The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is irritated that the world dedicates 2.4 trillion dollars annually to military spending (almost 2.3 trillion euros) while wars multiply and 733 million people are malnourished. “As if all of Brazil, Mexico, Germany, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Canada were going hungry,” Lula illustrated to his G-20 peers this Monday, when opening the summit of the world’s largest economies. Lula has presented the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, signed by 82 countries and created to accelerate the battle against these evils caused, as the Brazilian emphasized, “by political decisions.” The escalation of the war in Ukraine and the maneuvers of the Argentine president, Javier Milei, who is participating in the meeting, threaten to ruin the wishes of the host country and those who share its vision of international relations that the conclave puts the combating inequality, the reform of international institutions and sustainable development.
Lula’s diagnosis is devastating. The host recalled that he participated in the first meeting of G-20 leaders, which was convened in Washington in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. 16 years have passed since then and today, he stressed, “the world is worse.” . “We have the highest number of armed conflicts since the Second World War and the highest number of forced displacements ever recorded,” he recalled. Added to this are the effects of climate change and “social, racial and gender inequalities,” which have deepened with the coronavirus pandemic. But the most pressing emergency, the main symbol of the failure of the last decades of management by the main powers, is hunger, “a scourge that shames humanity,” Lula has proclaimed.
The Brazilian president has received the leaders of the main economies on the planet in Rio de Janeiro, which was both a slave port and the capital of Brazil, and is a true reflection of the inequality that generates all types of conflicts. The affability of the Brazilian with the majority of the guests (from the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to the Spanish Pedro Sánchez, the American Joe Biden or the prime ministers of India, Narendra Modi, and of Italy, Gioria Meloni) has contrasted with the protocol exchanged with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, and the absolute coldness of the first official greeting with Milei. The fear that the Argentine economist will try to ruin the summit worries Brazil.
Milei has kept the organizers of the summit in suspense and, according to a spokesperson for the Brazilian Foreign Ministry, only at the last minute has he agreed to join the Global Alliance against Hunger. Since the libertarian and close ally of Trump became President of Argentina, 11 months ago, five million Argentines have fallen below the poverty line, which half of the population already suffers from. In the first half of 2024, the delegations of the G-20 countries developed the founding framework of the Alliance against Hunger, which was approved unanimously, that is, also by Argentina, last July. The Milei Government agreed in October to join the initiative, calling for “market-driven and market-oriented approaches” to also be considered.
