The G77+China summit, which brings together 134 countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America, representing 80 percent of the world’s population, It began this Friday in Havana with a call to “change the international economic rules.”
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About thirty heads of state and government attend this meeting with the presence of Alberto Fernández, president of Argentina; Gustavo Petro, from Colombia; Nicolás Maduro, from Venezuela and leaders from other regions such as Asia, Africa and Arab countries. The Brazilian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrived at night.
When opening the summit, the president of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, said that after “all the time that the north accommodated the world to its interests (…) it is now up to the south to change the rules of the game.”
Díaz-Canel pointed out that the majority of the nations that make up the G77+China are victims of “the current multidimensional crisis that the world is suffering.” of the “cyclical imbalances in trade, international finance and abusive unequal exchange”, as well as the effects of climate change.
He condemned an “international architecture” that is “hostile to the progress” of southern nations.
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For its part, The Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, during his speech spoke out for a “more representative” world and that better responds to the needs of developing economies.
Currently, southern nations are “entangled in a tangle of global crises,” he said, believing that the “world has failed developing countries.”
At the Havana conclave, which addresses “current development challenges: role of science, technology and innovation,” Guterres congratulated Cuba for the development of its own vaccines during the Covid 19 pandemic.
The group, created by 77 countries in 1964, expanded to include 134 nations, while China participates externally. and is represented at this summit by Li Xi, member of the standing committee of the political bureau of the Communist Party of China.
Delegations from a hundred countries attend the meeting, including Iran, Qatar, Angola, Rwanda, India and Sri Lanka and the Palestinian territories.
Argentine President Alberto Fernández said that the coronavirus pandemic, among other factors, marked a change of era by “exposing inequality” in countries’ access to vaccines.
“There came a climactic moment that was the moment the pandemic revealed the inequalities that exist in the world” when “90% of the vaccines were in the hands of 10 countries and 90% of humanity traveled the world looking for vaccines “.
In that sense, he considered that the G77+China have a “huge tool because in the global south there is what the central world is needing”, such as food and lithium from South America, as well as the energies of the Arab nations.
“We have a huge opportunity to demand equality,” he said.
For its part, Colombian President Gustavo Petro proposed “a universal negotiation” to reduce the debt of poor countries and thus have “public funds that allow us to pay for the transition to a decarbonized economy”
‘An austere summit’
In July, the head of the UN defined the G77 as “the voice of the Global South” and “the largest group of countries on the international stage”, highlighting the “multiplicity of summits” that are occurring in different regions as a “reflection of the growing multipolarity of our world.
Guterres has just participated in the high-level meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in August in Johannesburg, and of the main economies, grouped in the G20, last week in New Delhi.
For Cuba, the organization of this event is an opportunity to deploy its diplomatic capacity, despite the difficult crisis it faces, the worst in three decades, due to the slow economic recovery after the pandemic, the reinforcement of Washington’s sanctions against the island and structural weaknesses in the country’s internal economy.
The country hosts the event “making a great effort amid the very difficult conditions in which the Cuban economy finds itself today,” said the head of diplomacy of the Caribbean country, describing the meeting as an “austere summit.”
“It is difficult not to recognize that despite the difficulty of the moment, Cuba has been recognized as a valid interlocutor,” Arturo López-Levy, visiting professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid and expert in international relations, told AFP.
For a month now, workers have gone out to paint the famous underwater tunnels that link municipalities of Havana and restored the deteriorated pavement of the main avenues of this capital.
The streets are this week taken over by a strong road system that speeds up the transit of the fast official delegations. Luxurious hotels in Havana, almost always half empty due to the slow return of tourism to the island after the pandemic, have regained their shine with the delegations that occupy their rooms these days.
AFP
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