Address by Ambassador Mauricio Carvalho Lyrio, Secretary for Economic and Financial Affairs, at the 2024 ECOSOC Financing for Development (FfD) Forum

Your Excellency, Paula Narváez, President of ECOSOC,

Your Excellency, José Antonio Ocampo, our moderator today, and a great authority on financing for development, who has been a lucid and illustrious voice on this topic for many years,

Your Excellency Mario Marcel, Minister of Finance of Chile and

Your Excellencies and fellow panelists, Ministers and Vice-Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs, Development and Cooperation.

I´d like to thank you for the invitation to participate in this distinguished panel.

Although our G20 agenda in Brazil has not allowed me to join you in person this week, I was keen to participate in the discussions today in my capacity as Brazil´s G20 Sherpa and to share with you some of our goals in the G20 and how Brazil views the upcoming negotiations for the Fourth FfD Conference, to be held in Spain next year.

As we have seen, the world is facing multiple crises that aggravate each other, which require reinforced international coordination and cooperation.

Among the most pressing challenges are persistent hunger, poverty and inequality; armed conflicts with catastrophic humanitarian consequences; widespread setbacks in living standards; inflation, rising interest rates and debt vulnerabilities; high volatility in food and energy prices; and a climate crisis that is no longer a distant specter, but a present reality and threat.

All these challenges have been amplified by old and new geopolitical tensions.

With regards to the G20, Brazil has taken into consideration many of the views and priorities of the G77 AND China and placed them at the heart of our presidency. Under the motto “Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet”, Brazil defined the following three general priorities for its G20 Presidency:

(1) social inclusion and the fight against hunger and poverty;

(2) energy transitions and the promotion of sustainable development in its economic, social, and environmental dimensions; and

(3) reform of global governance institutions.

Based on these three general priorities, Brazil has proposed a substantive and action-oriented plan for the group. I would like to highlight two initiatives.

First, the articulation of a decisive global alliance against hunger and extreme poverty. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around 735 million individuals currently face hunger and 2.4 billion face moderate or severe food insecurity.

To help reverse that course, Brazil has created a temporary G20 Task Force to launch a Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, bringing together the Sherpa and the Finance tracks of G20.  The Alliance will take concrete steps to mainstream a set of established domestic public policy instruments that proved successful in developing countries, including targeted cash transfers, school meal programs, support for family farming, single-registry systems for low-income persons and families, and social security mechanisms.

The Global Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty will be open to all countries, not only of G20 members.  To ensure efficiency and cohesion, G20 is joining efforts with UN organizations such as the FAO, ILO and the World Food Programme (WFP). We have been working also with the World Bank and other multilateral development banks.

The Alliance will be structured around three pillars: the national commitments pillar, the financial pillar, and the technical support pillar. Countries facing hunger can commit to adopt public policies from a basket of policies that have already proved successful. They will have access to technical cooperation and financial funds, including the possibility of debt swap (debt for hunger for example). South-South cooperation will play an important role in the Global Alliance.

Second, I would highlight the G20 response to climate change. To this end, Brazil has established a Task Force for the Global Mobilization against Climate Change, once again bringing together the Sherpa and the Finance tracks.

The Task Force will explore the role of national sustainability transformation plans and economy-wide platforms and a renewed agenda for the engagement of the financial sector in climate action.

As I think we would all agree, there will be no meaningful results in the fight against climate change without sufficient, timely and accessible financial resources.

The third priority of Brazil’s G20 Presidency is to reinvigorate multilateralism and to promote the reform of global governance institutions.

There is a growing perception that key international organizations, such as the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization and this United Nations, are in urgent need of reform. The G20 does not have the tools nor the membership to replace the established multilateral fora. The way we see it, the G20 role is to act as a conduit to muster political will towards concrete changes.

Dear coleagues,

With regards to the IV Financing for Development Conference, I think it is essential that we achieve an ambitious and consensual outcome, not only to guarantee the financing of the 2030 Agenda, but also to show that multilateralism and the UN can still deliver significant results, specially in these troubling times.

FfD is a positive and constructive agenda and we should strive to ensure that we have the political will to produce a successful and meaningful outcome.

In our negotiations, we should:

(1) build upon the success of previous Conferences and avoid backtracking with regards to Addis Abeba;

(2) maintain a balanced approach to sustainable financing in its economic, social and environmental dimensions;

(3) strengthen tax cooperation within the UN, taking into consideration the discussions with a view to the creation of a UN Tax Convention;

(4) preserve public policy space for developing countries to implement their national development priorities;

(5) address the current debt crisis, which is one of the main obstacles to financing the SDGs, as many developing countries dedicate more resources to servicing their debt than to investments in education or health;

(6) explore and propose new sources of financing for development and innovative financial mechanisms;

(7) renew the political commitment to achieve the 0,7% ODA target by developed countries;

And, finally,

(8) strengthen the treatment of systemic issues, such as trade and the reform of the international financial system, so that developing countries have an increased representation and participation.

I know that these and other topics will be discussed at length during the folllowing days and I wish you all a very productive FfD Forum.

Please count on Brazil to advance the interests of developing countries during our G20 presidency. Building on the excellent work carried out by Indonesia and India, and looking forward to South Africa´s presidency next year, Brazil once more puts sustainable development at the center of the international agenda. 

Thank you very much.