2023-04-15 20:50:15
By Joe Bavaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Africa is dealing with three shocks: rising debt, the food crisis and the fallout from climate change, and it needs more help from international institutions and rich countries to deal with it, ministers of African finance this Saturday.
Africa’s developing economies were just beginning to recover from the pandemic when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked capital market turmoil and an acceleration of inflation that sent food prices soaring.
Meanwhile, the continent was already dealing with extreme weather events, including droughts, floods and cyclones, compounded by climate change.
“African countries are really victims. They are really not responsible for these devastating effects (of climate change),” Comoros Finance Minister Mzé Abdou Mohamed Chanfiou told a press conference.
Chanfiou was accompanied by two other African finance ministers during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in Washington, United States. The trio was speaking on behalf of the continent’s finance ministers.
“Even if the IMF, the World Bank and our regional institutions have created emergency funds, these funds don’t seem to be really enough to respond to this.”
The IMF created the Resilience and Sustainability Fund (RST) last year to help channel excess IMF Special Drawing Rights reserves from richer countries to poor and vulnerable middle-income countries.
While Africa needs more support to deal with food shortages and high prices caused by weather phenomena and the war in Ukraine, the ministers said African governments also have their role to play.
(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal)
((Translation Editorial São Paulo))
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