Does Latin America exist? Héctor Abad Faciolince titled his intervention during the largest summit of development banks held this week in Cartagena de Indias with a question as disconcerting as it is existential. The Colombian writer left a cloud of reflection floating over the Convention Center and, through a literary sketch, made his contribution so that participants from the world of finance and economics could take the baton and refresh the old debate from their corner: “We lack a true story, a fiction, a credible invention that represents us before the global world and before ourselves,” said the author of The oblivion that we will be.
The first edition held in Latin America of the meeting named Finance in common ―four meetings have been held― has served as a prelude to mulling over three days a philosophical question like that of Abad Faciolince. And at the same time, give the impression that all the actors gathered were rowing in the same direction. At times it even seemed that the arduous task of explaining Latin America in a few minutes to a Japanese banker would not represent major inconveniences. Brazilian Natalia Dias, director of capital markets and sustainable finance at BNDES, He warned that it is a geographical area whose inhabitants have a much easier time recognizing its shortcomings than highlighting its qualities or opportunities.
“We have 40% of the world’s biodiversity,” the Brazilian listed, “10% of the coral reefs, 10% of the mangrove forests, one of the cleanest energy matrices in the world. And we are one of the biggest and best food producers.” A sum of factors that tend to jump easily in this type of appointment. But, in Dias’ opinion, they are essential to remember that the region must go from being the epicenter of all these advantages to turning them into competitive instruments as soon as possible. A good starting point, perhaps, to begin to weave the common story that the Colombian writer demanded.
The homework is difficult. It is a region where it is easy to fall, as the writer and anthropologist Carlos Granés explains, in a story haunted since the sixties by the narrative of suffering caused by “exploitation, domination or foreign oppression.” That is why Diego Sánchez Ancochea, professor of Economics and International Development at the University of Oxford, chooses to define the region as a laboratory of ideas.
in his book The cost of inequality explains that the structuralist current, which was born in the southern cone, produced “useful findings to understand challenges from other places in the world.” That economic theory also served to structure the Latin American manifesto that shaped the spirit of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a way of seeing the world that sought to distance itself from the middle of the last century. corpus Anglo-Saxon theorist to find answers rooted in the local terrain.
Since then, and despite a certain exhaustion of the macroeconomic formulas cepales, it was identified that an important part of underdevelopment was anchored to dependence on raw materials and technological backwardness. Two variables that, with few nuances, have not changed much and are still present among the three contemporary problems that extend from Mexico to Patagonia, according to the Colombian Ana María Ibáñez, vice president of knowledge and sectors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). ).
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“We are a region with persistent medium and high levels of inequality,” explains the economist. “Second, we have not achieved sustained periods of growth with good productivity and innovation. And third, we have a very high degree of informality, both labor and business.” The expert states that 50% of the population in the region works in labor markets, a figure that in the case of the Caribbean reaches 80%.
Phenomena exacerbated by the health crisis of the pandemic, with their own chapter in the construction of a common economic history. In fact, the academic Diego Sánchez Ancochea points out that, although these are difficulties that all countries in the world have suffered, the Latin American case of difference has lasted, with brief parentheses such as the rise of raw materials at the beginning 2000, for more than a century.
The major players in public development banking present in Latin America recognize the above almost in unison. Rodrigo Peñailillo, representative of the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF), concedes that behind the renewed initiatives in search of a regional economic narrative is the grayish climate horizon: “The situation cannot be improved in isolation. We must build more trust between countries, establish common purposes.” A diagnosis that extends to all multilateral banking: “Due to the magnitude of the projects that are now being undertaken, this cannot be done with the IDB alone on one side and the CAF on the other.”
It refers to some recent mega investment projects, labeled as green. In the Amazon, for example, the so-called Green Coalition, focused on governance issues and sustainable projects in both rural and urban areas; or on the Caribbean coast, where there are plans to recover marine fauna and promote marine research centers.
Experts agree that one of the ways to ward off apathy should be to focus on the solutions that the region can provide to the situation from its abundant natural resources: “Researchers, bankers, academics, businessmen,” says Carlos Granés, “they have to regain interest and ask themselves what the hell we are doing in the neighborhood.” And he answers with certainty to the question about the existence of Latin America: “There is not the slightest doubt.”
He also adds that there is a shared cultural history, which has drawn on the same influences, has become obsessed with the same ideas and the same “generally harmful” delusions. The worsening of climate change now serves as an unavoidable link for joint action by a group of countries that have historically faced a notorious lack of mutual knowledge.
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