Africa and the Monetary System

No African country or region was participating the recent Washington Financial Conference of the G20 group. However, they are the ones that are most affected by the present financial and economic downturn or recession. It is a question of procedural and social justice that would given them have a voice in these deliberations, which, unfortunately, are taking place outside the UN gambit.

It is high time that the IMF and the World Bank not only be reformed, but transformed into a Keynesian monetary system of balance between nations with a trade surplus or trade deficit. George Monbiot of the Guardian in his post of November 18 entitled “Clearing Up the Mess” not only shows how the present system came into being, but also how the Keynesian system can work now.

However, there is one major modification I would make to the Keynesian system which would be of great benefit to African countries and other countries in the South.

The new system has to include the ecological debt and credit among nations. A country’s social trade balance as is being proposed in the Keynesian “bancor” proposal is to be augmented with its ecological trade balance. The integrated of both trade balances can be expressed in “terra” the Latin word for Earth.

This Terra integrated monetary system becomes the more urgent as the climate crisis deepens and a system has to be put in place that is historically based and ethically strong. Substantial work has to be done on UNFCCC’s Article 3 dealing with the shared and differentiated responsibilities of countries and regions in the global North and South.

It is up to African regions and other Third World groupings to claim their rightful place in these ongoing economic, financial, and monetary deliberations and push for these deliberations to include the ecological balance sheet as a matter of social, economic and ecological equity. It is this integrated view of ethics which can be called sustainability ethics that humanity has to progress to and which is being reflected in the people’s covenant called the Earth Charter. It is its frame of reference of the community of life rather than a narrow anthropocentric frame that will lead humanity to new thinking and new institutions.