The French president will have to stop convening useless summits at some point. The latest one, held on June 22nd and 23rd in Paris, was about the New Global Financial Pact. It was prepared for six months by his teams. And it must be said that it didn’t offer any solutions to the problems faced by developing countries, such as overindebtedness, poverty, and climate change. The countries in question spend five times more money on repaying their debt than they receive from Northern countries.
In Paris, the issue of debt was carefully avoided, as was the change in the global financial system represented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which should not be restructured or improved, but completely replaced. We are far from that, and with Joe Biden absent, staying comfortably in Washington, no one could address this issue. How can Macron develop a new global financial system without the presence of Joe Biden, the president of the wealthiest country in the world, without Xi Jinping, the second largest economy and holder of the most liquidity in the world, without the Prime Minister of Japan, without the British Prime Minister? Wasn’t the failure of such a summit predictable?
About forty heads of state made the trip to Paris, expecting a real awareness from developed countries, followed by concrete actions defined in order of priority according to a schedule to address the complaints of Southern countries, particularly in terms of annual climate-related losses estimated between 7 and 15 billion dollars, according to Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, the president of the African Development Bank (AfDB).
Unfortunately, the polluting countries once again showed a worrying lack of interest when they found themselves in the dock and had the opportunity to correct the consequences of their past actions.
Brazilian President Lula participated in the summit with his usual frankness: he is among the world’s great leaders calling for the dissolution of the IMF and the World Bank, which have become obsolete. This is not the opinion of his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron.
Only two African nations (out of the 80 countries present in Paris) come away with relatively good news. The first is Senegal, which has been granted a sum of 2.5 billion euros to increase the share of renewable energy in its energy mix to 40% by 2030. The second is Zambia, which, after three years of negotiations, has obtained debt restructuring from its creditors. To achieve this, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Lusaka on April 3rd to call for a “quick” resolution of the country’s debt. The realization of this action, which began in advance, was the Summit in Paris.
Apart from the gains made by these two countries, the only minor progress achieved in Paris is the agreement of lending countries to suspend debt service in the event of a climate catastrophe. Hopefully, we won’t have endless debates about the notion of a “climate catastrophe”.
For the rest of the African nations, as usual, they were given new (unfulfilled) commitments, added to the many past promises that were never realized, which they often struggle to remember. Indeed, in 2020, developed countries announced the provision, without any particular conditions, of $100 billion per year for Southern countries in response to climate action. Three years later, this unfulfilled promise suddenly became a limited support measure for African governments adopting green energies.
After recognizing that the success of the climate aspect of the new financial pact will revolve around the energy transition of Western countries and the development of major emerging economies beyond fossil fuels, Emmanuel Macron criticized the idea of canceling the debt of African countries, arguing that it would complicate their access to future financing. This is pure demagogy, as it is a general demand in Southern countries and even in some Northern countries. He failed to address the issue of increased taxation on polluting entities such as Total Energies, whose record profits are blamed as a direct result of the degradation of the planet’s ecosystem.
True to themselves, the West turns a deaf ear to Africa’s distress calls, and the Third World prefers to focus on its own problems rather than assume its responsibility. This attitude may prove counterproductive as the world order is being redefined, with the BRICS countries keen to propose an alternative to the dysfunctional systems put in place by the major powers since the Second World War.
The hope raised by the establishment of the BRICS Bank in Shanghai, chaired by former Brazilian President Dilma Roussef, is enough to worry Westerners in their congenital selfishness. Hence Macron’s insistence on wanting to attend the next BRICS Summit in Johannesburg at the end of August, in order to have an idea of its internal functioning and undermine it from the outside. But even if the current president of the BRICS, Cyril Ramaphosa, were in favor of such participation, it was closed off by Vladimir Putin, who said from Moscow that there was no question of admitting countries “hostile” to this summit. Implicitly, France.
