“Inequalities continue to widen within countries, but they are now increasing in morally unacceptable ways between North and South. And this situation creates a gap that can be very dangerous for peace and security.”
The British daily The Guardian thus reports the words of António Guterres collected during an exclusive interview granted to him by the Secretary General of the UN, on the sidelines of the United Nations Conference on the Oceans which took place this week in Lisbon.
As the diplomat analyzes, the combination of crises – food, energy and financial – observed since the start of the war in Ukraine is all the more worrying in that it “hits countries already reeling from the pandemic and the climate crisis, thus reversing the process that saw developing countries converge with developed countries“, abstract The Guardian.
For Guterres, “everything contributes” at the moment to the worsening of inequalities on a global scale and to “a serious deterioration in the living conditions of the most vulnerable populations”.
save the human species
In mid-June, the director of the World Food Program (WFP) David Beasley had warned of the risk of seeing an explosion “protests, riots and political violence in dozens of countries dependent on Russian and Ukrainian wheat, amid soaring global food prices”, recalls the newspaper.
In his interview with the GuardianAntónio Guterres is also alarmed that “the war in Ukraine has, to a large extent, prevented us from focusing on climate action”. As he formulates it:
“We must do everything in our power to put the climate back at the top of the collective agenda. It is not only the planet that is in danger, the human species too.