Media Releases

Oxfam reacts to World Health Organisation announcement on Covaxin

November 4, 2021

In response to the announcement that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has granted emergency use for the COVID-19 vaccine, Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech in India, People’s Vaccine Alliance spokesperson and Oxfam Health Policy Manager, Anna Marriott, said:

“Another approved vaccine to fight COVID-19 is fantastic news. We strongly encourage Bharat Biotech to show pandemic leadership and do the right thing for humanity by agreeing to share the vaccine technology and rights with the WHO’s COVID Technology Access Pool, so that more manufacturers around the world can produce them.

“Today’s vaccine apartheid between rich and poor countries has been created by the monopolies of companies like Pfizer and Moderna who have consistently put obscene profits before saving lives and we urge Bharat Biotech not to follow in their footsteps.

“This decision should also silence those who have claimed that the experience and expertise to develop and manufacture life-saving medicines and vaccines do not exist in developing countries. Those claims were wrong for HIV two decades ago, and they are wrong now.”

A year since conflict erupted, nearly 7 million people still suffering in Northern Ethiopia

November 3, 2021

One year since conflict broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, almost seven million people there and in neighboring Amhara and Afar are reeling from the combined toll of violence, human rights abuses, hunger, locusts, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

With the conflict now spreading in Northern Ethiopia, many more vulnerable people are left without vital protections and resources. The need is growing exponentially, while the aid that could save lives and head off further catastrophe falls woefully short due to access restrictions and inadequate funding for the response.

According to the IPC’s food security figures, 400,000 people in Tigray are living in famine-like conditions. While the Ethiopian government has not endorsed these findings, their own figures show that close to 2 million people displaced in Amhara and Afar are in urgent need of aid.

Parvin Ngala, Oxfam’s Regional Director for the Horn, East and Central Africa said, “No matter how you measure this crisis, there is no disputing that hundreds of thousands of people are suffering in catastrophic hunger and even more are in urgent need of aid. Yet, what we have been able to provide so far is a mere drop in the ocean. Families desperately need food, clean water, shelter, and other essentials – and they also need to be able to safely return to work, have access to cash and fuel, and live in safety. There is so much more we can and must do, and we are committed. Now we also need a commitment from all parties to allow unfettered humanitarian access and the tools for the response, and the economy to recover.”

Humanitarians are witnessing first-hand the human toll this crisis is taking. People who have fled their homes have shared with Oxfam harrowing stories of losing their property, cattle, and food stocks and spending days hiding out in rough terrain without food, water, or shelter. Many farmers reported not being able to plant or harvest crops this year and having lost their animals due to the conflict.

The people of Ethiopia are doing all they can to support themselves and each other to survive, with communities hosting many of those who have been forced from their homes and sharing what little they have. As the conflict continues however, and resources become even more scarce, they need additional, urgent support now to meet their most basic needs.

“As is so often the case, those already facing incredible hardships are stepping up for others in need. We need global leaders to step up and provide the $255 million still urgently needed to help humanitarian organisations respond to the crisis. We also need to see leaders, especially in the region, use their influence to push for peace,” Oxfam’s Ngala said.

Oxfam has been responding to the crisis in Tigray and Amhara since November 2020 in partnership with local organizations, reaching close to 85,000 people with food, clean water, health, and sanitation services. Oxfam’s goal is to reach 400,000 people total, but that is being hampered by the severe risks and restrictions the humanitarian community is facing.

“As a humanitarian organization, our focus is working with local organizations and leaders to help save lives now and to prevent future crises. We are calling on all parties to do the same – and to prioritize the lives of Ethiopians now caught in this conflict,” added Ngala.

“Oxfam calls for all parties to deescalate the conflict and respect international law, to allow humanitarians to access the most vulnerable and to make cash, fuel, and other services available to allow the economy to recover and for the response to save lives. And above all, Oxfam calls upon all warring parties to reach a sustainable and inclusive peace before more lives are lost and this becomes yet another unheeded warning and stain on our collective conscience.”

