By: Staff Writer
March 15, 2022
The economic impact from the COVID-19 pandemic has been stronger for Central America and the Caribbean than anywhere else in the world states a United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) report.
ECLAC in their latest report, A decade of action for a change era, highlighted concerns for the region trying to achieve goals for the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. The report said: “Since 2020, efforts to assess progress towards meeting the 2030 Agenda have had to be undertaken amid the constraints imposed by measures to address the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Our region has been especially hard hit: it accounts for much higher percentages of COVID-19 infections and deaths than it does of the world population, and the ensuing deterioration in the countries’ economic and social conditions in 2020 was the worst seen in over a century.
“The recovery in 2021 not only failed to recoup the large job losses, particularly for women, but also occurred within the constraints of a development pattern that had already shown its limitations and low growth before the pandemic, and amid new inflationary pressures that erode the real income of much of the population. Broadly speaking, the region has returned to the path that led it into the extreme vulnerability from where it had to face the health crisis: high levels of poverty, limited capacity to create quality jobs, low productivity and low technological intensity of production, and a production and consumption model that still fails to internalize environmental externalities. All this in a context of social exclusion and the prevalence of a long-ingrained culture of privilege.”
The report also said: “Of the four Goals linked to education, gender equality and marine and terrestrial biodiversity shows that the effects of the pandemic have further impeded progress towards the targets set for 2030. Three, often invisible ‘silent crises’ are still at play: the loss of more than a year of classroom schooling for an entire generation of students, the increase in gender-based violence and in the unequal gender distribution of care burdens, and the exacerbation of biodiversity destruction as a result of illegal activities, often combined with killings of environmental defenders. Despite these harsh realities, the countries of the region continue to support the implementation and follow-up of the 2030 Agenda through a growing number of voluntary national reviews and, increasingly, voluntary local reviews, reflecting the increased importance of the territorial dimension of sustainable development.”
The report also said: Effective responses to these questions require political agreements ensuring national, regional and global cooperation. The serious asymmetries regarding vaccination, financing, concentration of wealth, income, technology, climate action and the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity cannot be solved unilaterally and without cooperation, since in most cases there are externalities that prevent such unilateral responses from being effective.” It also noted, however, “these agreements are difficult to reach, which increases uncertainty about the future. Moving towards sustainable development requires overcoming the strength of the short-term interests of small, concentrated but very powerful groups, in favour of the broader (and difficult to organize) long-term interests of the majority.”
The report laid out several key initiatives policy makers must undertake to get back on track for the 2030 Sustainable Agenda mission. It said that Multilateralism, international financing and regional integration is important just as crafting sound public policy to respond effectively to further fallout from the pandemic is critical.
The report also said that resilient institutions are needed in building up the institutional framework for reducing country vulnerability to disasters and also the region must commit to solving conflicts and create new social compacts.
“The main challenge going forward is therefore political and institutional: the challenge of closing performance and legitimacy gaps. The diagnosis and the road map are clear. So, too, are the costs of ignoring the signals sent by the economy, the environment and inequality. Recovering multilateralism and international cooperation, achieving convergence and institutional strengthening of regional integration schemes, and forging agreements on the objectives of productive transformation based on sustainability and equality in each country, are all convergent strategies and complementary measures to surmount the crisis and redress imbalances,” it said.