<
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/aug/01/brazil-led-the-way-now-the-uk-should-get-behind-the-assault-on-hunger-and-poverty>
"Last week the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, shattered the
mould of G20 meetings. In using the annual summit as a launchpad for a new
effort to tackle hunger and extreme poverty, he has provided the world with a
chance – a last chance – to breathe new life into a moribund sustainable
development goal (SDG) agenda. He has handed the G20 a cause that could halt
its slide into irrelevance.
For the UK, the creation of the Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty
represents an opportunity to restore a deeply tarnished reputation on
international development.
The foreign secretary, David Lammy, has pledged to put cooperation with the
global south at the heart of an agenda for “progressive realism”. Getting
behind Lula and the Brazilian initiative would be a good place to start.
The G20 is not an obvious platform for an assault on the twin scourges of
hunger and poverty. Like a riderless horse in the Grand National, the forum has
plenty of economic and political muscle – its members account for more than
three-quarters of world economic output – but no direction.
Since 2009, when the UK’s prime minister Gordon Brown used a G20 summit to
avert a global economic depression, meetings have become fractious talking
shops.
That’s a lost opportunity. In a multipolar world, the G20 should be a critical
pillar of multilateralism and international cooperation, forging solutions to
shared challenges. Instead, it deals in the currency of anodyne communiques
designed to paper over political cracks.
The last summit, hosted by India, produced a 30-page epic reciting an endless
stream of past commitments on the SDGs, the climate crisis, the rule of law,
governance of the digital economy, and registering concern that war in Ukraine
was a source of “negative impacts” on the world economy.
Lula has set a new direction. “Nothing,” he said in his G20 speech last week,
“is as unacceptable in the 21st century as the persistence of hunger and
poverty.”
The aim of the Global Alliance is disarmingly simple. It envisages a
partnership approach under which governments will develop nationally owned
plans for accelerating progress towards the eradication of malnutrition and
poverty, with alliance members mobilising support and affordable finance."
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-healthcare-americas-smoking-in-indonesia-hunger-in-brazil/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
