Washington Post: More of the world has plunged back into poverty — and Trump’s leadership won’t turn it around
Editorial Board

“It is no exaggeration to say that the years since the Cold War’s end have been something of a golden age for poverty eradication around the world. … Now, tragically, the deep global recession due to the coronavirus pandemic has brought at least a temporary halt to the progress. … Once considered ambitious but plausible, the United Nations’ goal of reducing extreme poverty to a rate of 3 percent or less by 2030 could be slipping out of reach, absent ‘swift, significant and substantial policy action,’ as [a recent World Bank report] noted. Especially urgent is the situation in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, which account for the vast majority of the bank’s projected extreme-poverty increase. … Trump administration contributions to the World Food Program represent a bright exception to the ‘America First’ rule the president has set in other contexts, such as his threats to withdraw from the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization. Yet it will take much more, and more sustained, international cooperation to resume progress in global poverty eradication. And that, in turn, would require U.S. leadership to help overcome the strong incentives, political and economic, that the coronavirus creates for wealthier countries to turn inward. It would require, in other words, a very different kind of leadership than the Trump administration has provided for the past four years — or offers for the next four” (10/11).