Oxfam International at the World Economic Forum called for the wealthiest beneficiaries of the COVID pandemic to be taxed to finance childcare, education, and work opportunities for women in Global South, Economic Times reported.
According to their website, “Oxfam: The future is equal” is a global movement of people working together to end the injustice of poverty with a slogan.
Speaking at Davos Annual Meeting 2022 during Equitable Responses to Ending the Pandemic on Monday, Oxfam International’s executive director Gabriela Buche said billionaires were arriving at the summit to “celebrate an incredible surge in their fortunes.”
According to a report from CNBC, Buche added, “The pandemic and now the steep increases in food and energy prices have, simply put, been a bonanza for them.”
“Meanwhile, decades of progress on extreme poverty are now in reverse and millions of people are facing impossible rises in the cost of simply staying alive,” Bucher said.
Buche also mentioned that Covid has been one of the most profitable products.
“Billionaires has been, you know, unprecedented during the pandemic. And there’s been several sectors where that has been mostly concentrated. And one is, in fact, the pharma sectors, because Covid has been one of the most profitable products ever. So that’s one point to discuss in our report,” Buche said.
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A new billionaire emerged every 30 hours during the Covid-19 pandemic, and nearly a million could fall into extreme poverty at around the same rate in 2022. Those are the sobering statistics recently released by Oxfam.
There were 573 more billionaires in the world by March 2022 than in 2020, when the pandemic began, the global charity said in a brief that was published on Monday, the first day of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland. That equates to one new billionaire every 30 hours, Oxfam said.
On top of that, it estimated that 263 million people could be pushed into extreme levels of poverty in 2022 because of the pandemic, growing global inequality and rising food prices that have been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. That’s the equivalent of nearly a million people every 33 hours, Oxfam said.