Allow me, at the outset, to congratulate Mr. Csaba Korosi on his election as President of the General Assembly and to thank Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed for their courageous leadership and commitment in very difficult times.
This year we come together again and the battles continue; indeed, they have grown. What we have seen over the course of the summer and the course of this year with the war in Ukraine are the concomitant consequences for ordinary people all over the globe with respect to inflation, the scarce supply of goods and quite simply hardship. The struggle for access to food continues, regrettably, to be the environment in which we live.
I had hoped that we would have seen improvement, but I am now convinced more than ever that there comes a time when we must heed a certain call, like the one made when others before us, when I was a student, sought to fight the great famine in Africa and came together as one world to make that definable difference. Last year I asked us to do the same (see A/76/PV.12) and it may be, in the words of Jimmy Cliff, that we have to keep trying, trying and trying, but the world must stand up if our citizens are to live a better life.
I say this today because it is easy to come and only complain. However, the truth is that it is within our power to make that difference and that definable change. We must decide whether we want to stand for peace, love and prosperity, knowing that we choose to do so at the most difficult time and from the most difficult, deep place we have seen in a very long time. I believe it is possible, but it is up to us to turn possibilities into realities.
What do I mean? We have been speaking for a long time about the reform of this institution and the recognition that only one quarter of the States now in existence were present when this institution was formed. Earlier this week, President Biden spoke of the need to reform the Security Council (see A/77/PV.6). We echo that, but we go further because we believe that a Security Council that retains the power of the veto in the hands of a few will still lead us to war, as we have seen this year. Therefore, the reform must not simply address the Council’s composition but also remove the veto.
We also believe that if the Group of Seven and the Group of 20, in their capacity as the world’s informal governance subcommittee, are to be fair, they must recognize that we can no longer accept that persons have to call year after year for the inclusion of the people of Africa and of African descent. For how can the world have at its core a subcommittee that excludes more than 1.5 billion people of the world and then expect it to reflect fairness and transparency in its decision-making?
We ask that the determination be made by those countries, who must understand that if we are to move from possibilities to realities, we must embrace a transparent framework that allows our peoples, who are losing faith in their institutions and in the governance of the world, to understand that fairness means something — the ability for all to have a voice — and that we cannot only speak to it in the corridors of democracy within the nation State, and indeed it will be meaningful only when it is also reflected in our international community.
If I perhaps have one simple theme today, it is that fairness and togetherness are what is needed to bring about peace, love and prosperity in the world. No, that is not romanticism. Those are hard realities that simply require decisions. That is why I use the language of that great anthem We Are the World, because there comes a time when we must heed a certain call, when the world must come together as one.
Yes, regrettably, there are too many people dying in conflict and as a result of the economic crisis, and the hand that we must lend to life comes in the decisions that we must make to reform and to fight for peace and not to fight to sustain war wherever it is found around the world; to fight for reform so that our citizens are not made victims of poverty due to the triple crisis of climate change, the pandemic and now the conflict that is causing the inflationary pressures that have regrettably led to people taking circumstances into their own hands, as we have seen in Haiti in the last week.
Any attempt to increase fuel prices by 150 per cent in any part of the world would be met with great consternation and anger by populations on fixed incomes. But when that happens in one of the poorest countries in the world that has been trying for almost 230 years to find stability, against the backdrop of the exploitation that it has faced, we ask ourselves what it will take for the world to stand up and be counted for the people of Haiti.
Similarly, we ask for the same transparency with regard to the removal of the blockade against the people of Cuba. This is the thirtieth year in which a resolution has called for the removal of that blockade, but the blockade has been there for 60 years. I simply say to the people of the United States of America not to be short-sighted in their goals, for in this hemisphere peace and prosperity is the province of all. Yes, there may be problems on both sides, but there is nothing that justifies further hardship for people because of ideological differences. If there are human rights differences, let us resolve them, as we have chosen to do with mighty countries across the world without the imposition of sanctions. Fairness and transparency demand it of us.
