The cost of living crisis is ravaging the UK, where poverty had already risen sharply in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

By 2020, more than one in five people in the UK were living in poverty, including more than half a million children. What’s more, the proportion of people experiencing destitution, meaning they are barely able to survive, rose by more than 50% between 2017 and 2019.

One of the major factors driving poverty in the UK was the removal of state support for the most vulnerable through the ruthless austerity programme introduced by the Conservatives in 2010. But what about those parts of the world that experienced austerity much earlier than the UK?

I am referring to the countries in the Global South that were forced to implement brutal ‘structural adjustment programmes’ in the wake of the debt crisis of the 1980s. When the US raised interest rates in the 1980s to trigger a recession that would tame inflation by destroying working class living standards, many states in the Global South found themselves unable to service their loans.

Countries throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East were offered emergency loans from the IMF and the World Bank in exchange for implementing ‘free market’ reforms such as privatisation, deregulation, and cuts to public services and social security.

The results throughout the Global South were dire. In Africa and Latin America, poverty and inequality shot up and growth remained low for years to come.

Everywhere, the legacy of these reforms has been the annihilation of economic support for some of the poorest people on the planet. Then came the pandemic and the cost of living crisis.

One of the first macroeconomic implications of the ‘Great Lockdown’ was that states in the Global South once again found themselves unable to repay their debts.

Despite structural adjustment, and even with the limited programme of debt forgiveness introduced at the start of the new millennium, poor countries continued to see their debt soar. These states are kept permanently underdeveloped thanks to the dominance of US and European multinationals and neocolonial trade and investment policies stacked in favour of the Global North. Without reform to the world economy, the debt will continue to pile up.

Rather than forgive these debts when the pandemic hit, the ‘international community’ introduced a time-limited debt moratorium, which simply kicked the can down the road.

With national governments focused on keeping the lights on during the Covid-19 pandemic, support to the poor was weak and patchy at best. Research from the World Bank showed that extreme poverty increased in every country surveyed by an average of 0.9%. In sub-Saharan Africa, extreme poverty increased by 1.3%.

But it is the cost of living crisis that has truly hammered the living standards of the world’s poorest people. If people in the UK, which despite the best efforts of the Conservative Party still has a welfare state and social security, are being pushed into poverty by the cost of living crisis, imagine what this crisis must be like for the poorest people on the planet.

The inflation that is being driven by a combination of the recovery from the Great Lockdown and the war in Ukraine is driving up the prices of the very staples that these people rely on to survive. Rising food and fuel costs are pushing millions of people from poverty into outright destitution. Nowhere is this clearer than in Africa.

According to the International Energy Agency, 30 million Africans will no longer be able to afford the liquefied natural gas used for cooking across the continent by the end of the year. The World Bank, meanwhile, says that the number of Africans living in extreme poverty will increase from 424 million to 463 million in 2022 alone.

Times of hardship often stoke up feelings of nationalism that can make economic crises even worse. Just look back to the response to the 1930s: governments concerned about the impact of the Wall Street Crash introduced protectionist trade measures that ultimately turned the Crash into the Great Depression.

Today, there is a danger that the plight of people in the Global South will be forgotten in the face of the deep and real challenges afflicting those in our own country. Debt forgiveness, which alongside structural reform to the global trade system is the sine qua non of poverty alleviation globally, is extremely far down on global leaders’ agendas now.

Yet it is not simply a moral imperative to alleviate poverty in the Global South. In a globalised economy, workers around the world are all dependent upon one another—though this is easy to forget in a world parcelled up into inward-looking nation states. But if the Global South does not recover from this crisis, the Global North won’t either.