The G77+China summit, composed of more than 100 countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America, representing 80% of the world’s population, started this Friday in Havana, with a call to “change the rules of the international economic game ” .
Dozens of heads of state and government are taking part in the meeting, in the presence of presidents of the Latin American left, such as Alberto Fernández of Argentina; Gustavo Petro, from Colombia; Nicolás Maduro, from Venezuela and Daniel Ortega, from Nicaragua.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s arrival is scheduled for tonight.
At the opening of the summit, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel said that after “so long in which the North catered to the world’s interests (…), it is the turn of the South to change the rules of the game .”
Díaz-Canel, who arrived at the main venue of the Convention Palace with Raúl Castro – one of the leaders of the 1959 Cuban Revolution – said that the majority of the countries that make up the G77+China are victims of “the current multidimensional crisis the world is suffering from” due to “cyclical imbalances in trade, international finance and unlawful unequal exchange”.
President pro tempore of the G77+China, the Cuban president condemned what he called an “international architecture” that has perpetuated “differences” and is “hostile to the progress” of the southern countries.
The UN Secretary General António Guterres defended a world during his speech “more representative and responsive to the needs of developing economies”.
Currently, southern countries are “caught in a tangle of global crises,” he said, as the “world has abandoned developing countries.”
“Critical” document
At the meeting in Havana, which addressed “current development challenges: the role of science, technology and innovation,” Guterres congratulated Cuba for developing its own vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Founded in 1964 by 77 countries, the group has grown to include 134 countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America, while China participates externally and is represented at this summit by Li Xi, member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China.
Among the countries represented at the meeting are Iran, Qatar, Angola, India and Sri Lanka.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said at a press conference on Wednesday that the draft summit declaration is a document “vital that calls for a deep reform of the international financial architecture, the urgent abolition of international coercive measures and adequate treatment of developing countries’ growing external debts”.
In July, the UN Secretary General defined the G77 as “the voice of the Global South” and “the largest group of countries on the international stage,” highlighting the “vast number of summits” taking place in different regions as a “reflecting the growing multipolarity of our world”.
Guterres took part in the high-level meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in Johannesburg in August and of the major economies, the G20, in New Delhi last week.
“Sober top”
Cuba is hosting the event “and is making a great effort because of the complicated circumstances in which the Cuban economy finds itself today,” said the Caribbean country’s chancellor, describing the meeting as an “austere summit.”
The island, which is experiencing its worst economic crisis in three decades, is facing a slow economic recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic, the increase in Washington’s sanctions on the island and structural weaknesses of the domestic economy.
A month ago, workers took to the streets to paint the famous underwater tunnels that connect Havana neighborhoods and repair the worn sidewalks of the capital’s main streets.
The city’s luxury hotels, which are always virtually empty due to the slow recovery of tourism after the pandemic, have regained their luster thanks to the delegations that occupy them during these days.
Source: DN