I also want to talk about other solutions that we believe can alter our condition without imposing the burden of taxation that is unreasonably sown on the populations of the world. As I said last year, we live in a world in which the disparity in income is too great, in which some are even disproportionately and egregiously benefiting from crises. We must ask ourselves, therefore, whether the time has not come for a review of the settlement of the Bretton Woods institutions, which no longer serve in the twenty-first century the purpose that they served in the twentieth century, when they were catering to one quarter of the nation States that are now members of this institution. We ask ourselves whether the time has not come for our voices to collectively demand such a review through the boards of directors of the respective institutions.
Why do I say that? The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development is really what the World Bank is. Maybe if we referred to that continuously, we would remind ourselves that the purpose of reconstruction and development must be appropriate to the century in which we live, a century that not only demands of us the eradication of poverty, which remains a noble goal, but equally demands of us the protection of global public goods.
All of us here have suffered as a result of the weakest among us being unable to rise to the occasion to protect public health. All of us now know what it is to be on the front line of the climate crisis. Years ago, we spoke about small island developing States being on the front line because we were the canaries in the coal mine. Today we speak about all countries and about this hot summer — from wildfires in California to heat waves in North America and Europe, waterways in Europe being unpassable by vessels, floods in China and, above all, the apocalyptic floods in Pakistan, for which our hearts go out to the people of that country.
It simply cannot continue. Any attempt to deny that the climate crisis has humanmade origins is an attempt to delude ourselves and an admission that we want to be accomplices in the continued death, loss and damage that ensue for the people who are victims of the crisis. Our people demand better of us.
We believe that today the most appropriate place to deal with global public goods is in fact the World Bank Group. I will speak more to this tomorrow, but I want to say simply that, if multinational companies have contributed to the global public risk — or if they benefit from the solutions for global public goods — then they ought to contribute to its resolution through a small percentage of their profits.
That funding would be used to address the needs of countries, whether in relation to climate stability, resilience and adaptation; the protection of biodiversity, both on land and in our waters; the protection of public health against the next pandemic, either a slow-motion pandemic of antimicrobial resistance or another that we have not even contemplated; the provision of education for all of our citizens, because to remain on Earth without the benefit of education is to be sentenced to life imprisonment from a young age; access to electricity, given that 600 million people in Africa are without it; or access to broadband, the equivalent in our age to the right to knowledge and prosperity.
Of course, as I said to the United States Congress last week, we must also address countries’ needs in relation to, believe it or not, the right to a bank account, because countries across the world are being denied the right to access correspondent banking, leaving their citizens and economies to function as financial pariahs in a world that is supposed to be globally interdependent in terms of the movement of capital. The provision of that funding to promote public goods at a global level is critical if we are to make a difference going forward and achieve the peace, love and prosperity to which I referred earlier.
I want to commend the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for its rapid financing mechanism at the beginning of the pandemic crisis and for the Resilience and Sustainability Trust that is soon to be launched. It is the first recognition that middle-income countries should be able to access funding irrespective of per capita income, depending on their climate vulnerability.
To those who recommend this to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, we say that they should not simply recommend it for countries following a disaster but also for countries before a disaster. Every dollar that is spent on research, as they have done, saves $7 in expenditure avoided, not to mention the lives saved. We do not want only to pay the undertaker, we want to save lives.
I asked the IMF to reflect on the fact that the Resilience and Sustainability Trust may need to be delinked from quotas if it is to be effective. I am conscious that will depend on more countries seeding the Trust with capital and more countries agreeing perhaps to allow their special drawing rights to be used for that purpose, just as we asked them to allow those special drawing rights to be used to enable multilateral development banks to significantly increase the money that is available to countries, particularly at this time when we are on the verge of a debt crisis, with more than 45 countries facing the heat of the moment due to the increased cost of capital resulting from the monetary policies being put in place to fight the virulent cancer of inflation.
We want to thank those countries that have come together to help us continue financing the Sustainable Development Goals, which we link to the global public goods. Why? Because they are fundamentally the right
to development and the right to give each person the ability to live a good life. We cannot get lost in the conflict, the climate crisis and the pandemic and forget what our mission is.
