MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentine President tells G7 dialogue was needed to solve Ukraine crisis

“We do not believe that we can live forever with a fiscal deficit,” Fernández said about Argentina's coffers

Argentine President Alberto Fernández Monday told attendees at the G7 Summit in Elmau, Germany, that tax havens “generate social hells,” and called for a new international financial architecture that would be inclusive of “the peripheries of the world.”

The first-ever Argentine president to be invited to a G7 meeting also highlighted the “need to promote dialogue between the parties involved” in the war in Ukraine in order to achieve “a lasting, resilient and solid peace.”

Fernández also stressed the importance of “full adherence to all the principles of multilateralism” and insisted that the war in Ukraine was “a tragedy” due to which “trade flows and logistics, already seriously damaged during the pandemic, reached a critical point.”

“From the very beginning we called for a cessation of hostilities; now we need to push for dialogue between the parties involved,” Fernández underlined.

”Never has it been more evident that the crises of the present (climate, health, financial, energy, and food) are truly global, since the solutions do not depend on individual efforts and the negative effects that these crises generate rain down acidly on the entire planet,“ he added.

Fernández then reaffirmed Argentina's historic position regarding the ”peaceful settlement of disputes and full respect for human rights.”

In his capacity as president pro tempore of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Fernandez also stressed that “in Latin America and the Caribbean we dream of a new international order where efforts are balanced and advantages are distributed with criteria of equity.”

“We dream of not being discriminated against by the central world and condemned to marginalization and oblivion”, he said and called for the “construction of a new international financial architecture that includes the peripheries of the world,” he went on.

Fernández also objected to the surcharges charged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which in his view were “an inadmissible penalty in the dramatic circumstances we are living today” and underscored the need for Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) issued by the IMF “including middle-income countries.”

“We are not challenged by the time of greed but by the time of fraternity,” Fernández elaborated. He also warned that tax havens were “an example of social injustice.”

After his participation at the G7 Summit, Fernández addressed current events in Argentina when talking to newspeople covering his trip. As the Argentine peso unstoppably falls daily against the US dollar, Fernández insisted that the measures adopted Monday had already been explained by the Economy Minister and the Central Bank (BCRA) President. “They were measures that we had been thinking about before and we were waiting for the IMF to approve the first quarter and they are aimed at trying to recover reserves, which is an important objective.”

“We also want to put the public accounts in order because we do not believe that we can live forever with a fiscal deficit,” he added after the board of directors of the Central Bank reshuffled “the foreign trade payment system to respond to the extraordinary needs of foreign currency to meet energy imports, with the purpose to sustain economic growth and the development of SMEs, avoiding speculative maneuvers on imports.” The measures are to “be in force for a quarter, to give time to the normalization of foreign trade.”

“Small and medium-sized companies are exempted from the current requirements to finance their imports for an increase of 15% over the previous year, with a limit of up to one million,” the BCRA also announced.