G20 summit: Aid groups decry slow progress in fight against hunger, poverty

Aid organisations on Wednesday criticized G20 states for making insufficient progress on pledges to combat hunger and poverty in developing countries.

Among other things, G20 members including Germany were criticised for failing to do more with so-called special drawing rights, a type of reserve currency created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to provide countries with liquidity.

Marwin Meier of World Vision, an aid group said “although the G20 encourages all members to provide financial relief to low and middle-income countries through special drawing rights, Germany is the only G7 country that will not comply with this call.’’

Meier said Germany was sitting on more than 30 billion dollars from reserve assets earmarked precisely for this purpose, noting that nothing was happening due to “nitpicking disagreements” between the German government and the Bundesbank, the central bank.

The IMF’s special drawing rights are aimed to provide its member countries with extra financial room for manoeuvre.

Larger IMF members can cede their drawing rights to poorer states.The declared goal was to provide an overall 100 billion dollars in voluntary contributions to distressed countries.

So far, only 82 billion dollars have been reached.

“The process seems to have stalled,” said Friederike Röder of Global Citizen, another advocacy group adding that the G20 was far from reaching the 100 billion dollars target.

“Worse still, nothing at all has moved since October, although France has already increased its share to 30 per cent,” Röder added. (dpa/NAN)