The Human Consciousness Now...Our World in the Midst of Becoming...to What? Observe, contemplate Now.
BRUSSELS, Belgium, Jun 27 2026 (IPS) - Animal disease is no longer a distant concern for farmers and veterinarians alone. It is increasingly visible in household budgets: global egg prices surged more than 60% during recent bird flu outbreaks. In South Africa, foot-and-mouth disease pushed beef prices up by 34%. These are not isolated fluctuations in price. They are reminders that when prevention falls short, families, farmers and food systems all pay the price.
Exactly 15 years ago today, the world proved there is another way. On June 28, 2011, the United Nations (UN) declared rinderpest, or “cattle plague,” eradicated. It remains the only animal disease ever wiped from the planet. For centuries, the virus had killed millions of livestock animals, devastated herds and triggered famines across continents.
The eradication campaign succeeded because science, logistics and political commitment all came together. A global prevention effort was supported by surveillance, international coordination, and an effective, heat-stable vaccine that could reach remote, tropical areas without the need for refrigeration. This turned an ancient threat into a preventable one – and then into a disease of the past.
The lesson was not only scientific. It was economic. According to estimates by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, rinderpest control cost around $610 million while the annual benefits for Africa alone amounted to $1 billion. In other words, prevention did not just save animals. It protected livelihoods, strengthened food security and paid for itself many times over.
Yet, in the past 15 years, the world has not applied that lesson more broadly or consistently enough. When outbreaks occur, the response still too often defaults to emergency measures such as culling, movement restrictions and trade disruption. Rather than rapid deployment of preventive tools like surveillance, biosecurity measures, vaccination and close international cooperation.
Lumpy skin disease is a current case in point: diagnostics, biosecurity practices and effective vaccines exist, yet many countries struggle to use them quickly enough to stop spread and limit damage. The barriers are structural. International trade rules with potential economic risk impact decision-making, even when it is a necessity. Countries may face an impossible choice: protect their animals and farmers or protect access to export markets. The result is a system that remains perpetually reactive.
Meanwhile, these diseases continue to spread. Lumpy skin disease and peste des petits ruminants (PPR) reached new regions for the first time last year, disrupting trade, harming rural communities and undermining food security. For the more than one billion people who rely on livestock for food, income and livelihoods, these are not abstract events. They have a real economic and social impact.
That is why the rinderpest eradication anniversary should be more than a moment of reflection. It should be a reminder that prevention only works when it is planned before the next emergency, not improvised during it. National preparedness remains essential, but diseases respect no borders. No country can fully control animal health threats alone.
Global collaboration is needed to improve surveillance, align incentives for vaccination, and remove the trade and policy barriers that discourage prevention. This is the role initiatives such as the World Organisation for Animal Health’s PREVENT Forum can play: bringing governments, international organizations and the private sector together to help remove the barriers that individual countries cannot on their own.
But collaboration must move beyond discussion. It should lead to practical changes: stronger investment in surveillance and diagnostics, clearer pathways for the use and recognition of vaccination, and faster access to these tools during outbreaks. The goal should not be to respond better to every crisis. It should be to prevent more crises from happening.
The past three years alone have brought outbreaks of avian influenza, bluetongue virus, foot-and-mouth disease and Newcastle disease across continents. We do not yet know which animal disease will cause the next major shock, or where it will emerge.
But rinderpest proved that the world knows how to act when science, political will and global coordination are aligned. The question is not whether prevention is possible. The question is whether we will choose to make it a priority before the next crisis strikes.
Dr Armin Wiesler is President of HealthforAnimals
IPS UN Bureau
NEW YORK, Jun 26 2026 (IPS) - Artificial intelligence (AI) promises remarkable gains in productivity, science, medicine and education. But it is also poised to wipe out millions of jobs, hollow out the middle class, and drain the tax revenues that pay for hospitals, schools and pensions. The process has already begun, and the time to act is running out.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that AI will affect almost 40% of jobs worldwide. In advanced economies, around 60% of jobs are exposed and as many as one in three (33%) human jobs are at high risk of being replaced by AI. In emerging markets, about 40% are exposed, with roughly one in four (24%) at high displacement risk; and in low-income countries, an estimated 26%, with close to one in five (18%) human jobs lost to AI.
