The executive director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, announced Thursday that the richest countries have already agreed to redistribute one hundred billion dollars (91 billion euros) from the issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) for the poorest .
“The target was set at one hundred billion dollars and we reached the target, we have one hundred billion,” said the IMF leader, quoted by the French news agency France-Presse (AFP), during a round table with the participation , among others, the new president of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, during the international summit for a new global financial pact, which takes place in Paris, promoted by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.
The SDRs are a capital reserve distributed among the members of the IMF according to quotas, carried out in 2021 for a total of 650,000 million dollars (592,000 million euros) and whose allocation benefits the most developed countries, which have a greater quota in the IMF and that they do not need these capital reserves as much.
The less developed countries, specifically the African ones, have repeatedly requested that a part of not less than one hundred billion dollars be channeled, dealing with a debt crisis and the effects of climate change, which harm economic growth.
Before the summit, France and Japan announced that they would jointly channel 30% of their SDRs for this purpose, counteracting the resistance of some European countries to lend this money to the IMF, which in turn would allocate it to those most in need. . .
The recycling of these drawing rights is part of a series of commitments by rich countries to poor countries that are taking time to materialize, such as the announcement of the distribution of one hundred billion dollars a year decided at a COP in 2009 to combat the effects of climate change, but was never implemented.
“Every time there is a meeting of the United Nations Conference on the Environment (COP) we make the same announcements; In Copenhagen it was announced that there would be one hundred billion dollars a year for poor countries, but we never saw it, it did not reach us,” said the President of the Republic of the Congo, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, at one of the meetings taking place in Paris, according to the financial information agency Bloomberg.
In the opening speech of the summit on the new global financing pact, the French president admitted that the IMF and the World Bank “are not entirely adequate” to the current global challenges, verbalizing the idea that African countries have conveyed about the need for a new global financial architecture.
Source: TSF
