The Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, chats with the Portuguese prime minister, Antonio Costa, at the UN assembly. /
Sánchez commits 236.5 million euros over three years to fight for world food security
“The pandemic is over,” US President Joe Biden announced on Sunday, despite the slipstreams of his critics. Proof of this is that the heads of state from around the world have met again this week in person at the UN headquarters in New York, after three years, but the end of the viral storm is not the harbinger of any dawn. .
“Let us have no illusions”, what is coming, said the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, is “a winter of global discontent”, the result of the economic and social consequences of the pandemic, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine. “The cost of living crisis is raging. Confidence crumbles. Inequalities skyrocket. Our planet is burning. People are suffering. We have a duty to act, and yet we are locked in a global dysfunction of colossal proportions.”
To this must be added “the hate speech, misinformation and abuse” that spread from social media platforms, “based on a business model that monetizes indignation, anger and negativity”, without In his opinion there is no power group capable of dominating the situation.
It is as if the seven plagues of humanity had only just begun, because “if action is not taken now, the following year may be even worse.” The energy crisis this winter will be followed by that of fertilizers – three times more expensive than last year – and without these, that of food. There are enough for this year, but “if the fertilizer market doesn’t stabilize, next year the problem could be the food supply itself,” he warned. Any spark in that pile of dry firewood can cause a bonfire of incalculable dimensions, “everywhere the anxiety spreads,” said Guterres.
Doom the invasions
The Chilean president, Gustavo Petro Urrego, seconded him in that dark gaze, despite the fact that he said he came from “the land of yellow butterflies and magic,” he evoked, which is also the country “of bloody beauty.” With his poetic debut at the UN he targeted both those who invaded Ukraine and those who invaded Iraq, Libya and Syria “in the name of oil and gas.” “Do they not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on their countries is to return to the water filling the rivers and the fields being filled with nutrients?” He blamed them for the global dysfunction that has bloodied Latin America. “Which is more poisonous to humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?” he asked.
He would have another opportunity to open the eyes of his hosts or offend them at the Food Security Summit – held in parallel at the initiative of the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, of which Petro and the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, were co-hosts, with the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken – to the presidency. It was about facing together that perfect storm created by Covid-19, climate change and the war in Ukraine, with the capacity to leave 765 million people around the planet “chronically hungry”. “There is no peace with hunger,” said Sánchez, who announced the commitment of 236.5 million euros in credit to the Fund for the Promotion of Development for the next three years.
The President of the Spanish Government also held an unexpected bilateral meeting with the Turkish president, Recep Tayipp Erdogan, to whom he offered his support in “searching for solutions” to the conflict in Ukraine. “Putin is at war with all of Europe,” Sánchez told ‘Politico’, “but that is only making Europe stronger.”