[Source: Fijian Government/Facebook]

Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum says the citizens of Small States did not choose to be those who suffer the most from global disasters that they did not cause.

He made the comments during the 2022 Economic and Social Council Forum on Financing for Development on the topic “Aligning the global debt architecture with the SDGs: What will it take?”

Sayed-Khaiyum says Fiji was the first nation in the world to sign the Paris Agreement and since then, 13 cyclones have wiped out half of the country’s GDP—the equivalent of a $13 trillion loss to the US economy.

[Source: Fijian Government/ Facebook]

The Attorney General says the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the livelihoods of over 100,000 Fijians and erased a fifth of the Fijian economy.

He adds Russia’s war on Ukraine has created a food and fuel price crisis that will continue to exploit the country’s vulnerabilities as an island economy.

He says these crises would have driven hundreds of thousands of Fijians into destitution, but the government has not let that happen and has used every fiscal resource to respond and reset the course toward the 2030 Agenda.

[Source: Fijian Government/ Facebook]

Sayed-Khaiyum stresses that Fiji and other vulnerable nations are being punished for it by a system of debt architecture that was never built to serve our needs.

He says the global financial system serves as a secure foundation for wealthy countries in times of crisis, but its cracks can swallow developing nations, and the smaller we are, the further we can fall.

He says ignoring small island countries’ vulnerabilities only worsens the consequences.

He says Fiji supports calls for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to explore and propose well-structured debt for nature swaps or other structural financing changes.