Isabel Ortiz
The most exposed jobs include many occupations long seen as the backbone of middle-class stability: clerical work, customer service, translation, journalism, legal support, financial analysis, marketing content, and even parts of software and data work. These jobs support middle-class incomes, consumer demand and, ultimately, tax-paying households, yet many are among those the IMF finds most exposed to AI.
New jobs will appear but, according to the IMF, far more are likely to vanish. The effects spread beyond the workers who lose their jobs. Wages fall, insecure work multiplies, and bargaining power collapses once employers can credibly threaten to swap workers for AI. More income flows to those who own the technology and to a handful of dominant firms, while the share reaching ordinary employees and workers shrinks.
Middle-class households are the economy’s main consumers. If their incomes fall, shops and small businesses sell less, investment slows, and closures rise. The economy can then slip into a low-growth trap of weak demand, low wages and chronic underemployment.
Falling tax revenues weaken the welfare state
The pressure then moves to public finances. Much of governments’ funding depends on the middle class: income taxes, consumption taxes and social security contributions. If wage income falls and stable employment shrinks, public revenues shrink with it. At the same time, more people need unemployment support, retraining, healthcare and income assistance. Governments then face the fiscal vise of lower revenue and higher need, a risk highlighted in the IMF’s 2026 analysis of AI, labor markets and public policy.
Bill Shoulder
Public services and democracy come under strain
History suggests what often comes next: austerity policies. Governments under pressure raise consumption taxes, increase user fees, tighten eligibility rules and cut public spending. When revenues weaken, education, health, care services and social protection are often treated as budget lines to be “rationalized,” even though they are human rights and indispensable public services that hold societies together. The result is a two-tier world: quality private services for the wealthy few and failing public provision for everyone else.
Economic insecurity erodes democratic trust. If people feel that work no longer provides stability, that public institutions no longer protect them, and that the gains from technology flow upward to a small elite, resentment grows. Polarization intensifies. Scapegoating becomes easier, as does the appeal of surveillance, manipulation and more authoritarian forms of control, especially when AI itself can be used to shape information and public debate.
The future is ours to shape
None of this is inevitable. As Nobel laureates Acemoglu and Johnson argue, the impact of AI depends far less on the technology than on the political and economic choices we make about how to use it. Governments can tax the windfall profits and concentrated power AI creates. With these funds, they can protect demand and guarantee income security through the transition. Governments can and should expand public services and social security as fundamental human rights. States should also give workers and citizens a real say in how AI is deployed, and regulate AI to strengthen democracy, prevent disinformation and surveillance from eroding civic trust before it is damaged beyond repair.
AI is already transforming society. The decisive question is whether democracies can ensure that its enormous gains are shared widely enough to foster prosperity for all, preserving the social contract on which stable, dignified societies depend. That choice is still ours, but not for much longer.
Isabel Ortiz, Director, Global Social Justice, was Director at the International Labor Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, and a senior official at the UN and the Asian Development Bank.
Bill Shoulder is an AI software engineer and a researcher, with a background in artificial intelligence and international project management.
IPS UN Bureau
LONDON & KARACHI, Pakistan, Jun 26 2026 (IPS) - The 30 COP gatherings may not have done what three months of US-Israeli war against Iran did: expose the world’s vulnerability to fossil fuels.
As the world faced its biggest energy shock in a decade, the case for investing in clean energy suddenly became far more compelling.
As an intense heatwave grips Europe, with London’s Met Office issuing a “risk to life” warning and the closure of shops, offices and schools alongside disruptions to transport during the London Climate Action Week (LCAW), calls for this shift are gaining even greater momentum.
New Sense of Urgency
“The sentiment is palpable among policymakers, investors and business leaders,” conceded Faraz Khan, MBE.
A Pakistani entrepreneur and co-founder and partner of Pakistan-based Sustainadility, a technology, data and advisory firm, with over 25 years of experience in multi-stakeholder investments and in drafting environmental, sustainability and governance frameworks, is among those gathered to discuss the future of climate finance and the energy transition.
Speaking to IPS by phone on the sidelines of LCAW which closes on June 28, Khan stressed the urgency of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, saying the shift would not be possible without investors and businesses.