Notes to Editors:

IPC food security data, often cited by the UN, can be found here: http://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/c/1154897/
Ethiopian Government assessments referenced: Transcript | Prime Minister’s Office Press Briefing – 26 August 2021 | Embassy of Ethiopia, London (ethioembassy.org.uk)
2 million people in need of food assistance https://reports.unocha.org/en/country/ethiopia/
7 million people are facing emergency levels of hunger in Afar and Amhara regions: https://reliefweb.int/report/ethiopia/wfp-completes-first-round-food-distributions-afar-and-amhara-still-lacks-necessary
Oxfam has been partnering with local organizations to deliver urgent aid including clean water, safe sanitation and hygiene, food, and more. We have reached nearly 85,000 people and aim to reach over 400,000 people.
Oxfam has been working in Ethiopia since the early 1970s to address the underlying causes of poverty and marginalization through supporting sustainable livelihoods, providing water, sanitation, and other humanitarian assistance, supporting agriculture, and working to addressing gender inequalities.

Reaction to Scotland announcement on Loss and Damage fund

November 2, 2021

Responding to the announcement that the Scottish Government has pledged £1 million (NZ$1.9 million) for ‘loss and damage’, Jamie Livingstone, Head of Oxfam Scotland, said:

“The First Minister’s announcement today is ground breaking recognition that funding to help certain people adapt to the climate crisis is utterly useless when their entire community has been wiped off the map.

“This announcement is welcome acknowledgement that for some communities around the world, talk of limiting the damage of climate change has already come far, far too late. In many places, climate change has already caused irreversible damage to people’s homes, lives and livelihoods. Despite this grim truth; world leaders have continued to duck calls to establish a new funding mechanism for loss and damage. Other countries must now follow Scotland’s lead and offer dedicated financial support to countries where lives have already been lost and ruined because of climate change.”

In addition, Alex Johnston, Oxfam Aotearoa Campaign Lead, said:

“We congratulate Scotland for recognising the devastating impacts of climate change on climate vulnerable countries, and being the first developed nation to commit to making an explicit financial contribution to tackling the loss and damage climate breakdown creates.

“Pacific Islands have been calling for loss and damage finance to be addressed globally for over 30 years. Despite efforts to adapt, climate-charged cyclones and flooding causes asset losses worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the Pacific each year. It is crucial other world leaders follow suit and recognise that these events need distinct funds to recover from.

“We call for the New Zealand government to follow Scotland’s lead and scale up financial support to existing loss and damage finance solutions in the Pacific with new commitments, and label this support as loss and damage, not adaptation finance. The government should also align with Pacific Island Countries’ positions on loss and damage at COP26 to get a global response to this issue.”

Oxfam criticises lack of G20 bold action to tackle vaccine inequality, climate change, and promote a fair economic recovery

November 1, 2021

At the end of the G20 Summit in Rome, Italy, Oxfam panned the lack of bold and effective action from the world leaders at such an important moment in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Despite the amazing coffee in Rome, G20 leaders must have been drinking decaf, as their collective results were muted, unambitious, and lacking concrete action plans,” said Oxfam’s Senior Advisor, Jörn Kalinski. “This G20 was supposed to be a key global moment for shaping effective, innovative and equitable responses towards a post-COVID world, but world leaders failed to come together and deliver the necessary action to the historic crisis still unfolding.”

While the G20 intend to help get at least 40% of the population in all countries vaccinated by the end of 2021 and 70% by mid-2022, they did not take the concrete action to put us on the path to deliver on that goal, such as a plan to boost the supply of vaccines in developing countries and remove relevant supply and financing constraints. According to the World Health Organization, 82 countries are at risk of missing that target. It is clear that we will not get there if we perpetuate the current profit-driven approach of insufficient donations of doses, voluntary licenses, generic support for technology transfer which has crashed and failed miserably.

“What an abysmal and total failure of leadership. The G20 talk of helping to reach the 70% vaccination target but yet again produce absolutely no plan to achieve it. At this stage in the pandemic for them to have requested health ministers to simply ‘explore’ ways to accelerate vaccine access is a sickening insult to the millions of people who have lost loved ones to this catastrophic pandemic and to the health workers on the front line trying to save lives with no protection,” said Kalinski. “Paltry and unfulfilled promises of donated doses will not end this pandemic, nor will pathetic hopes that greedy pharmaceutical corporations will at some point volunteer to do the right thing. It is scandalous that Germany and the UK have acted to silence the majority of the G20 members who support the breaking of pharmaceutical monopolies so that vaccine production can be redistributed and scaled up across the world. It is beyond time that the rights and the recipes for these lifesaving tools were shared as global public goods.”

