This result of the two-day forum (Thursday and Friday) convened by France’s President Emmanuel Macron with around 40 heads of state and government present is not surprising, because the name of the event indicated that the question is whether the responsible and the beneficiaries of the current arrangement are ready to respond to the claim.
No country should be forced to choose between reducing poverty and protecting the planet, the host president said in the high-level dialogue concluding the summit at the Palais de la Bourse in Paris, where he unsurprisingly took the biggest critique from the Bretton -Woods institutions.
Macron saw the meeting as a sign of the beginning of the road to building a new architecture, “with new tools and methods, more money and reforms in its institutions”.
However, nothing really suggests that the countries of the South, trapped in poverty, underdevelopment and a lack of resources to tackle climate change, can call the summit a success or expect things to be any different than today.
Almost always smiling, the Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, referred to the need to proceed step by step in the face of the risk of haste when African leaders called for more funding for developing countries, on top of the 100,000 million dollars, promised to the poorest.
The President of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, spoke on behalf of the Group of 77 plus China at the meeting about the urgency of the situation and the need for political will on the part of decision-makers to change the prevailing scenario.
“I am giving no secret when I claim that the worst consequences of the current deeply unfair, undemocratic, speculative and exclusive international economic and financial order are hitting developing countries harder,” warned the pro tempore president of the bloc, which joins 134 of the 193 member states of the UN.
In this sense, he called for a review of the current fundamentals that determine North-South relations and coexistence on the planet, and urged leaders not to go down in history as those who do not make a difference in our common destiny could.
According to Díaz-Canel, the current financial architecture represents an obstacle to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, a criterion also presented at the summit by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.
“Our peoples can and must continue to be laboratories of colonial recipes and renewed forms of domination, using debt, the current international financial architecture and unilateral coercive measures to perpetuate underdevelopment and augment the coffers of a few at the expense of the South,” the Cuban leader said.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was also forceful when he claimed that the Bretton Woods institutions created after World War II are dysfunctional and do not correspond to society’s aspirations and interests.
The World Bank and IMF leave a lot to be desired in terms of people’s expectations. To be clear, he criticized sitting next to Macron at the conclusion of the forum for a new world financial pact.
The summit is already history, and the claim is that it certainly represents a starting point for a more just and supportive order in the face of unavoidable challenges, but the old players and the great powers must show concrete signs that they are ready for a rule change to accept.
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