Khan described the mood at LCAW, as “optimistic” tempered by caution. He also welcomed the attention Pakistan was getting. “Our country was lauded for its efforts in brokering the peace deal,” referring to the Islamabad Memorandum between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
From Rule-Making to Seeking Investment
Comparing the two events, he said the annual Bonn climate talks, held from June 8 to 18, focused on diplomatic negotiations and climate rule-making, while LCAW, also an annual event held since 2019, centres on mobilising private investment in sustainability and ESG and scaling these initiatives commercially.
“LCAW is more business- and private sector-orientated,” said Khan, who is also the founder and director of SeedVentures, a Pakistan-based social impact organisation and impact investor.
Still, he said: “There are two sides to the coin. On the one hand, the US-Iran peace deal and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz have shown the world that oil remains crucial for the world to exist; but, on the other, many countries recognise that dependence on fossil fuels is not in their national interest and even poses a national security risk.”
Geopolitical conflicts have exposed the vulnerabilities associated with oil production, trade and transportation, which is why investment in alternative energy is expected to accelerate.
At a COP31 presidential meeting with the private sector at LCAW, which Khan attended, the conversation revolved around the circular economy, electrification and climate finance with some of the biggest names in the global climate community, including BlackRock, the World Bank, UNIDO, the IFC and several trade organisations.
“It was a gathering of the who’s who of the climate world,” Khan said with a laugh. “Even we made the cut.”
What was missing, however, Khan said, were women in decision-making roles. He was, however, impressed by those in the Turkish COP team, praising their intellectual rigour and commanding presence in the room, which he found to be “truly impressive”.
Beyond the composition of the meetings, Khan said the discussions themselves reflected a growing determination to move beyond rhetoric.
There was a strong sense in the room that a new precedent was about to be set by shifting the focus from negotiations to implementation, investment and action.
“Governments can create an enabling environment and UN frameworks can provide the rules, but ultimately it is investors, bankable projects and big businesses that will drive change,” he said.
While the Bonn climate talks focused on regulatory frameworks, LCAW’s focus is on climate finance and transactions, he noted. “And at Antalya, where the COP31 will be held this November, it will be about putting money where our mouths are—deploying capital into bankable projects and creating collaborative investment vehicles to scale climate action,” said Khan.
Private Sector Takes Centre Stage
He also observed that China was frequently cited as a global leader in clean energy investment.
“Across the various meetings, I sensed a strong and growing appetite for investment in renewable energy, and I believe this momentum will only accelerate,” he said.
Large businesses and institutions, he added, would be critical to delivering a just transition because their extensive operations and community links give them the reach needed to drive meaningful change.
The emphasis on electrification and reducing dependence on fossil fuels was echoed by Türkiye’s COP31 leadership.
Earlier this month, speaking to The Guardian on the sidelines of the climate talks in Bonn, Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s environment minister, said the 35% target would be “one of the defining priorities” of the COP31 presidency.
“By electrifying daily life, from transport to buildings and industry, we can protect families and businesses from volatile energy markets,” he told the media outlet.
Khan believed Pakistan has an opportunity to position itself at the forefront of this transition.
While Pakistan is frequently showcased as a victim of climate disasters, despite contributing less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, Khan said the global focus on solar should also shine a light on the country’s “silent solar revolution”, which has transformed its investment landscape.
“Pakistan has become a global example of how solar adoption can evolve rapidly, opening up substantial investment opportunities in solar manufacturing and battery production,” he said, adding that modernising the grid and scaling up utility-scale energy storage have become increasingly urgent.
Investing in Nature
Beyond renewable energy, Khan saw significant opportunities in nature-based investments.
Khan said Pakistan’s rich biodiversity—from mangroves and forests to wetlands, rangelands and mountain ecosystems—offers enormous investment potential, with private capital capable of both restoring and protecting these natural assets.
Agriculture accounts for a large share of Pakistan’s economy and is a major driver of biodiversity loss. He said private businesses could invest in regenerative agriculture, agroforestry and sustainable rice and cotton production, either to meet sustainability goals or as part of emerging biodiversity credit markets.
“Just as there are carbon credits, there are biodiversity credits, and these are directly linked to food security and agriculture,” Khan said. Given agriculture’s central role in Pakistan’s economy, he argued that the country holds enormous potential for biodiversity credits. “I think this is going to be truly phenomenal because it presents enormous investment opportunities,” he said.