As the world’s largest economies and emitters, the G20 should have provided the lightning bolt that the COP26 climate talks so desperately need. Instead, they responded with vague promises and platitudes.

“Confirming the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement was a minimum requirement. Without a promise to revise their lacklustre national climate plans to be in line with this goal, it is meaningless,” said Kalinski. “The planet is on fire, and we are running out of time. It is now critical that COP26 agrees to send all countries back to the drawing board to scale up their climate plans immediately, and not in five years’ time.”

The half-hearted words on financing adaptation in vulnerable countries were again not backed up by timeframes or targets. Without these, poorer nations will continue to lack the resources they need to protect lives, homes and businesses from weather disasters. This was a missed opportunity to re-invigorate the $100-billion climate finance target that should have been met last year.

One of the few positives is the promise to stop financing new coal power plants overseas by the end of this year. But it is disappointing that there was not a similar announcement on domestic coal power and on phasing out other fossil fuels altogether with rich nations taking a lead. This means that climate-killing coal power plants can be built for another ten years, which is incompatible with the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C.

G20 leaders also had the opportunity to pursue a more equitable economic recovery and there was growing hope that leaders would take bold action on debt relief. Mounting debt in developing countries poses a considerable threat to the fight against COVID-19, as it represents a clear opportunity cost to resources that should be channeled to public health and economic recovery. However, these hopes were dashed.

“There is no credible reason for rich countries and companies to continue extracting resources from the world’s poorest countries and people during an unprecedented global catastrophe,” said Kalinski. “Ad hoc approaches with strong biases towards the borrowers should be left to the past. Instead, we need to establish an international, autonomous, framework to oversee temporary standstills and handle debt restructuring, thus ensuring poor countries are not using their limited resources to pay off their debts instead of helping their citizens cope with the pandemic.”

Oxfam welcomes the general SDR allocation that the G20 agreed to earlier this year to address the huge liquidity needs associated with the pandemic and the post-crisis recovery and it is good to see the G20 stating an ambition of channeling USD 100 billion worth of SDRs to more vulnerable economies; this should be a bare minimum given the massive gulf between what rich countries and lower income countries received. This must now be operationalized through individual country commitments which are still sorely lacking, and crucially this funding must be delivered on terms that work for countries and their people.

“Recalling that rich countries received USD 400 billion in SDRs this year, we need to see them now make individual commitments to meet, if not surpass, the USD 100 billion commitment on SDR channeling. Today the pledges only amount to USD 45 billion, less than half of the global ambition,” said Kalinski. “Moreover, how the channeling is done is of fundamental importance. We don’t want to see funding that locks countries into high debt payments or into risky conditionality that could worsen inequalities. Moreover, SDR channeling absolutely cannot be a substitute for existing aid and climate finance commitments”,

The G20 Leaders also endorsed the OECD/G20 global tax agreement that Oxfam says is far from historic and displays a far too moderate level of ambition and little fairness. While the agreement proves it could have been possible and realistic to tax large corporations on their global profits, the envisaged profit redistribution is extremely limited and less than one hundred mega corporations will be in scope. It could generate just 10 million Euro on average in extra revenues for 52 of the poorest countries and comes with the conditionality to remove all the existing digital services taxes. The minimum tax rate set at 15% with generous carve outs is a joke: rather than curbing the harmful tax competition, it normalizes low-tax jurisdictions and risks to transform the current race to the bottom into the race towards the new minimum.

“At the G20 Summit in Rome, G20 leaders could have taken urgent action to dramatically scale up manufacturing and access to COVID-19 vaccines around the world, promote a fair economic recovery, lower dangerous greenhouse gas emissions, and help the poorest countries adapt to the climate change already happening,” said Kalinski. “The bottom line is that this Summit failed to deliver much of anything for people, planet or prosperity.”

