Alejandro Nadal, a Giant in Global Conservation

The following tribute to Alejandro Nadal appeared in La Jornada newspaper in Mexico, penned by his longtime editor at the paper. It highlights work Alejandro did on the economics of the illegal wildlife trade, one of the many areas in which Nadal left his indelible mark.

By Luis Hernández Navarro, La Jornada, March 24, 2020

On 13 April 2012, the King of Spain, Juan Carlos de Borbón, stumbled into Botswana, broke his hip and dented his crown. The setback initiated the political decline that would culminate in his abdication to the throne. The monarch was in that African country accompanied by his lover on an elephant hunting safari.

Killing elephants is not a crime in several African countries. Every year 35,000 pachyderms are killed on the continent, on average one every 15 minutes. This figure, to which natural mortality must be added, already exceeds the birth rate of elephants, which are in danger of extinction.

These pachyderms—explained Alejandro Nadal Egea, who died last March 16th—are not hunted, they are actually killed. They are animals that live in community, very intelligent, with an exemplary way of life, exceptional in the animal kingdom, from which we must learn. They suffer for their dead, they have a history. A matriarch—for example—can remember the watering hole to which she led her family 30 years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »

Informal Workers in the Time of Coronavirus

By C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

Republished from Network IDEAs; originally published in the Business Line on March 24 2020.

The global devastation caused by Covid-19 is only just beginning, with the severe threat to public health worsened by the evident inability to cope of most health systems across developing and developed countries. Many states across the world appear to have realised the serious potential of this pandemic and have declared lockdowns, closures, partial curfews and curtailment of all but essential activities in efforts to contain the contagion.

The economic impacts of such lockdown are also just beginning to be felt, and will escalate in the coming months. The discussion on the economics of this pandemic has tended to focus on supply disruptions and the likely financial losses of companies, especially those in travel, transport and other services and manufacturing activities. Precisely because companies have more lobbying power and more political voice in general, they have already started clamouring for (and being offered) incentives, bailouts and other relief measures to allow them to cope with this crisis.

But in fact, the worst material impacts are already being felt by informal workers, who face a dismal spectrum of probabilities of loss of livelihood, from declining earnings among the self-employed to job losses among paid workers. These are likely to get much worse in the coming months. Even so, barring in just a handful of countries, very few governments have declared strong measures to cope with these effects—and therefore they are letting loose forces that could be even more devastating for poor people across the world. In the worst-case scenario, this could even mean that more people could die from hunger and the inability to treat other problems than will do so because of the virus.

Read the rest of this entry »

Economic Crisis Was Foreshadowed Before the Coronavirus

By Alejandro Nadal

Republished from La Jornada, March 11, 2020, with permission.

It is with great sadness that we announce that Alejandro Nadal, an economist, lawyer, professor at the Centro de Estudios Económicos (CEE) of the Colegio de México, and a longtime contributor to Triple Crisis blog, passed away on March 17 after a short time with fast-moving cancer. As former D&S co-editor and former Triple Crisis administrator Timothy A. Wise put it, “A great loss for us all, far too young and otherwise healthy and vibrant. Like Frank Ackerman. Tough times, just when we need those clear, critical minds most.”  This article was his last for the Mexico City daily newspaper La Jornada, where he was a columnist. It was submitted on March 10 and published on March 11, just six days before he died. Even though he wrote it almost two weeks ago and the news is moving so quickly, it still seems to capture powerfully the current moment and the economic context of the pandemic. The journal Sin Permiso, on whose editorial board Nadal served, has posted an obituary and tribute here, and has made available a pdf compiling some of his articles.  —Eds. 

Cycles and crises in capitalism can happen in an irregular way. This is part of the anomalous movement of an economy that is inherently unstable. The great crisis of 2008 was the result of such processes. And to bring an economy that has fallen into imbalance back to life, you need to inject it with liquidity in good quantities. For example, the monetary easing policy measures implemented by the Federal Reserve were felt before the crisis and their speculative effects began to spread throughout the economy from 2009–2010. Astronomical amounts went into the pension funds and treasury departments of large corporations, where they served to fuel global speculation. But what they did not do was promote investment and employment.

Read the rest of this entry »