But realising this potential will depend on Pakistan’s ability to attract sustained private investment.
Investment Challenges
Sadly, there are few takers.
Khan said Pakistan’s high sovereign risk remains the biggest obstacle to attracting international climate investment at scale, although recent policy reforms, including the Pakistan Green Taxonomy, green banking guidelines and ESG standards, have improved investor confidence.
He also pointed to a shortage of bankable projects, with many failing to attract global investors despite their strong fundamentals. Still, he said, the investment potential remains enormous.
Yet time may be of the essence.
If the recent turmoil in the Middle East exposed the world’s vulnerability to fossil fuels, Khan believes it also underscored the urgency of accelerating the clean energy transition. For Pakistan, he said, the opportunity is immense—but only if the country can create the conditions needed to attract the investment required to realise it.
IPS UN Bureau Report
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 26 2026 (IPS) - On 21 June Colombians made their choice. By the narrowest of margins, Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right criminal lawyer who’s never held elected office, became president-elect. Climate activists, human rights defenders, Indigenous communities and peace advocates have the most to lose from the incoming government’s agenda.
The election results follow the logic of a decade of deepening polarisation. Since the 2016 Peace Accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia began a contested and incomplete transition away from armed conflict, Colombian society has divided into two mutually hostile blocs. The election further revealed that no middle ground remains between them. The mainstream right is gone, its candidate receiving a humiliating 6.3 per cent of the first-round vote, and a new right, harsher and less constrained by institutional norms, has taken its place.
Peace agreement in trouble
Nothing divided the two runoff candidates more starkly than the 2016 Peace Accord. Iván Cepeda, the candidate backed by outgoing leftist President Gustavo Petro, is a long-time human rights advocate and senator, and chairs the Senate’s Peace and Post-Conflict Commission. He ran on a ‘comprehensive peace’ platform focused on addressing the structural roots of violence, including land access, inequality and the absence of state services in rural areas.
In contrast, De la Espriella said there would be no peace process under his watch, proposing instead to resume aerial bombardment of armed groups and reinstate herbicide fumigation of coca crops, a practice with well-documented environmental and public health consequences.
According to figures from Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office, the six-decade conflict caused over 1.1 million killings and more than 200,000 enforced disappearances, while over nine million were forcibly displaced. That record, and the significant progress made since 2016, will now be judged expendable by a government that regards the accords as illegitimate.
For the communities living in territories where armed groups overlap with extractive industries, this is no abstract policy debate. Human rights organisations have warned that a return to a full military offensive will be devastating for civilian populations, particularly the environmental defenders and Indigenous communities who already face lethal threats. Colombia is the world’s deadliest country for environmental and land rights defenders. It’s likely about to get worse.
Cutting the human rights lifeline
De la Espriella also proposes to part ways with the international human rights architecture that has provided Colombia’s victims with a path to justice. On the campaign trail, he announced his intention to withdraw from ‘useless’ international organisations including the UN and the Organization of American States, and denounced the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as ‘a farce’ that has served only to ‘support the left and persecute our security forces’.
In Colombia’s conflict-ridden territories where Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities continue to experience massacres and displacement, international monitoring bodies are often the only source of independent verification that violence is happening. The American Convention on Human Rights, which Colombia ratified in 1973, is embedded in the country’s constitutional framework, shaping the interpretation of fundamental rights across the legal system.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has hundreds of cases involving Colombia. In December 2024, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the state responsible for the 1995 enforced disappearance of two human rights defenders. Their families waited almost three decades for closure, and only got it because they turned to the regional system when domestic institutions failed them. Now that route could be closed.
What the results mean
Colombia’s change of direction could have global repercussions. Just weeks before the election, Colombia hosted the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels, bringing together 57 states alongside civil society and scientists frustrated by the repeated failure of UN climate summits to deliver binding commitments on fossil fuel phase-out. Under Petro, renewable energy grew from two per cent to around 16 per cent of the energy mix, and Colombia issued no new contracts for fossil fuel exploration.
