Will Europe Wage Peace?

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, May 20 2025 (IPS) - With President Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine war, Europeans are now mainly responsible for prolonging it. Despite lame protestations of peace, Europe seems committed to fighting ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

Unsustainable peace

As Europe celebrated the end of the Nazi-initiated Second World War earlier in May, it does not seem to know how to sustain peace after war.

Both ‘world wars’ of the 20th century started in Europe as inter-imperialist wars, killing millions. In 1884-5, the Berlin Conference divided Africa among the dominant European powers.

After attending the Versailles palace negotiations following WW1, the young John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace warned the agreement’s terms undermined a sustainable peace, almost anticipating Nazism’s later rise.

Towards the end of World War II (WW2), FDR’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, insisted Germany should not be allowed to re-industrialise after the War.

After starting and losing two world wars, German military aggression seemed unavoidable. For Morgenthau, reindustrialisation would inevitably lead Germany to war again.

For FDR, only postwar recovery for all would ‘win the peace’, not subjugating and destroying the loser.

His WW2 generals, famously Eisenhower, Marshall and MacArthur, imposed ‘pacifist’ constitutions and reforms for postwar growth on Germany and Japan.

Imperial oversight?

Despite his brilliant contemporaneous insights into the unsustainability of the peace secured at Versailles, Keynes ignored its outcome for China.

At Versailles, the Shandong peninsula, previously ruled by the Germans, was not returned to China, but given to Japan instead!

The resulting May 4th (1919) movement culminated in the Chinese revolution. Keynes was as blind to this as to WW2’s three million lives lost to the Bengal famine.

Although invisible in movies, tens of thousands from China were involved in WW1, mainly digging trenches for European troops in a war primarily remembered for trench warfare.

German possessions in southern Africa were not returned to Africans, but instead held ‘in trust’ by European powers, including the white South African regime.

While there have not been more ‘world wars’ since the end of the Cold War, there have been many more wars in the supposedly unipolar/multipolar world.

NATO v the UN

At the UN General Assembly, 141 countries condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But many also oppose North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) expansion via Ukraine to threaten Russia.

This is reminiscent of broad international support for President John F Kennedy in 1962 when he insisted Soviet missiles be withdrawn from Cuba, just off Florida.

NATO was established for the Cold War and should have been dissolved at its end. Its raison d’être, the rival Warsaw Pact, was gone. Worse, NATO expansion continues while it conducts unlawful wars not sanctioned by the UN Security Council.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande have both confessed that the 2014 Minsk deal with the Russians was intended to buy time to arm Ukraine for war later, not to secure peace.

Similarly, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson successfully blocked negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in the last half-year of his tenure. A peace deal would have ended hostilities and saved hundreds of thousands of lives, mainly Ukrainian.

Europe has continued to insist on war despite worsening odds. And when NATO allies blew up the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, no protests followed.

NATO should have been dissolved at the end of the Cold War, once its raison d’être, the rival Warsaw Pact, was gone.

Despite Europe’s pretensions of leading worldwide efforts against global warming, it quickly reversed earlier commitments, even abandoning its 2021 Glasgow commitment to reject coal less than half a year later.

Unsurprisingly, the Global South remains sceptical of the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), perhaps only the latest form of European trade protectionism.

The EU has already worsened world economic conditions by raising interest rates, imposing illegal sanctions, insisting on fiscal austerity and cutting social spending in favour of military expenditure.

European leaders now proudly announce military Keynesian policies, expecting growth from more war spending. Thus, the turn to war has meant less growth and more inequality.

A non-aligned South?

FDR envisaged a peaceful new multilateral order offering progress for all. But such hopes have been squelched by political pressures for informal empire abetted by a resurgent military-industrial complex.

A different world is needed based on much stronger commitments to peace, freedom and non-alignment. It may be time for the West, the Global North and others to learn from the South-East.

In 1955, Indonesia hosted the Afro-Asian summit in Bandung, which boldly spoke for the post-colonial South and made the case for non-alignment as the Cold War began.

Over half a century ago, in 1973, the Association for South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), set up in 1967, committed to creating a zone of peace, freedom and neutrality (ZOPFAN).

Creating the enabling conditions for ongoing cooperation, development, and progress can help sustain the bases for a peaceful and progressive new world order.

