At G20 summit, Mexico’s Sheinbaum defends allocating 1% of global military spending to reforestation

Speaking at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday defended the need for the world’s main economies to allocate 1% of their spending on the “largest reforestation program in history.” The president’s proposal is inspired by one of the flagship initiatives of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life) program was exported to Central America during the previous administration. “It entails giving poor rural families a daily wage, and the technical training to plant timber and fruit trees, as well as other crops,” said Sheinbaum, who figured that with annual resources of $24 billion, six million farmers could be supported.

The fight against hunger, which affects 73 million people globally, is one of the key topics of the summit in Brazil, along with the reform of international institutions and the environment, and it is a priority goal for the summit host, President Lula da Silva of Brazil. His proposal is clear: fewer armed conflicts and more development and commitment to combat poverty. “We have the highest number of armed conflicts since World War II and the highest number of forced displacements ever recorded,” he lamented in the opening speech of the gathering. “The world is worse off” than in 2008, when the G20 met in Washington in the context of the global financial crisis.

In line with this approach, the Mexican president underscored one of the challenges of the international community: the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. “What is happening in our world when, in just two years, spending on weapons has grown almost three times as much as the world economy? How is it that the economy of destruction has reached an expenditure of more than $2.4 trillion? How is it that 700 million people in the world still live below the poverty line?” Sheinbaum began her speech with these questions, to give way to the general philosophy of her proposal: “I come on behalf of a generous, supportive and wise people to call on the great nations to build and not to destroy. To forge peace, fraternity and equality. Call us idealists, but I prefer that to being conformists,” she added.

Sheinbaum’s participation in the G20 summit represents Mexico’s return to the major international forums after López Obrador’s years of withdrawal. But the general tone of her speech, delivered behind closed doors, echoed the ideology of her predecessor and of Morena, his political movement. “I belong to a generation that fought against repression, authoritarianism, for social justice and democracy, and I come from a great people who decided to establish, through peaceful means, a new history for my country,” she said. “Since our political project began in 2018, Mexico has been building a new course [...]. The dogma of neoliberal faith, that the market resolves everything, has been left behind.” Standing before U.S. President Joe Biden and the main world leaders, Sheinbaum repeated one of the founding slogans of López Obrador’s movement: “For the good of all, the poor first.”

Sheinbaum highlighted the success of the Sembrando Vida program, which was presented by the Mexican government to the United States as a tool to alleviate migratory flows. “We allocate $1.7 billion each year to support 439,000 families in Mexico, and 40,000 in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In six years, more than one million hectares have been reforested, with the planting of 1.1 billion trees,” she explained.

The idea includes a global commitment to the summit’s objectives. “With this, we would help mitigate global warming and restore the social fabric by helping communities get out of poverty. The proposal is to stop sowing wars, and instead sow peace and sow life,” said Sheinbaum, who had eight bilateral meetings planned for the rest of the day, including with Lula da Silva, French President Emmanuel Macron, and the prime ministers of Canada, Justin Trudeau, and India, Narendra Modi.

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