That era ends when de la Espriella takes office on 7 August. He frames fossil fuel expansion as a fiscal imperative and calls for the immediate legalisation of fracking, currently banned by judicial moratorium. Since the country includes significant parts of the Amazon rainforest, the climate impacts won’t be limited to Colombia.
Ultimately, De la Espriella did not win for his positions on peace, climate or human rights. He won on security and the promise of order. Calling himself ‘The Tiger’, he modelled his campaign on the populist template of Argentina’s President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, vowing to shrink the state, build megaprisons and combat corruption with tools normally reserved for organised crime. The movement he founded, Defenders of the Homeland, carried Donald Trump’s public backing. The combination proved effective in a country exhausted by decades of violence where many are deeply sceptical of the left’s ability to deliver safety.
The far-right candidate converted legitimate grievances about insecurity into a mandate to dismantle the peace process, reverse climate commitments and withdraw from the international human rights architecture. The consequences will be felt most acutely by those his campaign never meant to speak to.
Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.
For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org
WASHINGTON DC, Jun 26 2026 (IPS) - For decades, official development assistance has been a central pillar of financing in sub-Saharan Africa. That pillar is now weakening—quickly and broadly.
In 2025, bilateral aid to the region fell sharply, with early estimates pointing to cuts of about 26 percent in a single year. Multilateral support is also under pressure, with major institutions projecting sizeable budget reductions. More cuts may follow as donors reset priorities in a shifting geopolitical environment.
As we explain in chapter 2 of the IMF’s recent Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa, this is not a routine fluctuation. It is hitting countries that have limited room to adjust and few alternative sources of financing.
Why aid matters
Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest aid dependency globally in 2024. On average, aid accounted for 3 percent of GDP at the regional level. But that average hid sharp differences. In low-income countries and fragile states, aid often reached the equivalent of 6 percent of GDP or more, and in some cases far higher.
Over half of that aid was used to finance essential services such as health, education, and humanitarian assistance. And because development partners and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often deliver services directly to people in need, aid cuts can also curtail the very systems that people rely on. Effective responses to crises such as the Ebola emergency in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, the high and rising needs of people forcibly displaced by conflict, and the ongoing drought in the Horn of Africa rely heavily on the health and humanitarian infrastructure that aid has consistently helped to build.
A different reality
Aid flows have always fluctuated. But this episode stands apart.
The recent cuts are large and broadly simultaneous across countries. They are driven by donor decisions rather than changes in recipient economies. And they come at a time when traditional buffers are weaker: multilateral institutions and NGOs, which have often cushioned past declines, are themselves facing funding constraints. While non-traditional donors, such as China and the Gulf States, have grown their aid presence in the region, the magnitudes are not able to cover the reduction in traditional donors.
The cuts are also difficult to manage because they follow six years of successive shocks—including the pandemic, tighter global financial conditions, and food and energy crises—that have already eroded fiscal space.
Tough trade-offs
Governments now face difficult choices. Many have limited fiscal space, rising debt, and low reserves.
IMF-administered surveys covering 28 African countries suggest four broad policy responses:
o Some governments are not replacing lost aid, allowing programs to lapse. This limits immediate fiscal strain but carries high social costs.o Many are reprioritizing spending, often cutting public investment—easier politically, but damaging to future growth.
o Others are borrowing more, including domestically, increasing debt risks.
o Some are stepping up revenue mobilization, though results take time.
Each option comes with trade-offs. Replacing lost aid can protect services and growth, but at the cost of wider deficits and external imbalances. Not replacing it stabilizes budgets and protects debt sustainability, but risks lasting damage to human capital and development.
There are no easy choices.
How to respond
The policy challenge is to manage the adjustment while preserving core development gains. Three priorities stand out.
First, protect and target high-impact aid.
With resources scarce, allocation matters more. Aid should be directed toward the countries and sectors where it has the greatest effect—especially low-income countries and fragile states, and essential humanitarian needs. Stronger coordination can reduce fragmentation and avoid duplication.
Second, broaden the financing toolkit.
Grant financing will remain essential, particularly in humanitarian contexts. But other instruments can play a larger role. Blended finance—using public funds to mobilize private investment—can help expand financing for infrastructure, energy, and agriculture. It is not a substitute for aid: it is harder to scale, more complex, and can add to debt if poorly designed. Managing these trade-offs will be critical.