Beware UN Food Systems Summit Trojan Horse

Jomo Kwame Sundaram

KUALA LUMPUR: Undoubtedly, the world needs to reform existing food systems to better serve humanity and sustainable development. But the United Nations World Food Systems Summit(UNFSS) must be consistent with UN-led multilateralism.

For the first time ever, the World Economic Forum (WEF), a partnership of some of the world’s most powerful corporations, is partnering the UN in launching the Summit, now scheduled for September, with its ‘Pre-Summit’ beginning today.

Food insecurity is primarily due to inequalities and deprivations as victims lack the means to obtain the food they need. The UN should not serve those who cynically use hunger, starvation and deprivation to advance private commercial interests.

UN-led multilateralism threatened

The collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and seemingly unchallenged US dominance in the 1990s posed new threats to UN-led multilateralism. The World Trade Organization was set up in 1995 outside the UN system. Later, ‘recalcitrant’ Secretary-General (SG) Boutros-Ghali was blocked from a second term.

The four UN Development Decades from the 1960s ended with the lofty, Secretariat-drafted Millennium Declaration, bypassing Member State involvement. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were then elaborated by the UN Development Programme with scant Member State consultation.

Growing corporate sway in the UN system got a big boost with the UN Global Compact. Such influences have affected governance of UN agencies, now better known as the World Health Organization struggles to contain the pandemic.

Difficult negotiations followed growing developing country disappointment with the MDGs, not delivering on climate finance as promised in 2009, and failure to better address the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath.

Hence, the negotiated Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) compromise enjoys greater legitimacy than the MDGs. However, achieving Agenda 2030 was undermined from the outset as rich countries blocked needed funding at the third UN Financing for Development summit in mid-2015.

Summit bypasses UN processes

In the last dozen years after the 2008 world food price spike, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has become an inclusive forum for civil society and corporate interests to debate how best to advance food security. Unsurprisingly, CFS has long addressed food systems.

CFS’s High-Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) is widely acknowledged as competent, having prepared balanced and comprehensive reports on matters of current and likely future concern. In the UN system, CFS is now seen as a ‘multistakeholder’ engagement model for emulation. Yet, the Summit bypassed CFS from the outset.

Nominally answering to the UNSG, Summit processes have been largely set by a small, largely unaccountable coterie. UNFSS organisers initially moved ahead without representative stakeholder participation until his intervention led to some consultative processes.

Mainly funded by the WEF and some major partners, they remain mindful of who pays the piper. Hence, they mainly promote supposedly ‘game-changing’, ‘scalable’ and investment-inducing solutions claiming to offer technological fixes.

Agroecology innovation

An HLPE report has approvingly considered agroecology or ‘nature-based solutions’. Many scientists have been working with food producers for decades to increase food productivity, output, diversity and resilience through better agroecological practices, thus cutting costs and enhancing sustainability.

The evidence is unambiguous that agroecology has delivered far better results than ‘Green Revolution’ innovations. A survey of almost 300 large ecological agriculture projects in more than fifty poor countries reported rising farmer incomes due to lower costs and a 79% average productivity increase.

This contrasts with the record of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) launched in 2006. With funding from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, it promised to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farm households by 2020. Despite much government spending, yields hardly rose as rural poverty grew.

Agroecological innovations have proved effective against infestations. Thus, safer, more effective biopesticides that do not kill useful insects and microbes, and non-toxic alternatives to agrochemical pesticides have been created.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hosted its first International Agroecology Symposium in 2014, before committing to ‘Scaling Up Agroecology’. But for Kip Tom, President Trump’s representative, FAO was no longer “science-based”.

Demonising agroecology

The Gates Foundation has been funding the Cornell Alliance for Science, ostensibly to “depolarize the GMO debates” by providing training in “advanced agricultural biotechnology communications”. Why traditional agricultural practices can’t transform African agriculture is only one instance of such sponsored propaganda masquerading as science.

Well-resourced lobbyists are using the UNFSS to secure support and legitimacy for commercial agendas. With abundant means, their advocacy routinely invokes ‘public-private partnerships’ and ‘science, technology and innovation’ rhetoric.

