This year’s United Nations General Assembly begins today in New York, with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky appearing in person for the first time since Russia’s invasion. But his country’s plight is not dominating the agenda – instead, the UN has scheduled discussions on climate change and sovereign debt relief. The debt load for developing countries is now estimated at $200 billion, according to the NYT, with poor and low-income countries struggling to get much international attention. Ghana has turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) again for the seventeenth time since 1957. But the IMF says more than half of low-income developing countries are in or at high risk of debt distress, with the pandemic and higher food and fuel prices pushing more countries to the edge – and the impact of climate change making it harder to recover before the next crisis. “People are looking to their leaders for a way out of this mess,” says António Guterres, the UN secretary-general. It would help if more of them were there – Joe Biden will be the only leader of the five permanent members of the Security Council (US, Russia, China, France and Britain) to attend the gathering.
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