0.36% of Billionaires’ Wealth Could Save 42 Million People

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Telesur

It is time for billionaires like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk to “step forward now, just once,” and offer a minimum percentage of their wealth to address the problem of global hunger, said David Beasly, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program.

It would be enough for these people to offer 0.36% of their wealth to save the lives of around 42 million people, added Beasly, interviewed by CNN. The 64-year-old U.S. official, who has a long political career – he was governor of the state of South Carolina between 1995 and 1999 and, although he has been a member of the Republican Party for decades, he was originally a Democratic representative – specified that the amount needed to deal with this emergency is 6 billion dollars.

An example of the concentration of wealth is that 2% of Musk’s wealth would be enough to overcome the current food shortage, Beasly told the Connect the World program on the U.S. network, and reiterated that it is “6 billion dollars to help 42 million people who are literally going to die if we don’t help them. It’s not complicated. As reported by the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Musk has a net worth of almost $289 billion.

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Already in April, the UN Secretary General, the Portuguese António Guterres, had said that, in the last year, the wealth of the richest people in Latin America had increased by five billion dollars, and recommended for the region a “solidarity tax” for those who benefited during the coronavirus pandemic; he also called for a minimum emergency income for those who were left in the most vulnerable situations, a measure that some countries in the region adopted. This would prevent a long-term crisis, Guterres said at the time.

During the pandemic, extreme poverty in Latin America increased to 12.5% according to UN data, while the number of billionaires grew 31% in the region. On its web page, the international organization compares in size the increase in wealth of these people with the volume of Ecuador’s economy. Meanwhile, since the pandemic began in the United States, the wealth of billionaires has practically doubled.

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