Forced to be more inclusive, Summit organisers are now using ‘solution clusters’ for advocacy. They then build broad ‘multi-stakeholder’ coalitions to advance purported solutions with the UNFSS mark of approval.

With strong and growing evidence of agroecology’s progress and potential, propaganda against it has grown in recent years. Agroecology advocates are caricatured as ‘Luddite eco-imperialists’, ‘Keeping Africa on the Brink of Starvation’, and condemning farmers to ‘poverty, malnutrition and death’.

A public relations consultant has accused agroecology advocates of being “the face of a ‘green’ neocolonialism” “idealizing peasant labour and retrograde subsistence farming” and denying “the Green Revolution’s successes”.

Agroecology solutions are the main, if not only ones consistent with the UN’s overarching commitment to sustainable development. But the propagandists portray them as uninformed barriers to agricultural and social progress. Such deliberate deceptions block needed food system reforms.

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri alerted UNFSS Special Envoy Agnes Kalibata that agroecology is being dismissed as backward when it should be central to the Summit. Concurrently President of AGRA, with its particular commitment to needed food system reform, she is in an impossible position.

Best Summit money can buy?

Investing in the Summit is securing legitimacy and more resources from governments, the UN system, private philanthropy and others to further their commercial agendas. Meanwhile, many are working in good faith to make the most of the UN Summit.

Nevertheless, it is setting a dangerous precedent for the UN system. It has rashly opened a back door, allowing corporate-led ‘multi-stakeholderism’ to undermine well-tested, inclusive ‘multi-stakeholder’ arrangements developed over decades under multilateral Member State oversight.

UNFSS Science Days on 8 and 9 July indicated the Summit is being used to push for a new food science panel. This will undercut the HLPE, and ultimately, the CFS. Hence, the UNFSS seems like a Trojan Horse to advance particular corporate interests, inadvertently undermining what UN-led multilateralism has come to mean.

As both CFS and HLPE are successful UN institutions, the Summit will inevitably undermine its own achievements. Hence, for many Member States and civil society, UNFSS represents a step backward, rather than forward.

Related IPS Articles

· Struggle for the Future of Food

· Another False Start in Africa Sold with Green Revolution Myths

· Green Counter-Revolution in Africa?

· Agricultural Trade Liberalization Undermined Food Security

· Big Business Capturing UN SDG Agenda?

· Genetically Engineered Disappointments

Finance Covid-19 Relief and Recovery, Not Debt Buybacks

Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR: In July, the UN Secretary-General warned that a “series of countries in insolvency might trigger a global depression”. Earlier, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had called for a US$2.5 trillion coronavirus crisis package for developing countries.

Debt distraction

In the face of the world’s worst economic contraction since the Great Depression, a sense of urgency has now spread to most national capitals and the Washington-based Bretton Woods institutions. Unless urgently addressed, the massive economic contractions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and policy responses to contain contagion threaten to become depressions.

Nevertheless, many long preoccupied with developing countries’ debt burdens and excessive debt insist on using scarce fiscal resources, including donor assistance, to reduce government debt, instead of strengthening fiscal measures for adequate and appropriate relief and recovery measures.

Most debt restructuring measures do not address countries’ currently more urgent need to finance adequate and appropriate relief and recovery packages. In the new circumstances, the debt preoccupation, perhaps appropriate previously, has become a problematic distraction, diminishing the ‘fiscal space’ for addressing contagion and its consequences.

Buybacks no solution

One problematic debt distraction is the renewed call for debt buybacks from private creditors, through an IMF-managed Brady Plan-like multilateral bond buyback facility funded by a global consortium of countries. The historical evidence is clear that bond buybacks are no panacea and neither an equitable nor efficient way to reduce sovereign debt.

The contemporary situation is quite different from the one three decades ago when US Treasury Secretary Brady’s plan successfully cut losses for the US commercial banks responsible for most debt to Latin American and other developing country governments. Hence, prospects for a comprehensive arrangement involving all creditors are far more remote now. Unsurprisingly, debt buybacks have been rare since the mid-1990s.

Furthermore, private bond markets have changed significantly from what they were during the Brady era when there was last a comparable effort involving many debtor countries. Importantly, the new creditors largely consist of pension and mutual funds, insurance companies, investment firms and sophisticated individual investors. Also, today’s creditors have less incentive to participate in sovereign debt restructurings.

