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A Pandemic Is No Time for US Economic Sanctions

Jeffrey D. Sachs and Francisco Rodriguez examine how US sanctions make it impossible for vulnerable countries to tackle the coronavirus pand

Venezuelanalysis.com

It is no coincidence that Iran and Venezuela, two countries targeted by the US, are both being hit hard by the pandemic. Iran accounts for just 1.1% of the world’s population but an astounding 11.2% of COVID-19 deaths, while Venezuela appears to be on the verge of a massive outbreak, judging from the rapid spread of the disease since the first diagnosis in that country 12 days ago. American sanctions have weakened both countries’ health infrastructure by curtailing access to foreign exchange and the capacity to import key medical inputs. In Venezuela, studies show that financial and oil-sector sanctions have cost the Venezuelan economy at least $17 billion a year since 2017, or more than four times the country’s level of non-oil imports. While sanctions are far from the only cause of the economy’s collapse, they were the driving factor behind the massive contraction in 2019, during which Venezuela lost one-third of its GDP. As UN Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet warned last August, the sanctions “are extremely broad and fail to contain sufficient measures to mitigate their impact on the most vulnerable sectors of the population,” with “far-reaching implications on the rights to health and to food in particular.”

Sanctions have had a dramatic effect on Iran’s economy as well. Oil production plummeted by 1.8 million barrels per day, to almost half the pre-sanctions level, after the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal. Last October, Human Rights Watch reported that US economic sanctions were “causing unnecessary suffering to Iranian citizens,” and that the consequences for patients with rare diseases could be “catastrophic.” Iran now has the second-highest rate of mortality from COVID-19, second only to Italy. The US authorities disingenuously argue that the sanctions carve out exceptions for transactions related to humanitarian goods. Those who deal with Iran know that this is false. It’s like telling someone who has just lost their job and income that they can still go to a store and buy whatever they want. Moreover, economic sanctions not only reduce the targeted country’s capacity to pay for essential inputs; they also dramatically increase the regulatory and reputational risk of doing any business whatsoever with that government. Almost all private-sector firms thus decide not to take the gamble – or to charge high fees for doing so.

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US economic sanctions have caused millions of people to suffer, and soon they could kill tens of thousands, if not far more. Exacerbating civilians’ suffering to try to change their government’s conduct is ethically wrong and prohibited by international law. Pursuing this strategy during the worst health crisis the world has faced in modern times demonstrates reckless disregard for human life and contempt for the norms of civilized behavior.