Foreign Secretary Bárcena calls on international community to strengthen global financial system and achieve 2030 Agenda goals

Foreign Secretary Bárcena calls on international community to strengthen global financial system and achieve 2030 Agenda goals

• At the Ecosoc High-Level Political Forum, Secretary Bárcena proposes the creation of a tax system to achieve the SDGs while prioritizing social justice.

Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena participated today in the UN Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc) High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, on the panel "Current trends and their impacts: Looking to the future and the realization of the SDGs." She called on the international community to tackle the current global challenges and create a tax system to finance 2030 Agenda implementation.

In her remarks, the Foreign Secretary highlighted some of the geopolitical and economic trends that have made the international scenario more complex. These include protectionism, poverty, a lack of human security, gender inequality, and growth of the informal economy. She proposed creating a tax system to achieve the SDGs with a focus on social justice.

"Ecosoc must create the tax system we need, and become an intergovernmental forum for fiscal and financial policy discussions," Secretary Bárcena stated. "Without this, global public debt [...] will become unsustainable. If we don't include middle-income countries in this debate, we won't achieve the development financing we all seek, which we need to combat climate change, protect biodiversity, and restore our planet."

She continued, "Our multilateral system is not managing to establish peace [...] [Ecosoc] must work to restore our global public goods, with peace being a crucial one. We must transition to a cleaner, fairer, and more orderly economic world, while addressing technology access gaps and aligning environmental agendas with the 2030 Agenda."

The Foreign Secretary urged the international community to "achieve effective, efficient multilateralism that is truly up to the task of addressing today's global risks," noting, "We face much lower global growth, higher indebtedness, and unsustainable debt, and we have not been able to reform the financial aspects of the multilateral system," she remarked.

She discussed Mexico's success with the Fourth Transformation, an economic model put in place by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. This model redirected public spending to social programs for vulnerable groups, increased the minimum wage, and invested in infrastructure that connects the country. This approach created jobs and lifted five million people out of poverty, while also managing human mobility in a comprehensive manner and implementing a feminist foreign policy.

In conclusion, Foreign Secretary Bárcena called for strengthening multilateralism to achieve peace, counter aggressive policies from developed countries, and address climate change, saying, "Ecosoc is the home of multilateralism for development."