Many of today’s creditors are now represented by powerful lobbies, most significantly, the International Institute of Finance (IIF). Unlike before, when their efforts focused on OECD developed economies, the IIF now actively works directly with developing country finance ministers and central bank governors.

Voluntary scheme problematic

But the debt buyback proposal, to be underwritten by a multilateral donor consortium, can inadvertently encourage hard bargaining by powerful creditors who know that money is available, while retaining the option of threatening litigation. Hence, resulting buybacks are likely to cost more. The evidence shows that a country’s secondary market debt price is higher when it has a buyback programme than otherwise.

Such an approach can also encourage trading in risky sovereign bonds promising higher returns, inadvertently sowing the seeds for another debt crisis. Private investment funds are more likely to buy such bonds if there is a higher likelihood of selling them off, while still making money from the high interest rates, even when the bonds are sold at large discounts.

The proposal’s voluntary feature also creates incentives for creditors to ‘free-ride’ by ‘holding-out’, thus undermining the likelihood of success. If the scheme is expected to effectively restore creditworthiness, then each existing creditor would hold on to the original claims, expecting market value to rise as new creditors provide relief.

Maintaining a good credit rating undoubtedly enables access to international funds at relatively lower interest rates. But low-income countries typically have poor access to international capital markets, and only get access by paying high risk premia, due to poor credit ratings.

Compared to near zero interest rates in major OECD economies, African governments pay 5~16% on 10-year bonds, while Kenya, Zambia and others pay more. Borrowing costs for developing countries issuing Eurobonds more than doubled due to high interest rates.

Also, many, if not most contemporary creditors are not primarily involved in lending money. They are therefore unlikely to respond to government requests for new loans needed to grow out of a debt crisis.

New obstacles include the greater variety of powerful creditors, the unintended incentives for free-riding inherent in voluntary debt reduction, problematic precedents as well as perverse incentives for both governments and bondholders. Perhaps most importantly, debt reduction by purely ‘voluntary’ means -- like buybacks, exit bonds, and debt-equity swaps – is unlikely to be adequate to the enormity of the problem.

Successful buybacks?

Only banks definitely gained from the Brady deals. Benefits were unclear for most debtors other than Mexico and Argentina, and particularly ineffective for Uruguay and the Philippines, where gains were paltry, if not negative.

Positive effects for economic growth were very small, as most buybacks failed to improve either market confidence in or the creditworthiness of debtor countries. Hence, even if private creditors participate, there is no guarantee that debtor countries will benefit significantly at the end of the long and complicated processes envisaged.

The 2012 Greek bond buybacks, backed by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF ‘troika’, effectively bailed out the mostly French and German banks owed money by Greece. Celebrated as a success, it neither restored Greece’s growth nor reduced its debt burden.

While bond buybacks can always be a debt restructuring option for consideration, Ecuador’s in 2008-2009 are probably the only one regarded as favourable to the debtor country. Wall Street observers suggest that Argentina’s recent initiative may also have a positive outcome.

Also, after successfully restructuring its commercial debt, the country is now better able to negotiate with its official creditors, particularly the IMF. These ‘successes’ have been exceptional, led by the countries themselves and ultimately settled on their terms, taking advantage of opportunities presented by global crises for comprehensive national debt restructuring.

Importantly, neither creditor consortia nor multilateral financial institutions were involved in coordinating or underwriting both restructurings, and hence could not impose onerous policy conditionalities. Thus, when able to take advantage of favourable conditions for negotiating strategic buybacks, debtor countries may be better able to benefit from them.

Urgent financing needed

Despite her earlier reputation as a ‘debt hawk’, new World Bank Chief Economist Carmen Reinhart recognizes the gravity of the situation and recently advised countries to borrow more: “First fight the war, then figure out how to pay for it.” Hence, in these COVID-19 times, donor money would be better utilized to finance relief and recovery, rather than debt buybacks.

Multilateral development finance institutions should resume their traditional role of mobilizing funds at minimal cost to finance development, or currently, relief and recovery, by efficiently intermediating on behalf of developing countries. They can borrow at the best available market rates to lend to developing countries which, otherwise, would have to borrow on their own at more onerous rates.