Third, strengthen domestic capacity.
With aid less predictable, resilience increasingly depends on domestic institutions. This means mobilizing more revenue, improving spending efficiency, and strengthening policy design and service delivery. Aid has often provided both funding and implementation; replacing that capacity will take time and sustained investment.
A turning point
The shift that began in 2025 is unlikely to be temporary. It reflects a broader reconfiguration of development finance, shaped by tighter donor budgets and changing priorities.
The implications will vary by country, depending on exposure, initial buffers, and policy choices. But the direction is clear: reliance on external aid will become more uncertain, and domestic policy will matter more.
The immediate task is to manage the decline in aid without backsliding on the significant human development achievements of the past decades. The longer-term challenge is to adapt to a world where aid is less abundant and less predictable. How countries navigate both will shape growth and development outcomes for years to come.
Chie Aoyagi, Maurizio Leonardi, and Athene Laws are economists in the IMF’s African Department, where Hamza Mighri is a research analyst.
IPS UN Bureau
NAIROBI, Kenya, Jun 26 2026 (IPS) - Smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia are likely to still be reeling from the fuel and fertilizer crisis caused by conflict in the Middle East when what forecasters expect to be a “super” El Niño arrives later this year.
Appolinaire Djikeng
Consensus is increasingly clear that tackling climate change to avert such crises is a legal duty under international law. Bringing down emissions requires both short-term and long-term action. And yet one of the most effective levers available — sustainable livestock farming — receives just 1 to 2 per cent of climate finance dedicated to agriculture. That is a vanishingly small share for a sector that, in many low- and middle-income countries, accounts for as much as 80 per cent of agricultural GDP.
This funding gap matters because livestock offer something relatively rare in climate policy: the chance to cut emissions fast while also building resilience. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over the short term, which means reducing it delivers quicker climate benefits.
Cattle and other livestock are among the primary sources of methane emissions. But crucially, both direct and indirect methane emissions from livestock production are often higher than necessary because of the same factors that hold back productivity. Poor animal health, low quality feed and nutrition, and climate stress all undermine production and increase both direct emissions and emission intensity. Tackling these fundamental factors solves both challenges.
In Ethiopia, for example, poor animal health has been found to increase livestock emissions by 50 per cent while also resulting in lower meat, milk and egg yields. Parasites and other vector-borne diseases increase the methane produced in animals’ guts while stunting growth and development.
Simply by applying existing tools to improve animal health, such as vaccines, drugs that kill parasites and good nutrition, research suggests that emissions could be conservatively reduced by at least 15 per cent per unit of output. The same interventions also increase productivity and improve livelihoods.
New research is also uncovering new opportunities to reduce methane from livestock while also boosting productivity and resilience.
Scientists from CGIAR research centres and partners have analysed nearly 300 forage samples and found that varieties of African clover, cowpea and lablab could reduce methane emissions by up to 90 per cent. These plants contain compounds that alter the microbes in cows’ stomachs and block the process that generates methane.
Testing is now under way to identify varieties that could be grown as low-methane feed, which not only helps reduce emissions but also supports local seed systems.
Restoring rangelands adds another layer: it helps improve forage availability to support better animal nutrition, lower methane emissions and build stronger ecosystems. Last year, for example, participatory rangeland management (PRM) was strengthened across 340,000 hectares in Ethiopia and 50,000 hectares in Tanzania, improving rangeland health and supporting livestock production.
Many more solutions exist to improve livestock sustainability for short-term and long-term gains, including those developed by the Livestock and Climate Solutions Hub. But despite growing evidence of impact from livestock interventions, climate finance continues to flow elsewhere, away from the agricultural systems that hundreds of millions of people depend on most directly.
In a post-aid world, directing more climate finance towards sustainable livestock farming in low- and middle-income countries is an investment in global stability.
Investing in more sustainable livestock production has a ripple effect that improves food security, livelihoods, and economic growth and contributes to greater stability and resilience in the face of shocks like the “super” El Niño.
Climate vulnerability is costly. Building resilience through the primary sectors of low- and middle-income countries is an insurance against future crises.
