Brazil highlights poverty, climate change as G20 priorities
BRASILIA, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Brazil will focus on reducing hunger and poverty, slowing climate change and global governance reform when it heads the G20 group of the world's largest economies starting next month, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Thursday.
Brazil takes over the G20 presidency from India on Dec.1 and will hold the 2024 summit in Rio de Janeiro in November next year.
"I hope we can address the issues that we need to stop running away from and try to resolve," Lula at a meeting with cabinet ministers to lay out Brazil's priorities for the G20.
Lula has frequently criticized what he says are global governance failures by bodies like the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and has insisted on the need to expand the permanent U.N. Security Council.
"It is not possible for the Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank, IMF, and many other financial institutions to continue functioning as if nothing were happening in the world, as if everything had been resolved," he said.
He complained the institutions often lend money to countries to pay off their debt, without any meaningful change.
G20 foreign ministers will meet in Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 21-22 and finance ministers will gather in Sao Paulo over Feb. 28-29.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a virtual summit of G20 nations on Wednesday to review progress on policy goals set at the annual G20 summit in New Delhi in September.
(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu, editing by Deepa Babington)
