COVID-19 Crisis and Long-Term Transformations: Alternatives From India

Summary

Will the Government of India listen to us, or go back to business as usual, content to handle the next emergency in the same kneejerk manner?

While the most urgent measures to contain the Covid-19 virus and its impacts are the highest priority, we need to also think of and initiate long-term measures that help prevent such disasters in the future. Otherwise we will be staggering from one pandemic to the other; we’ve had many over the last 100 years, and many more are predicted if the conditions creating them continue as now.

The statement recommends that we “strengthen local, self-reliant economies.” Economic globalization has not only significantly enabled the spread of disease vectors and pathogens like Covid-19, but it has also devastated ecosystems and ecosystem-based livelihoods, unleashed abysmal levels of inequality, and created fragility in the economies of nearly all countries.