on, where some delegates from the unions were completely downplaying the importance of the crisis. That’s really a big problem over there, but not for us. And it was not the same panel I was in so I didn’t have to engage in a public debate, but at the end, I drank a coffee with this guy [and told him] “what do you mean, you know the crisis is serious!” And he said: “Yes, but who benefits?” Who is going to really have the capacity to extract policies out of the government with the pretext of the crisis in their favour? And that is usually, you know… or the fear was that the entrepreneurs would get more access than the workers.

And that is also one of the reasons, when you look at it through the different countries, why women, for example, are suffering much more with the crisis; even more than what we think about. Because we know all those mechanisms where the informal sector in which women are over-represented or the care economy is overwhelming the crisis because the State is not as protective as it was or as it should because of budget cuts, because of unemployment, because even the increase in domestic violence and all the different problems that have been identified and written about. But then there is one additional problem which is the lack of political power and influence to shape the policies to confront the crisis. And so other sectors, which are more structured and more organized, which have more capacity to influence, get there first.

In a way, the image of the crisis that I get reading through all the 61 reports is like a brawl in the saloon in those Westerns, where a fight starts at the poker table and then all of a sudden after a while everybody is fighting against each other, and someone takes the opportunity to leave without paying and the guy that was over there goes and kicks the guy that was at the other end because he had stolen his fiancée or whatever, which has nothing to do with the poker game where it all started but in the middle of that confusion people get away with what they wanted anyhow. And the reply has to be fast and energetic, and billions and trillions of dollars are spent in very much unaccountable ways in the name of the crisis …………

And then our question is, how does that at the end benefit the vulnerable, women, workers, people living in poverty. And the answer is, it doesn’t if you don’t design explicit policies aimed at that. It does not just by reviving the economy and getting back with business as usual. First, because it is never revived as it was before, because in the meantime you do have to spend that money somewhere, and how it’s being spent, who gets to benefit, and so on, it starts with those that really have more access. Yes, there are some cases, there are examples where people living in poverty, women, are specific targets of specific policies to at least protect, help, and some of them are described here, some of them are in effect and others are being demanded by civil society organizations. In the combination of the financial and economic crises, food and climate crises, the role of rural women, for example ………… the demands from civil society and Social Watch groups in many countries, in one way or the other, their demands have to do with the protection and promotion of rural women and traditional agricultural forms and communities ………… is directly related even when the link is not always so clearly made. But the notion that I had in reading all that input was: it’s got to be worse than what is reported. Because the modelling that happens when it comes to what are the consequences and the cost of the crisis, which are not coming from actual research on the ground but from that modelling, ignore those factors. And putting them in makes for a different result, even if we are not in a condition to quantify that.

Then, what to do about it precisely relates with that, which is, how do we amplify, defend and support those voices. And that is precisely what this Social Watch Report attempts to do, with many others, of course, it is not the only effort and probably not by far the most important one, but that’s where we want to contribute, which is, into making those voices heard, making them influential, giving them the legitimacy they need to be validated as real important findings and contributions to, therefore, be able to shape those policies.

And I think in this regard the role of the United Nations has no possible substitution, no matter how important other ad hoc groups might be, as the one that is meeting in Pittsburgh right now.

This is something you’re not going to find in the Report but it’s the testimony that in this process I have heard from government officials in G-20 countries, like some in South America very near from where I live. They said, we have no clue on how to make our voice heard in the G-20; we have no clue who is preparing which documents; where do our proposals fit in, how do we do to put them in the agenda, and then if we manage to get that formulated and accessible to somebody, what kind of process makes that appear or disappear from the final document we don’t know. That’s not the civil society, that’s the people that are supposed to be preparing the outcome [document]. So the level of frustration with these kinds of bodies even within them is enormous.

Yesterday the Dutch prime minister volunteered himself to represent the voice of the poor countries in the G-20. That’s a generous offer, but don’t those countries have their own voice, and their own flag? It is over there (pointing at the UN), with transparency mechanisms and legitimacy for them to be heard. So that is why we think our hope lies with the G-192, much more than in any other “G” groups. But that’s another question and it’s even part of a debate that will go on after this debate ends and I’m supposed to invite everybody and I do it very gladly. It’s a debate about strategizing and thinking about MDGs and human rights that Mary Robinson and Amnesty International are organizing immediately after this event a couple of blocks from here.

So this is the message that I wanted to convey and I apologize for having talked longer than what I thought. Thank you very much for coming here.