Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. A 0.3% tax would generate enough to secure life's necessities for many tens of millions of the world's most vulnerable. Photo: File
As host of this year’s G20 Summit, South Africa could help end one of the greatest injustices in the world today — the cavernous gaps in wealth and in access to life’s basic necessities. Most acutely, people living through humanitarian crises are dying for want of food and medicines because funding for aid agencies is wholly insufficient. Yet, our world is awash in wealth.
Nobel Peace Laureate and former World Food Programme executive director David Beasley said it best: “When you have got $400 trillion worth of wealth on the planet and the fact that anyone dies from hunger, a child, shame on us. We can do better than this.”
The G20 summit scheduled for 22-23 November, with the theme of “Solidarity, Equality, and Sustainability,” is the first to be hosted on the African continent. South Africa can meet the moment by proposing that the G20 endorse a humanitarian tax on the super-rich. This would build on last year’s G20 initiative to establish a global minimum tax standard for ultra-high-net-worth individuals. And it would come at a time of major aid cuts and an unprecedented funding shortfall for humanitarian assistance, with 2025’s UN humanitarian appeal little over 18% funded — more than $37 billion short — though we are well over halfway through the year.
This shortfall translates into food rations being cut to well below minimum daily human requirements, which can lead to people “slowly starving,” to children with the blank stare of acute malnutrition. It translates into a lack of lifesaving medicine, clean water, sanitation, and shelter. Children receive little or no education. Some refugees are even driven to take their own lives.
Those suffering are invariably among the world poorest and most vulnerable people — people who have survived genocide and mass atrocities in Sudan, who cannot get enough to eat in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, Somalian and Sudanese refugees in Kenya, and people living through dozens of other crisis situations. (Palestinian children are starving today not from a lack of funding but, most immediately from a depraved, criminal policy of the Israeli government.)
Governments have moral and human rights obligations to increase their funding, but between a highly parochial, ill-conceived “America First” US foreign policy, pressures to vastly increase defense spending in Europe, and economic uncertainty, even a return to recent levels of funding — themselves inadequate — are remote.
It would be wrong to yield to this unconscionable reality. If governments refuse to fund humanitarian needs, they must find another way. There could hardly be a fairer way than asking the world’s richest people to give a sliver of their wealth to save their lives and restore the dignity of the world’s poorest people.
The G20, whose members are home to the overwhelming majority of the world’s billionaires, would be the natural forum for nurturing a humanitarian assistance tax into existence. At last year’s Summit in Brazil, G20 leaders agreed to “engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” The revenue from the tax would go to national treasuries. Its rationale is to counter tax avoidance.
Using strategies not available to a typical taxpayer, the ultra-rich are able to earn vast fortunes that go virtually untaxed. Billionaires pay an effective tax rate equivalent to 0.3% of their wealth, compared to the taxpayer average of 1.1%.
To compensate, a paper commissioned for last year’s G20 proposed that ultra-high-net-worth individuals pay an annual tax equivalent to a minimum of 2% of their wealth. So, for example, a billionaire who paid 0.5% of their wealth through regular income tax payments would pay an additional 1.5% of their wealth to make up the difference.
This tax scheme would raise $200-250 billion annually. Extending this minimum tax to centi-US-dollar millionaires (people with a minimum net worth of $100 million) would generate an additional $100-140 billion.
The world now has slightly more than 3,000 US-dollar billionaires, with a total net worth of over $16 trillion. There is wealth enough to go around. Both the number and riches of the world’s wealthiest people continues to grow. Billionaires’ net worth jumped by $2 trillion from 2024 to 2025, while the number of billionaires increased by more than 200. Over the past decade, both the wealth and number of billionaires more than doubled. At current levels, South Africa’s economy would need 40 years to generate the wealth of today’s billionaires.
On average, billionaires enjoy a 7.5% annual pre-tax wealth increase (after inflation). With a minimum effective tax of 2% of their wealth in place, these super rich individuals would see their wealth increase by 5.5% year-on-year — $55 million for every $1 billion of wealth. That leaves plenty of room for them to continue to significantly increase their wealth while also paying a small humanitarian assistance surcharge.
And even a small tax for humanitarian assistance could make an enormous difference. A tax equivalent to 0.2% of ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ wealth and applied to all current billionaires worldwide would raise $23.5-29.4 billion. Increase the tax to 0.3% and include centi-millionaires, and it would raise at least $52.9 billion. That exceeds this year’s UN appeal and would also encompass much or all of a separate, partially overlapping World Food Programme appeal.
Consider the world’s worst displacement crisis, Sudan, with well over 12 million people refugees or internally displaced — and 25 million people experiencing acute food insecurity. Sudanese refugees in Chad receive food rations for a month that do not last the month, but buying food at the market gets ever harder as food scarcity sends food prices soaring. Some have no shelter, and sleep on dirt. Women must often walk for hours to get water. Many vulnerable refugees in Uganda must survive on fewer than 500 calories a day — if they get any food aid at all. Short on funding, the World Food Programme has had to stop supporting nearly a million Sudanese refugees in Uganda this year. And within Sudan, the funding shortage combined with a host of other factors, including insecurity and restricted humanitarian access, has forced some people to resort to eating dirt and boiled leaves, and even to suck on charcoal to try to quell their hunger.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If higher-income governments refuse to meet their responsibilities through regular budget processes, then they should meet them by imposing a humanitarian wealth tax. It is not too much to ask that the super-rich pay their fair share so that the world’s most disadvantaged people can live with the dignity due every human being.
Human dignity is the first right listed in South Africa’s Constitution. By pushing the G20 to endorse a humanitarian assistance tax on ultra-high-net-worth individuals, South Africa can breathe life into its highest value and share it with the world.
Eric A Friedman is the global health justice scholar at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-friedman-0b71b02/
Lawrence O Gostin is a distinguished university professor and founding O’Neill Chair in Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and co-faculty director of the O’Neill Institute. www.linkedin.com/in/lawrence-gostin-b46136348