The Summit of the Americas Must Focus on Economic Inequality
Lina Holguin
The Summit of the Americas Must Focus on Economic Inequality
Posted: 04/07/2015 5:41 pm EDT
The Seventh Summit of the Americas will take place in Panama on April 10-11, 2015 and it is set to be an historic occasion, given Cuba's participation for the first time since the founding summit in 1994. In the 2012 Summit, all Latin American and Caribbean countries voted to give Cuba a seat at the table. The United States and Canada opposed Cuban participation.
I will be following this year's summit live. When I arrived in Panama City Monday, it was clear that Cuba's presence at the summit is generating significant media attention. Another major focus is on the 10 million-strong petition that president Maduro of Venezuela is planning to give to President Obama -- demanding an end to sanctions against Venezuela. And extreme inequality, while not garnering the high profile seen at the recent Davos summit, is nonetheless a profoundly important issue for the region. The summit's theme is "Prosperity with Equity" and it remains to be seen government leaders will take this opportunity to commit to concrete actions in addressing the extreme economic inequality in the region.
Although Latin America and the Caribbean have been able to make some headway in reducing economic inequality, it is still the world's most unequal region. Approximately 167-million people now live in poverty, while a further 200 million are considered economically vulnerable. Meanwhile, the richest 1 per cent have continued accumulating huge amounts of wealth. Oxfam's analysis of the Forbes Billionaires list shows that in 2002 there were 25 billionaires in the region with a combined wealth of $60.8B. By 2014 this number ballooned to 114 billionaires with combined wealth of $439.55B.
Inequality and poverty go hand in hand. And extreme inequality threatens to roll back gains in reducing regional poverty. It's no coincidence that Latin America, the most unequal region in the world, is also the region with the greatest levels of insecurity in the world, outside of active war zones
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