The confederation of humanitarian organizations OXFAM recently published a shocking report, where it points out that in the midst of the pandemic and the global crisis affecting the whole world, every 30 hours a wealthy person reaches the figure of one billion dollars of fortune.
By Guillermo Alvarado
The confederation of humanitarian organizations OXFAM recently published a shocking report, where it points out that in the midst of the pandemic and the global crisis affecting the whole world, every 30 hours a wealthy person reaches the figure of one billion dollars of fortune.
The document specifies that a good part of these super-rich belong to the medicine, energy and food sectors, which are precisely those that are most burdening middle and low-income families, as well as those who lack the resources to meet these needs.
OXFAM, which brings together 19 major non-governmental organizations working in 90 countries, points out that the wealth of these people increased in the first 24 months of the pandemic much more than in the period between 1987 and 2010.
The assets of energy and food businessmen grew by 453 billion dollars during the last two years, which is equivalent to one billion every two days. This trend will continue through 2022.
Moderna and Pfizer pocket a thousand dollars in profits every second for their monopoly on the vaccine against COVID-19, even though they received billions of dollars in public investment for its development.
All this is not because the big corporations are smarter or work harder today, but because they have found a way to manipulate the system to their advantage and now make money out of people's suffering, the research points out.
On the other side of the coin, the poor world, the situation is a complete disaster because many of the advances made over the years to reduce inequalities have been lost.
It is expected that this year a total of 273 million human beings will fall into extreme poverty, which means that every 33 hours a million people lose the ability to meet their basic needs.
Wages are staying the same or decreasing, job offers are scarce and food prices are soaring around the world, which equates to a rise in hunger, not because of a lack of food, but because of the manipulation and greed of large corporations.
"In East Africa, hunger could be claiming a life every minute. These obscene inequalities are breaking the bonds that bind humanity together. They are divisive, corrosive and dangerous. They are inequalities that literally kill," said Gabriela Bucher, director of OXFAM.
If this continues, we are dangerously close to a tipping point that could blow up what we call civilization.
