ONE CAMPAIGN REACTS TO A G7 SUMMIT THAT SHOWED SOME WELCOME AMBITION BUT FAILED TO RISE TO THE CHALLENGE OF THE CONVERGING CRISES OF CONFLICT, COVID, CLIMATE, AND RISING HUNGER

Ottawa, ON – As G7 leaders conclude their 2022 summit, anti-poverty organization The ONE Campaign has cautioned that words and aspirations alone are not enough to protect people around the world from the converging crises of conflict, Covid, climate change, and rising hunger.

With the global economy under increasing pressure, more than 900 million people around the world lacking enough food, and global life expectancy falling for the first time in over 70 years following the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, leaders were urged to use this meeting to develop the global response needed to tackle all these crises.

Edwin Ikhuoria, Executive Director for Africa at the ONE Campaign said: “We needed leaders to come to this G7 meaning business and ready to take the urgent action needed to combat the unprecedented converging crises threatening all our futures. 

“The inability of the G7 to provide the global leadership needed in the face of these threats is a collective failure that leaves people everywhere at risk. It is inexcusable if the leaders of the world’s most advanced economies cannot deal with more than one challenge at a time. 

“Their response to the Ukraine crisis has proved that they are capable of acting with speed and scale in the face of a security threat but to date leaders seem unable or unwilling to treat modern global challenges such as the pandemic, climate crisis or growing food emergency with the same urgency and cooperation.”

While the summit’s final communique includes new commitments to address some of these challenges, ONE is calling on the leaders to match these words with the real action – backed up by genuinely new investment – if they are serious about driving a truly global recovery that will protect the world’s most vulnerable people. In particular, ONE has identified key areas where the G7 has not taken the steps needed to address these global crises:

• Failure to sufficiently scale up the response to the global food security crisis – just $4.5bn of new money in response to the $21.5billion requested by the World Food Programme.
• Failure to fill the $13bn gap in funding needed to deliver key tools in the global fight against Covid-19.
• Failure to recycle $100billion of SDRs to give vulnerable countries the fiscal space to tackle crises.
• Lack of leadership on efforts to reduce debt burden on world’s most vulnerable countries.

Stephan Exo-Kreischer, Director of ONE Germany said: “The insufficient reaction to the food crisis and the total  lack of action on Covid and on the economic steps to ensure vulnerable countries can respond to these crises leaves millions of people at risk – and will have long term consequences for global stability and prosperity. This simply isn’t good enough. 

“At a time of multiple global crises the G7 needed to act decisively – instead we saw the same old mix of photo shoots, empty promises and missed opportunities. The whole world needed much more from this summit – and will pay the price for its failure.”

On the specific issue of food security, Exo-Kreischer, Director of ONE Germany, says: “The G7 are talking about a total of 14 billion US dollars to fight the food crisis. But this is nowhere near the 21.5 billion US dollars that the World Food Programme needs this year alone. Moreover, only $4.5 billion of this are newly pledged funds. Moreover, the G7 has not yet answered how it intends to help break the blockade on the Black Sea so that Ukrainian wheat finally reaches the people who desperately need it.”

ENDS