SA officials leading the Group of 20 (G20) engagements in Washington DC this week say the US remains willing to be a constructive partner in the G20 and take it forward next year, but experts have warned that US President Donald Trump’s clear aversion to global co-operation could weaken the forum.
The US is due to take over from SA as next year’s G20 president, making it part of the “troika” of past, present and future presidents managing the group this year. But US secretary of state Marco Rubio declined to attend the G20 foreign ministers in Johannesburg earlier this year, while Trump has put question marks over his attendance at the leaders’ summit in November and warned that the US will cut its support for multilateral institutions generally.
A former Obama-era White House G20 “sherpa”, Caroline Atkinson, said this week that the US walking away from international co-operation weakened the G20, which is widely viewed as the premier forum for global co-operation, accounting for almost 90% of global GDP and three-quarters of global trade. “Globalisation goes on. Co-operation needs to go on. But it may be, sadly, going about the US in some way now rather than relying on the US to be a supportive partner,” she said.
Treasury director-general Duncan Pieterse said, however, that the US had indicated its willingness to be a constructive partner this year and to take the G20 forward next year. It was also keen, as was SA, to review the way the G20 worked to make it more agile and nimble and ensure it could be more impactful, Pieterse said.
They were speaking on Tuesday at the Brookings Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, ahead of the G20 Finance Track meetings at this week’s spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Finance minister Enoch Godongwana and Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago will chair the high-level meetings of the Finance Track, which is the original 25-year-old G20 forum that brings together the finance ministers and central bank governors of the now 21 countries.
But the agenda of the group has ballooned over the years, along with the number of invited guests, with SA hosting a total of 52 countries and institutions at the recent Finance Track meeting in Cape Town.
Kganyago told the Brookings panel that the G20 had demonstrated its value during crises and it was testament to its value that even now at a time of extraordinary global change all its members agreed on its importance. But its processes subverted better policy formulation, detracting from what the G20 could achieve, and he called for the G20 to sharpen its focus so that it could deliver more concrete solutions.
G20 meetings had become large and it could be challenging to have spontaneous conversations and robust debates. Its agenda was overloaded and too complex. “Because the G20 is powerful, prestigious and global, it is tempting to bring it all the problems of the world. It does not follow, however, that just because something is important it should be on the G20’s agenda,” Kganyago said.
“We should be more intentional in how we choose which issues to discuss,” Kganyago said. “Narrowing the G20’s scope might also make for more focused discussions around the top two or three priorities chosen each year.” He also suggested it might be a good idea to separate out the Finance Track and the broader Sherpa Track, making them more distinct from each other. It’s also been suggested the G20 establish a permanent secretariat.
SA has used its presidency to introduce a new work stream on addressing Africa’s growth and development challenges and Pieterse said this had received wide support across the G20 “at a time when there is quite a lot of broader disagreement about some other issues”.
The work stream will look at Africa’s macroeconomic vulnerabilities, infrastructure, the cost of capital and weak institutions, and is pulling together proposals that will be discussed at the next G20 Finance Track meeting in Durban in July.
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