Bernardo Kliksberg.
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to economist Daron Acemoglu. Author of numerous texts, he has preached the decisive importance of democratic institutions for the proper functioning of the economy. He has shown that countries with stable and inclusive institutions have found in them the most favourable context for development. His reflections have been disseminated internationally and encourage participatory practices and the search for equitable economies.
Recent data on Latin America show both serious dilemmas and promising trends that merit taking Acemoglu's thinking into account. Firstly, the continent repeatedly demonstrates the innovative capacity of its youth. Two indigenous Mexican teenagers from one of the poorest states, Oaxaca, have just won the Youth Nobel Prize for social innovation. At their secondary school, they developed research to remove chemical impurities from the main product that the artisans of their town produce with their hands. They use coloured dyes for this, and the students managed to create a filter system that eliminates the chemical waste they leave behind.
A report by ECLAC (2024) on Latin America shows that despite acute problems, average poverty has been reduced slightly. Social protection networks have been key to this. It is estimated that their strengthening in Brazil, in the last two years of Lula's administration, has significantly improved the social figures of the most populous country in the region. If these figures are taken out, the improvement in poverty almost disappears. It is still very present through the persistence of extreme poverty, which is 10%. But there is still a lot to do, because inequality, the central cause of poverty in such a rich continent, remains stuck at a high Gini coefficient of 0.45.
With better economic and social management, the figures could improve significantly given that the region has a third of the planet's clean water, huge reserves of strategic minerals, including some essential minerals for new technologies such as lithium, and very favourable agricultural and geo-economic conditions.
Water Stress
The continent has the greatest biodiversity on the planet, including 600 varieties of cereals, and uses only a few of them. One of the difficulties in its development is water. The Amazon, which runs through 6 countries, is the richest group of tropical forests and jungles in the world. It has ideal conditions for generating rain, and absorbs a large amount of poisonous gases produced by the contamination of solid fuels that are transformed into carbon dioxide, which has raised global warming to historic highs. However, predatory practices, deforestation, intentional fires caused by spurious interests, illegal mining, and the boundless greed of groups with great economic power, are contributing to drying up the Amazon. 420.000 children from the indigenous communities that inhabit it cannot attend classes because the river has lost much of its flow. 1700 rural schools and numerous health centers have closed, and the indigenous people demand protection. They are the ones who know best how to take care of it, and they do so with complete dedication.
At a special UN Assembly, 169 countries have finally approved a statute with numerous safeguards to defend them from permanent ecological crimes.
Teachings of Israel
An expert country, which is a must-see for successfully dealing with the issue of water, is Israel. Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres used to say “it is a nation that has only one river, the Jordan, full of biblical stories, but with very few cubic centimeters of water.” Almost desert-like, it had to become an “inventor of water,” which it fully achieved with technologies such as collecting every drop of water, sprinkler irrigation, desalination and comprehensive recycling. Today, it has added the conversion of air into water and artificial intelligence. Its technical cooperation with Latin America has contributed greatly to the continent.
Latin America has great potential ahead of it, but new solutions will be required, such as the Amazon drainage proposed by Brazilian environmentalists, the effective implementation of an alliance of Amazonian countries, full support for the inclusive institutions mentioned by the 2024 Nobel Prize winner, and an economy focused on the well-being of people, such as that advocated by ECLAC, the IDB, the CAF, the UNDP and Pope Francis, among others.
(*) Advisor to various international organizations. Doctor Honoris Causa from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His new work “Where is social responsibility going in the world” appeared (2024, Council of the Judiciary of the City of Buenos Aires). kliksberg@aol.com
Numerous articles have appeared in newspapers such as El País, listing the atrocities committed in Brazil by large fascist landowners or criminal bosses, who above all had carte blanche with the recent far-right governments of Bolsonaro, who in turn received many votes from the lower classes thanks to the very manipulative evangelical Christian sects, these in turn associated with Brazilian mafias, using coercive and criminal methods to achieve their goals. All this while citizens of all countries are becoming more aware of ecology every day that passes, due to the obviousness of climate change and the increasingly frequent natural disasters, dismantling the usual denialist discourse of the right and far-right parties.
The worst example among Western European countries is Spain. Not only is it the most classist Western country or the one with the greatest social differences, it is practically still a feudal country with a very small privileged class and followed by medieval guilds based on clientelist relations. In addition, there is no country more neglected in matters of ecology. The right and the extreme right, or Spanish businessmen, keep the Spanish people in the dark with the approval of politicians. For example, even though it is one of the countries with the most hours of sunshine per year, it is also one of the countries with the fewest individual solar energy installations. Only in the last few months has there been some movement regarding government subsidies and advertising campaigns by some companies. The situation for electric vehicles is much worse. They are hardly ever seen in Spain except in the two major capitals, Madrid and Barcelona. Most Spaniards only see them in television and other media adverts. Furthermore, the few owners cannot find a network of chargers comparable to those in European countries. Many of them are of very low power, and are almost just there to appear on the map because they are useless for charging the battery of a normal electric car. Even with government subsidies, Spaniards are not encouraged to buy them, not even for the cheapest motorbikes or mopeds. On social media, the right and the far right have managed to get their voters and young people to create a public opinion that is mostly anti-electric, or that prefers petrol, smoke and making a lot of noise, like fools.
In Spain there is also a region that has become the greenhouse of Europe, the south-east of Spain, which has the dubious honour of having the largest man-made construction that can be seen from space, the so-called sea of plastic, an infinity of vegetable greenhouses stuck together. This also serves as a nest for fascists, racists and quite a few neo-Nazis, always protesting to all governments about the competition from Morocco, while the supposedly very buoyant economy of the region due to this ultra-intensive agriculture, in reality only makes a few rich, with quite a few fascist illiterates, and the bulk of the population is made up of unskilled immigrants who work for low wages or illegally with black money, and even the majority of Spaniards earn barely 15.000 euros/dollars per year per family, according to official statistics that have been published. That is not to mention the criminal mafias, prostitution, drug trafficking, etc. However much the local fascists want to sell the image of decency, without forgetting that this region has the lowest cultural level in Spain, or we must not forget that this nonsense arose from a great project of the fascist dictatorship, one of the various ones that they created doomed to failure or for the enrichment of a few corrupt fascists, but which in this case was continued by a very corrupt local landowner, now honoured in the area. Clearly the Spanish region has reached levels of overexploitation that are not very coherent, and are not at all ecological as they dare to sell it, but nobody dares to criticise the manipulations and violence of the few interested parties and their very interested or paid followers.