Prof. Appolinaire Djikeng is Director General of the International Livestock Research Institute
IPS UN Bureau
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jun 26 2026 (IPS) - Leadership of the Global South has gradually declined since the 1980s. Many hope BRICS+ will fill the vacuum, but its purpose and membership suggest such hopes may be misplaced. A repurposed Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) offers the best way forward.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram
The post-World War Two (WW2) Keynesian ‘Golden Age’ saw significant postwar reconstruction and post-colonial development, especially in South Asia.
In 1964, developing countries formed the G77 caucus and created the UN Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD) within the UN system.
In 1974, the UN General Assembly called for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) after President Nixon ended the 1944 Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1971.
In 1979, the US Fed responded to Western stagflation by sharply raising interest rates. This triggered fiscal and sovereign debt crises in Latin America and Africa, forcing many to seek IMF emergency funds to cope.
Meanwhile, the Thatcher-Reagan-inspired counter-revolution against Keynesian and development economics led to ‘neoliberal’ Washington Consensus policy reforms, deepening economic contraction.
At New York’s Plaza Hotel, the US got its G7 caucus of the world’s 7 largest allied economies to address its overvalued dollar by requiring the currencies of Japan and Germany to appreciate sharply.
Nurina Malek
With its legitimacy at stake following the East Asian, Russian, and other financial crises of 1997-99, G7 finance ministers agreed in 1999 to create a more inclusive G20 grouping of finance ministers of the world’s 20 largest economies.
Soon after the 2008 global (actually Western) financial crisis began, the first G20 leaders’ summit convened in the White House in November 2008.
Making BRICS
‘BRICs’ was coined in late 2001 by then-Goldman Sachs Global Economic Research head Jim O’Neill, referring to Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
Ostensibly to include Africa, the BRICs invited South Africa to join, creating BRICS as a coalition of the five more independent large ‘emerging market’ economies.
Also serving as a caucus within the G20, BRICS has tried to improve international monetary and financial relations. It has since admitted more nations into an expanded BRICS+ with two tiers of affiliation.
To be sure, neither BRICS nor BRICS+ was ever intended to represent the even more diverse interests of the entire Global South. Understandably, it serves its ‘financially significant’ developing economy members.
BRICS and the South
The BRICS promise a world less dominated by the rich and powerful nations of the Global North, mainly in the West.
The world has been dominated by the US since the end of WW2, and especially after the first Cold War. Despite occasional dissent, the US’s European NATO allies seem happy playing second fiddle.
Many developing countries have long felt that existing arrangements do not serve their best interests. The BRICS seem to offer some ‘voice’ and alternative bases for international economic cooperation.
BRICS has undoubtedly strengthened the Global South’s voice and developed new arrangements to support developing country interests, especially to finance development.
The BRICS have also advocated on specific international issues for the Global South. All five BRICS countries have also led developing-country groupings on specific issues with varying degrees of success.
Unsurprisingly, many developing countries appreciate the BRICS role in such matters, with some choosing to publicly align with and even affiliate with it.
However, the BRICS expansion into BRICS+ is unlikely to resolve many problems faced by developing nations due to international power asymmetries and imbalances.
Potential and problems
The diversity of the Global South complicates any grouping’s claim to represent it.
BRICS+ brings together countries with very different political and economic systems, priorities and aspirations, including development goals and interests.
This diversity enhances BRICS’ broad appeal but also makes it difficult to ensure it becomes an effective platform consistently advocating all developing nations’ interests.
This challenge becomes more apparent when the interests and ambitions of weaker developing countries are compared with those of the major BRICS+ powers.
Many vulnerable nations are preoccupied with food security, structural change, deindustrialisation, environmental sustainability, planetary heating, and financialization.
Meanwhile, BRICS members seek to pursue their own strategic interests, garner finance and investments, boost their exports and increase their influence internationally.
Such objectives are not inherently contradictory, but rarely fully aligned. This makes it more difficult to pursue shared interests, advocate collectively, and sustain cooperation.
BRICS+ membership by invitation also limits its effective accountability to the Global South. It is unrealistic to expect BRICS+ to consistently advocate for the full range of concerns of all developing countries, especially the poorest and least influential.
The Global South should undoubtedly try to benefit from the economic weight and voice of BRICS+. But it can best advance its shared interests with its own voice and organised strength via a revived NAM, repurposed for peace, development and justice.
IPS UN Bureau