I commend those that continue to remember that and ask that we reach a global compact. Financing for development cannot be short-term; it needs to be at least 30-year financing. The world recognized that when it allowed Britain to participate in the refinancing of its World War bonds, which were only paid off eight years ago, 100 years after the First World War started. Or when it allowed Germany to cap its debt service at the equivalent of 5 per cent of its exports, conscious that the cataclysmic experience of war would not have allowed it to finance reconstruction while repaying debts incurred for war.
We are no different today. We have incurred debt for the coronavirus disease and the climate, and now in order to fight this difficult moment of inflationary crisis and uncertain supply of goods. Why, therefore, must the developing world now seek to find money within seven to 10 years when others had the benefit of longer time frames to repay?
Finally, I want to deal with the issue very quickly and to impress on the Assembly that all of those things have been the subject not just of idle thought or arbitrary comment on our part. We had the good fortune in Barbados of collecting a large number of persons from civil society and academia at the end of July and the beginning of August, and we settled on what we have come to call the Bridgetown Agenda, which we believe to be an agenda for peace and prosperity inspired by the love of humankind.
It is that agenda that speaks to the reform of the Bretton Woods architecture. We have asked, and will ask, countries and people to join it because we believe that, unless we take responsibility for ourselves and accept that we are the world, we will not see a change. As I come to the issue of climate change, which will dominate over the next 45 to 48 days as we head to Egypt, let us remember that the trust that is needed to propel us to fight the great causes of our time will not be won by breaching promises.
The developing world, in particular the small island developing States, went to Paris and agreed to a global compact thanks to one of its key aspects, the promise concerning loss and damage. Today the people of Guadeloupe and Puerto Rico, and yesterday those of the Turks and Caicos Islands — and little do we know what will happen in Bermuda — face the difficulty of disruption by Hurricane Fiona. This morning I received news of difficulties concerning our own natural gas supply in my country, and I suspect that others will experience difficulties in this part of the world due to the facilities and installations being affected in Puerto Rico. This comes at a time when access to that commodity has already been affected by the war in Ukraine and the decision by Russia to cease the supply to Europe.
When we match this with the reality that we have not planned in granular form our capacity to meet the commitments we have made for net zero — I am a big defender of net zero, as the Assembly knows — then I see trouble ahead. We must pause and get it right. Our small States are making commitments that the world wants to hear. However, when those commitments are undermined by the inability to supply the electric cars or batteries necessary to sustain renewable energy, then we know we have a problem.
That is why natural gas has been viewed as a bridge to clean energy. But when the very access to natural gas is also affected, one understands better why emerging market countries in the Caribbean, including my own, and in Africa have determined that they cannot abandon access to their own natural gas resources until they are assured of having the capacity to sustain their populations. That is where the rubber meets the road. I ask us to recognize that those commitments on loss and damage and that granular detail matching commitment to capacity are absolutely critical if we are to make serious progress in saving our world. We know that our world needs to be saved.
I want to salute Denmark for its commitment on Tuesday to offer $13 million towards a loss and damage fund, because it represents the first acknowledgement by a North Atlantic country that there is a justified need and justice in the demand for that loss and damage claim. I ask us to recommit ourselves to the big matters
and to recognize that, if we do not speak truth to our population or explain and have the mature conversations rather than relying on headlines and sound bites, we will find a disconnect between those who are governed and those who govern. Therefore, let us move to the task with dispatch — not to make sound bites but to have difficult conversations to secure the peace of the world and the prosperity of our people and to underpin those with a love for humankind, the original purpose that this Organization was formed to achieve.
In the words of that same song: let us lend a hand to life, for it is the greatest gift of all. We cannot pretend day by day that someone somewhere else is going to make that change. This is our family, this is our world and this is our time to make that defining difference. Many of the things that are put before us today do not require money, but they require a commitment and political will. With the power of the pen, we can impose natural disaster and pandemic clauses in our debt arrangements, and we can change the capital that is available to multilateral development banks so as to remove current barriers to us fighting poverty.
With those commitments, we can make a difference in today’s world. Let us do so, recognizing that a world that reflects an imperialistic order, hypocrisy and a lack of transparency will not achieve that mission, but one that gives us freedom, transparency and a level playing field will make that definable difference.