A Just Solution For Sustainable Development

In the run-up to the G20 Summit and Rio+20 UN Conference, global activists have joined together to call on world leaders to adopt a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions to promote global health, to sustainable human and environmental development, and to help manage global capital flows.

Financial Transaction Taxes could help save lives all over the world

Currently, global funds developed to fight poverty and global health problems are shrinking. Money raised from Financial Transaction Taxes (FTT) can help to plug these gaps, for example by helping the Global Fund to continue fighting AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. An FTT would have the capacity to tackle the global health gap; resources for promoting gender equity and women’s rights; money to fight the devastating effects of climate change. And crucially, it could save millions of lives by feeding the world’s hungry.

In addition to the social and environmental benefits, an FTT would help better monitor and manage capital flows, averting large problems such as capital evasion, high-speed speculative transactions and derivation.

In social justice we trust

The time is now for an FTT for health, education, gender equity programs, poverty eradication projects, and environmental solutions. It will also support proper regulation of a financial system which has run amok, deregulated to the extent that it has unbalanced its very own structural basis through successive crises.

The economic crisis has destroyed much of the social fabric in countries across the world, spreading human and environmental vulnerability while satisfying the whims of extremely well paid money managers and financial institutions. Is this just? We don’t think so.

Additional funds for sustainable development

We have a responsibility to keep pushing for a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions which will help regulate financial markets while creating urgently needed additional funds for sustainable development.

Taxes on big capital could raise billions of dollars to help the poorest and most vulnerable in the world. In 2012, the G20 and the Rio+20 Conference leaders have a big role to play in taking the tax forward and making an FTT a reality.

Written by: Alessandra Nilo (LACCASO), Claudio Fernandes (Gestos, Brazil)

This blog originally appeared on Action for Global Health.