Saint Lucia and other CARICOM member-states are preparing to attend the upcoming G-77+China summit in Havana, Cuba, because the region and the remainder of the developing world gear-up for a 2023 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) that guarantees great opportunities to handle new and old challenges and opportunities for the Global South within the new unfolding international era.
Global alliances are being forcibly reshaped by regional and national developments as developing countries start determining their future with more determination and demanding control of their raw materials like never before.
The G-7 richest Nations on the planet and the European Union (EU) and US and NATO forces have been caught in a backfiring quagmire in Ukraine. That is costing a whole lot of billions of dollars, while EU residents pay the price of ineffective sanctions against Russia and China, the developing nations have been reordering their priorities away from traditional imperial and imperialist hegemony, and circling their very own wagons to defend and attack (in self-defense) when and where obligatory.
The US-led G-7 and EU alliance have of late been reaching-out to developing nations within the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean with the stated aim of ‘countering China’s influence’ globally, leading to high-level summits and state visits like US President Joe Biden’s hosting of African l3aders at yet one more fruitless summit earlier this 12 months, followed by Vice President Kamla Harris’ recent ‘whirlwind tour’ of several African nations, ramping-up of tension as within the South China Sea and re-ignition of military tensions within the Korean Peninsula, while fomenting fear within the China-Taiwan Strait.
The new Philippines and Japan administrations have joined US military drills with more fervor and the Biden administration is now looking for to enlist Vietnam right into a US-led anti-China axis.
However the US and EU are in turbulent and uncharted waters in all places, starting with Europe post-COVID and post-Ukraine sanctions and France’s current comeuppance in Africa’s Sahel region and the fast-forward emergence of the BRICS grouping that’s now expanded beyond Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa to incorporate Saudi Arabia and 6 other major developing nations to represent essentially the most people in the most important countries on earth, with nearly all of the natural resources the world needs – and a capability to represent a greater share of the world economy than the West combined.
Following the successful BRICS summit in August, the G-20 Summit in India saw the African Union (AU) join (representing 55 nations), but didn’t achieve the Western objective of driving a wedge between India and its BRICS nations, despite the fact that the Western press stressed more on the absence of China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin – notwithstanding that China was represented by its Premier Li and Russia by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
President Biden has the dance floor all for himself on the G-20, where the US and EU failed, like on the recent ASEAN Summit in Bali, to get the pinnacle to agree on final communiques that reflect anti-Russia and Anti-China new Cold War sentiments, as a substitute of addressing the actual political, social and economic issues that affect them – like facing US-backed and EU-approved the military administrations violating rights of minorities in several nations.
Then again, the BRICS nations haven’t only expanded but in addition established their New Development Bank that will definitely eventually bring higher order to world trade and reduce dependence on the US dollar for international trade.
Similarly, Russia called African leaders to a summit where it pledged more economic and investment, food support, grain supplies and other guarantees within the vein of longstanding Soviet Union (USSR) ties with Africa which can be still very-much-valued by nations supported and armed by Cuba and the USSR of their independence struggles, in addition to by the new breed of African military leaders not trained in US and European military academies as in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Guinea.
Following the successful BRICS Summit and the blunting of the thrust of the Western nations on the ASEAN and G-20 Summits, the following big hurrah for the worldwide south can be in Havana on September 15-16 for the G-77=China Summit.
The G-77+China grouping is chaired by Cuba and Cuba’s UN Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedros says one in every of its important goals is “closing the large gap between developed and developing countries, to maneuver towards a standard way forward for sustainable development, peace and respect for all human rights for all.”
This weekend’s Havana Summit, to be attended by Saint Lucia and other CARICOM nations, can be being held inside a context of what the ambassador described as “human rights and dignity for each country and each people.”
The ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ can be “top-priority at the middle of preparations for any end result,” he added.
“The Summit of the Future,” he said, “should strengthen multilateralism to maneuver towards a fairer, equitable, non-discriminatory and sustainable world that advances towards the prosperity of all countries, in step with the non-discriminatory and sustainable world that advances towards the prosperity of all countries, aligned with the UN Charter.”
On this regard, Pedroso said that “a future world can’t be conceived without lifting and refraining from enacting and applying unilateral economic, financial or trade coercive measures that aren’t in accordance with international law and the UN Charter.”
CARICOM nations and their Latin American neighbors in CELAC can be fascinated by all of the agenda items that affect the region; and Saint Lucia may even have added responsibility (for CARICOM) for those matters that relate to Climate Change and Environmental Concerns, for which the island has Prime Ministerial Responsibility.
However the Havana meeting may even be the last stop before New York, where CARICOM, AU and CELAC member-states could be expected to place the problem of Reparations for Slavery and Native Genocide on the Agenda and lobby fellow southern nations to support growing calls for a Second UN Decade for People of African Descent.
