[ Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, has a plan to
create a new financial system that would fund climate spending. She
put forward the Bridgetown Agenda would suspend IMF debt payments for
the poorest countries.]
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DISMANTLING BRETTON WOODS TO PAY THE CLIMATE BILL  
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Tina Gerhardt
November 25, 2022
The Nation
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_ Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, has a plan to create a
new financial system that would fund climate spending. She put forward
the Bridgetown Agenda would suspend IMF debt payments for the poorest
countries. _

Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, at the COP27 summit. , Peter
Dejong / AP Photo // The Nation

 

When Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, spoke
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of last year’s UN climate negotiations, or COP26, she made global
headlines with her fiery criticism of rich nations. “The world
stands at a fork in the road,” she told the audience, “one no less
significant than when the United Nations was first created in 1945.
Will we act in the interest of our people, who are depending on us, or
will we allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of
our common destruction?”

This year, at COP27 [[link removed]] in Egypt, Mottley followed
up her viral speech with a proposal that she believes would help
ensure social, economic, and environmental justice. She put forward
the Bridgetown Agenda
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is named after Barbados’s capital and calls for an overhaul of the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Citing a debt crisis exacerbated by the pandemic, rising living costs,
and climate change, the Bridgetown Agenda would suspend IMF debt
payments for the poorest countries, defer interest surcharges, and
make $100 billion immediately available to those nations that need it.
Additionally, the proposal demands a new global mechanism to cover the
loss and damage caused by climate change, which was a successful
outcome at COP27. This, according to Mottley, would lay the groundwork
for “a new financial system that drives financial resources towards
climate action.”

The Bridgetown Agenda states: “Most climate-vulnerable countries do
not have the fiscal space to adopt new debt. We must move beyond
country-by-country responses that have become bogged down by issues of
who should do more.” It advocates a new multilateral institution for
“raising reconstruction grants for any country just imperiled by a
climate disaster.” It calls for $650 billion in emergency liquidity
and for development banks to issue $1 trillion in low-interest loans
for climate spending in poorer countries.

Mottley has also pushed back against some of the traditional IMF
stipulations to qualify for loans, questioning the need to privatize
national assets, fire civil servants, liberalize trade, and deregulate
domestic economic activity. Confronting the climate crisis will
require a lot of spending and investment, especially in frontline
communities in the Global South. Wealthy countries typically get
interest rates between 1 and 4 percent, while developing countries are
forced to borrow at rates of between 12 and 14 percent. The Bridgetown
Agenda asks that nations in the Global South be offered better
financial terms, closer to what countries in the Global North already
receive.

This new approach would effectively dismantle the financial framework
that has been in place since 1944, when 44 nations met
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Woods, N.H. The Bretton Woods conference established the IMF and the
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which today is
part of the World Bank.

Addressing COP27 on November 11, former vice president Al Gore said
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“We need to reconvene Bretton Woods and completely revamp and reform
the World Bank system.” He said it could be accomplished within a
year. Gore also called for David Malpass, the Donald Trump–appointed
World Bank president, to be removed from his post.

In September, when Malpass appeared alongside the head of the IMF and
Bahamian leaders on a _New York Times_
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panel, he was asked if he agreed that the “man-made burning of
fossil fuels is rapidly and dangerously warming the planet.” He
refused to answer the question three times before he finally replied,
“I don’t even know—I’m not a scientist.”

In response
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Joe Thwaites of the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote, “We
know climate change is not a priority for Malpass, not just from his
words but from his deeds.” Thwaites went on to outline how, since
Malpass’s appointment in 2019, the World Bank “has been dragging
its feet on taking the climate crisis seriously, at a time when we
need it to sprint,” namely by “lagging behind its peers” in
funding climate-focused projects, hampering other multi-development
banks from doing so, and providing over $14 billion in funding for
fossil fuels.

The UN climate negotiations are the world’s largest gathering of
nations and NGOs (and, yes, a growing number of fossil fuel
lobbyists). Crucially, these talks bring participating nations
together on a level playing field. Critics point out that even though
27 annual UN climate negotiations have taken place, the climate crisis
has only grown worse during that time. But Mottley’s actions offer
hope. While the Bridgetown Agenda is a long way from implementation,
it has widespread support among countries in both the Global South and
the G7.

Mottley has used the unwieldy and unlikely vehicle of the UN climate
conference to have this discussion about the global financial
architecture. And her plan just might undo the Bretton Woods system,
which was decided on by a minority of nations, less than 80 years ago,
with disastrous results. Overhauling Bretton Woods would be one of the
most radical economic and political shifts of the past century. And it
can’t happen soon enough.

_[TINA GERHARDT is an environmental journalist who covers
international climate change negotiations, domestic energy policy and
sea level rise. She is author of Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a
Rising Ocean (University of California Press, 2023). Her writing has
been published in Grist, The Nation, The Progressive, Sierra
Magazine, and Washington Monthly. You can follow her on
Twitter @TinaGerhardtEJ
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_Copyright c 2022 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!_

* Climate Change
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* COP27
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* Climate Crisis
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* Global warming
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* Inequality
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* economic inequality
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* Global South
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* Bretton Woods
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* Mia Mottley
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* Bridgetown Agenda
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* World Bank
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* International Monetary Fund
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* IMF
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* IMF policies
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