Small states deserve a voice: AG – FBC News
Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum said small states deserve a voice in the long-awaited reform of the global debt architecture.
He made the comments during the 2022 Economic and Social Council Forum on Financing for Development on the theme “Aligning the global debt architecture with the SDGs: what will it take?”
The Attorney General says that citizens of small states have not chosen to be those who suffer the most from global catastrophes that they did not cause.
“We and other vulnerable nations are being punished for this by a system of debt architecture that was never designed to meet our needs. The global financial system serves as a solid foundation for wealthy countries in times of crisis, but its cracks can engulf developing countries.The smaller we are, the further we can fall.Developing countries spend on average five times more than developed countries to service their loans often in response to the crisis.
He says about ten percent of Fiji’s debt burden is due to weather-related disasters alone and that as the scale of these disasters increases, access to concessional finance must also increase.
Fiji supports calls for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to explore and come up with well-structured debt for nature swaps or other structural finance changes. We urge the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other multilateral institutions to ensure that eligibility for their climate-related programs and funding is based on our climate vulnerability and not our income status in the OECD. And we call on MDBs to take a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to their debt sustainability assessments rather than relying on overly simplistic and increasingly irrelevant measures.
He says climate-vulnerable countries should be empowered to continue to become centers of innovation.
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