Barcelona"Development and its great driver, international cooperation, are facing very strong headwinds," admitted UN Secretary General António Guterres on Monday morning, warning that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set for five years from now – the so-called 2030 Agenda – "are in danger" and are in danger. "Two-thirds of these goals are behind schedule and achieving them requires an investment of more than $4 trillion a year," said Guterres during the opening of the 4th International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) which started this Monday in Seville.
But finding these trillions is today more difficult than ever, as demonstrated by the conspicuous absence from the summit. The United States has withdrawn from the debate and has decided not to attend the meeting in Seville after having completely dismantled its development aid agency USAID, that provided more than 40% of global development funding. And it is in this context that the rest of the UN countries approved this Monday, in the opening plenary session of the summit, the Seville Commitment, a 38-page document that was supposed to serve to promote a structural reform of the development financing system. The final document, however, "falls far short of what civil society was asking for and what the world needs," denounced Iolanda Fresnillo, representative of the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), one of the observer organizations.
At a time when the major world powers They have committed to increasing their investment in weapons to 5% of GDP., the average allocated to development cooperation by wealthy countries is 0.47% of GDP, and only four countries (Denmark, Luxembourg, Norway, and Sweden) meet or exceed the 0.7% mark. The Spanish government, the host of the summit, is one of the few that still maintains this commitment of 0.7% by 2030, but in practice it still allocates 0.35%. Spanish President Pedro Sánchez has called for Seville to "set the course" in the area of international cooperation and to once again commit to "multilateralism." Guterres has also called for an increase in development funding from wealthy countries, but the reality is that Trump's is not the only government that is cutting development aid., so have many European countries in the last year.
"The negotiations [for the document, which have been carried out in recent months] have been very intense and very tense. The United States has been absent for most of the process, but the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Switzerland and Canada have exerted enormous pressure to dilute the agreement," Fresn complained.
The debt crisis, a key issue
One of the most disappointing points of the Seville Commitment concerns the renegotiation of the debt of poor countries. At a time when some governments in the South are forced to allocate more money to paying debt interest than to healthcare or education, the main demand for this summit—on the part of these countries and civil society—was to give more voice and vote to indebted governments. The call was for the creation of a UN Framework Convention on Debt, a forum (similar to the climate talks) in which a possible reform of the lending system and the renegotiation of debt for states that have entered or are at risk of bankruptcy could be negotiated on equal terms by all UN members.
"All of this is currently being decided in the OECD, the G-20, or the Paris Club, exclusive spaces where creditors dominate and they are the ones who impose the conditions. That's why we wanted it to be negotiated within the framework of the UN, a multilateral space where all countries have an equal voice, one country," says a researcher at the Debt Observatory for Globalization (ODG). "But this has not been achieved in the end. The Seville Commitment only includes the promise to open an "intergovernmental process to make recommendations" on this matter."
However, for Guterres, "the Seville Commitment lays the foundation" for a "fair and timely debt restructuring" because it "creates a single debt registry in the name of transparency, and promotes responsible lending and borrowing practices," among other points.
The Global South and NGOs also called for the creation of another UN Framework Convention to generally negotiate the international cooperation system, since "currently, countries of the South do not participate in defining the rules of the game" of this system, Scherer points out. But this has not been included in the final document either.
On the positive side, there are some "cracks" opened by the document approved in Seville, such as the one in the area of "taxation," where governments like Brazil's are trying to push through a commitment to raise taxes on the wealthiest. "There is progress regarding reforms to achieve tax justice," Scherer admits. But, in general, the expert also considers that "the Seville Commitment is a victory for the countries of the Global North, because they have managed to maintain thestatus quo In many ways, this goes against what the South was demanding, which was more structural reforms." In fact, in addition to governments and NGOs, in Seville there are also representatives from other sectors involved in this development financing, such as "large investment funds like Blackrock, also interested in ensuring that the rules of the game do not change."
NGOs denounce a "hostile climate" toward them at the Seville summit.
Several NGOs present at the UN summit in Seville speak of a "hostile climate" toward them on the part of the meeting organizers. They complain specifically that they are not allowed to speak at the plenary sessions, that they are prohibited from any type of protest, even passive protest, and that they are not allowed to bring "banners, posters, or any political symbols" into the summit grounds, such as fans or T-shirts with messages like "Tax the rich."
However, after some negotiations, civil society was granted a few minutes of speaking time within the so-called "Stakeholder Spaces," where they had not initially been given a voice, and also in the plenary. Eurodad civil society representative Tove Mari Ryding used these minutes to make her complaint clear: "I have been following these negotiations for a decade and other UN forums for two decades, and I have never seen such restrictive rules for civil society participation," she denounced. "We have a document that was agreed upon behind closed doors in a basement in New York where civil society was not welcome, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why we have a document that falls so short of the solutions we need."
The organization of the event, especially regarding security, is in the hands of the UN, and sources from the Moncloa assured ARA that "Spain has insisted" that NGOs have a space within the summit meetings. "All parties have worked to make this conference inclusive, and we have created a fund so they can attend," Spanish government sources point out.
"An atmosphere of fear is being created within civil society. Yesterday, they sent us an email with all the security measures in which they told us that even passive protest is considered a security threat, that we cannot carry any political or protest symbols, and that this is a precedent for the upcoming UN summits and the next COP," the Global Debt Observatory (GDCO) denounced in the next issue.