Brazil’s president tells UN that Western organisations are failing developing nations
- Addressing the general assembly, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva says: ‘When institutions reproduce inequalities, they are part of the problem’
- Lula said the recently expanded Brics, the emerging-market alliance, would be ‘a force working for a more equitable global economy’
The failure of economic governance by Western-led organisations had led to the recent expansion of the Brics emerging-markets group, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
In his first speech at the UN since his election last October, Lula criticised the inertia of developing countries in not pushing back harder, saying that “when institutions reproduce inequalities, they are part of the problem and not the solution”.
Lula specifically called out the International Monetary Fund, which made US$160 billion available in special drawing rights to European countries in 2022 while African countries only received US$34 billion. The instrument, created by the fund in 1969, works to supplement the official reserves of member countries.
Brics – an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – “emerged in the wake of this immobility [of developed economies] and constitutes a strategic platform to promote cooperation between emerging countries,” Lula said.
He added that the recent expansion of the group, which accepted six new members last month, “strengthens the struggle for an order that takes into account the economic, geographic, and political plurality of the 21st century”.
Lula contended that Brics members – which, effective January 1, will include Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – “are a force working for a more equitable global economy in a context of a serious crisis of multilateralism”.
