Economists: The G20 Presidency Must Be Able To FIND Solutions And ISSUE A Mitigation Policy For The Potential Food Crisis
JAKARTA - Director of the Center of Economic and Law Studies (CELIOS) Bhima Yudhistira stated that the Indonesian G20 Presidency must find solutions and issue policies to mitigate the food crisis that could potentially occur next year."Some G20 agendas need to be realized, one of which is efforts to mitigate the food crisis," he said, quoted from Antara, Saturday, October 29.Bhima said that the G20 Indonesia Presidency must participate in overcoming this crisis considering that the issue of food cannot be handled by each country so that there must be international collaboration.He mentioned that one of the policy steps as a solution to mitigate the food crisis that the G20 Indonesia Presidency can take is to reduce food export protectionism policies.In addition, the G20 can also provide greater financing to the food sector and cut food distribution by infrastructure and digitization."Regarding food cannot be handled by each country, there must be international collaboration," said Bhima.In addition to the food crisis, Bhima said the G20 needed to immediately encourage easy cross-border digital payments and local MSME access to export products using digital platforms." “Concept of regulations regarding MSMEs going digital in the G20 is quite positive," he said.This is considering that every time there is a global recession, it turns out that many workers switch to the MSME sector so that their sustainability must always be supported, including by the G20."So MSMEs as the backbone of the economy must get priority on the G20 agenda," said Bhima.Not only that, to suppress inequality due to the COVID-19 pandemic and so as not to be further depressed by the recession or food crisis, the G20 must immediately realize the international tax agenda in order to close tax evasion gaps between countries.He explained that the cost of post-pandemic economic recovery and facing an economic recession is quite large, so to cover costs in the form of stimulus and social protection, the answer is tax justice."“Global minimum tax effective in preventing tax evasion," he said.Finally, to reduce post-pandemic inequality, the G20 also needs to encourage wealth tax or wealth tax because credit suisse data shows that the number of rich people during the pandemic in Indonesia increased to 171,000 people or an increase of 62 percent.