Oxfam Aotearoa: NDC announcement a betrayal to Pacific Island countries

October 31, 2021

The New Zealand government’s NDC announcement is a betrayal to Pacific Island countries and those on the frontlines of climate change says Oxfam Aotearoa Executive Director Rachael Le Mesurier. The Government’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) target sets the bar for New Zealand’s contribution to keeping global warming within 1.5 degrees under the Paris Agreement. However, Le Mesurier says that the target is not good enough:

“Let’s be real here, this is not our fair share. The government has changed the way they count our emissions reductions to make them look like they are doing more than they are. This is a government that has said time and again that climate change is our nuclear-free moment. Instead of leading the fight against climate breakdown, they are hiding their inaction by changing the goal posts.

“Our previous target was to reduce emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 on an emissions budget basis. The Climate Change Commission (CCC) recommended that to be consistent with 1.5 degrees, New Zealand’s new target needed to be ‘much more than 36 per cent’ measured on an emissions budget basis, yet it is only 41 per cent,” Le Mesurier said.

Rather than showing the ambition we need, what the government have done today is change the way they measure their emissions from an emissions budget basis to a point year basis. This means they can make it look like they have increased the target by more than they have.

Last year, an Oxfam report found that to meet its fair share, New Zealand’s updated target needed to be between 80–133 per cent emissions reductions below 1990 levels by 2030. Le Mesurier says that the government has had all the science, advice and the tools to get this right, but this time has failed Aotearoa, failed our Pacific whanau and failed as a global citizen:

“We’ve shown that we can play our part in global efforts with a recent four-fold increase in climate finance for countries most vulnerable to climate change. But now we need to get our own house in order. Each Minister in Cabinet needs to take responsibility for that fact that our current plans for domestic action are completely inadequate. New Zealand is not taking the action necessary for the country to do its bit to protect our planet and our people from significant harm.”

Earlier this year the harrowing sixth IPCC report revealed human influence has warmed the planet almost beyond repair, issuing what the UN Secretary General called a “red alert” for humanity that world leaders must urgently act on.

“The New Zealand government has shown us today that they are not committed to limiting the worst effects of climate change for people on the frontlines, nor to keeping a 1.5 degrees future in reach. For that to change, some bold action needs to happen to tackle our industries with the biggest footprint domestically, including the agriculture sector.”

/ENDS

Notes:

New Zealand’s NDC target of 50 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 on a point year basis equates to 41 per cent on an emissions budget basis. This is a mere 5 per cent beyond the Climate Commission’s absolute bottom line.
The Government’s creative accounting is compounded by the fact that New Zealand continues to measure its net reductions against an inflated baseline by using gross emissions in 2005. On a net-net basis, this target is more like 27-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Oxfam Aotearoa is calling the new NDC target a “scandal” as the vast majority of it is being met by offshore carbon credits – no country in the world is planning to rely on these to the extent that New Zealand is to meet their NDC.
Ardern claims that this new NDC target is New Zealand’s fair share; however, it is not consistent with keeping global heating to 1.5 degrees under the Paris Agreement, let alone our fair share of effort

ILO report a “stark reminder” that vaccine inequality is “economic self-harm”, People’s Vaccine Alliance says

October 27, 2021

Responding to an International Labour Organisation’s report, “ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the World of Work”, campaigners have called global vaccine inequality “a collective act of social and economic self-harm”.

The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of more than 75 organisations including Oxfam, UNAIDS, Global Justice Now, and Amnesty International, is calling on governments to support a waiver of intellectual property rules on COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments at the World Trade Organisation, and to pressure pharmaceutical companies to share the technology and know-how behind their vaccines with the World Health Organisation.

Commenting on behalf of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, Alex Maitland, Oxfam’s Private Sector Senior Advisor:

“This report is a stark reminder that allowing COVID-19 to run rampant in the Global South is a collective act of social and economic self-harm that devastates jobs, businesses, and communities across the world. Women and young people have borne the brunt of job losses while pharmaceutical companies have reaped billions from vaccine monopolies.

“Governments like the UK and Germany, who are defending vaccine patents at all costs, must stop holding up the global recovery. If they want to avoid an ever-deepening global jobs crisis, they need to waive intellectual property on COVID-19 vaccines and force pharmaceutical companies to share their vaccine technology with the world.”