A/HRC/44/40 by 2030. 56 If forecasts used a more realistic poverty line and fully priced in the counterproductive impact of carbon emissions, the future would look even grimmer. 32. Despite vast resources, many high-income countries have failed to seriously reduce poverty rates under national measures, which are often in the double digits, and in some cases, poverty has risen alongside increasing homelessness, hunger, and debt. Between 1984 and 2014, poverty rose in countries such as Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. 57 One in seven children in OECD countries live in income poverty, and child poverty rates increased in almost two-thirds of those countries in recent years.58 While people speak of a “growing middle class,” most of that group lives a highly precarious existence, below the $10-a-day line associated with permanent escape from poverty.59 D. COVID-19: a pandemic of poverty 33. The impact of COVID-19 will be long-lasting, but much-needed structural responses have been sorely lacking. According to the World Bank, the pandemic will erase all poverty alleviation progress over the past three years, and will push 176 million people into poverty at the $3.20 poverty line.60 Rather than resolving to address the inadequacy of their public health and social protection systems in response to the pandemic, many governments have seen COVID-19 as a passing challenge to be endured, ignoring the indispensability of largescale economic and social restructuring. Others have taken it as an opportunity to undermine or restrict human rights. And rather than acknowledging how badly efforts to “end poverty” have been faring, and how relentlessly the pandemic has exposed that fact, most actors are doubling down on existing approaches that are clearly failing. 34. The public health community’s mantra for coping with COVID-19 encapsulates the systemic neglect of those living in poverty. The pithy advice to “stay home, socially distance, wash hands, and see a doctor in case of fever” highlights the plight of the vast numbers who can do none of these things. They have no home in which to shelter, no food stockpiles, live in crowded and unsanitary conditions, and have no access to clean water or affordable medical care. Far from being the “great leveler,” COVID-19 is a pandemic of poverty, exposing the parlous state of social safety nets for those on lower incomes or in poverty around the world. Poor people are more likely to be exposed to, and least likely to be protected from, the virus. They experience the impact of lockdowns, layoffs, and closures far more dramatically. The majority of ‘essential workers’ are poorly paid, badly protected, and unsupported by emergency assistance. In the understandable rush to re-open economies, they risk becoming sacrificial lambs. 35. Shockingly skewed illness and mortality rates have tracked and exposed racial and class divides. In some of the world’s richest nations, health care systems have proven grossly inadequate, and race, gender, religious, and class discrimination have skewed access to housing, food, education, and technology in ways that have yielded radically different outcomes. Gaping North-South disparities have been exposed. And many national and local governments, constrained by austerity policies, lack the will, resources, and administrative capacities to step in effectively. Meanwhile, multilateralism has been gravely wounded, and with a few exceptions, international solidarity has been conspicuously lacking. 36. If social protection floors had been in place, the hundreds of millions left without medical care, adequate food and housing, and basic security would have been spared some of the worst consequences. Instead, endless pressures to promote fiscal consolidation, especially over the last decade, have pushed social protection systems closer towards nineteenth century models rather than late twentieth century aspirations. When combined with the next generation of post-COVID-19 austerity policies, the dramatic transfer of economic and political power to the wealthy elites that has characterized the past forty years 56 57 58 59 60 World Bank, Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty (2016). Atkinson, Measuring Poverty, p. 199. OECD, “Poor children in rich countries: why we need policy action,” October 2018. Edward and Sumner, The End of Poverty: Inequality and Growth in Global Perspective (2019), p. 40. Mahler, et al., “Updated estimates.” 9