Cao Heping: Helping tens of millions of hungry people requires institutional innovation

Source: Global Times

A few days ago, David Beasley, director of the United Nations World Food Programme, said in an interview with the media that "the two richest people in the world, Musk (tesla founder) and Bezos (amazon founder) companies have a market value of more than one trillion US dollars, as long as they take out 2% of their wealth to support the United Nations food relief program, the hunger problem of 42 million people in the world due to the epidemic may be solved." This statement quickly attracted international attention and made people wonder. The superposition of the three forces of the epidemic impact, climate change and the long downward cycle of the economy has led to the emergence of new humanitarian disasters in the world, so in theory, the United Nations should first turn to the public sector of Member States, why should it turn to private institutions instead?

Musk infographic

In fact, there is precedent for such an approach. In the 1990s, the U.S. government's accumulated arrears to the United Nations for many years once reached more than a billion US dollars (the United Nations spent about 3 billion US dollars a year at that time), coupled with the increase in peacekeeping activities, humanitarian relief and other projects, the United Nations operations often did not make ends meet. Countries around the world have been demanding that the United States pay years of arrears to alleviate the lack of United Nations costs, but no matter how much the international appeal is, the Clinton administration at that time just ignored the arrears. Finally, American media magnate Tand Turner promised that if the U.S. government did not pay back, he, the taxpayer, would pay it back on behalf of the U.S. government, and he personally announced a $1 billion donation to support the United Nations and its cause. It also sets a precedent for cooperation between the United Nations and the business community. This time, David Beasley, administrator of the United Nations World Food Programme, is actually trying to revive the hunger problem of 42 million people through unconventional means. But this one-by-one approach is not institutionally sustainable.

An important reason why the United Nations machinery has been dysfunctional for the past 30 years is that the United States, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, felt that it could handle most of the world's affairs through unilateralism. For its part, the United Nations sometimes becomes a stumbling platform, so it is used when it is in its own interest and left aside when it is not needed. The pragmatism of the United States has led a very bad lead in the construction of international organizations, which has often caused headaches in many countries, including US allies.

Partisan politics in the United States also often interferes with the construction of the international public goods system represented by the United Nations and affects international cooperation. In the 1990s, when the Republican Party was running for the presidential nomination, there was a candidate named Patrick Buchanan, and one of the four important platforms he proposed was that if he won the presidential election, he would order the United Nations to move out of the United States on the first day of office. If the United Nations can't do it, he said, it will send Marines to help them roll up the mess. He won four states in a row, and finally Republicans joined forces to force him out of the race. By the time of the Trump administration, the United States had withdrawn from several specialized agencies of the United Nations one after another, repeatedly defaulting on its dues, and trying to turn the United Nations into a place for bargaining and forcible benefits.

As we all know, there are four engines for the revival and reconstruction of the international governance system after World War II, cooperation in the political system is the United Nations, cooperation in the field of trade is the International Trade Organization, cooperation in the field of development and reconstruction is the World Bank, and cooperation in the field of exchange exchanges and liquid payments is the International Monetary Fund. Later, FAO and the World Health Organization were supplemented. As technological advances and global trade have increased, the task of global cooperation and coordination has multiplied, but the extent to which these organizations' operating expenses, under the influence of the bad example of the United States, have become more inadequate.

How to help 42 million hungry people is only a cross-section of the problem facing the United Nations system, and it is necessary to find ways to provide relief to these people as soon as possible with the help of the private sector, but it is more important to think about how the solution of similar problems can be based on institutional guarantees.

The four-engine system of postwar reconstruction and reconstruction has been too slow to extend to a wide area and a deep level over the past 80 years. Human development has reached the 21st century, and the emergence of a networked sharing platform supported by digital technology has a new meaning of institutional construction. The technology platform itself is not only a public good, but also an interactive place for market competitive product units, "government-industry-learning-research-capital-business-media" seven of the most active areas of human economy entities, can break the original four walls of the original technical system on the new platform, and carry out integrated cooperation in the world. The "tightness-high-throughput-low latency-privacy protection" of the global digital network grid can also make new cooperation more efficient, allowing rescue to better solve many of the problems of human supranational cooperation in the sense of public-private cooperation. Cooperation among multilateral mechanisms should address at a higher level the issues of science and education culture, environmental protection, carbon neutrality and use, development divide, food safety, humanitarian assistance, space development and even the new digital development divide between national borders, guided by the concept of a community with a shared future for mankind. (The writer is a senior researcher at CITIC Foundation)