Fully support India’s G20 agenda: IMF

WASHINGTON: The IMF “fully supports” the G20 agenda of India, which is planning to use the ongoing global crises as an opportunity to seek consensus on issues that require urgent attention, a senior official from the international financial body has said.

India formally assumed the G20 Presidency on Thursday.

“They (India) are putting together a collective agenda for a much more prosperous future,” Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, Director of the Strategy and Policy Review department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told a group of reporters ahead of her trip to China and India next week.

“They (India) plan to use the ongoing (global) crises as an opportunity to seek consensus on issues that really require urgent attention,” she said on Thursday.

Pazarbasioglu was apparently referring to the food and energy crises due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

The IMF “fully supports” the G20 agenda of India, she said. The theme of India’s G20 presidency is “One Earth, One Family, One Future.”

“This means that India is prioritising the need to set aside differences and work at the local level, the federal level, the international level,” explained the IMF official.

India, she said, played an important role in negotiating the G20 declaration in Bali, Indonesia.

“As you know, we haven’t been able to have a declaration or a communique in the past two ministerial meetings, they were chair summaries. I will not go into details on how many hours those took. But so this was a major achievement, which included very strong language, that most members condemned the war in Ukraine,” she said.

The G20’s Bali Declaration last month acknowledged differences among members on the Russia-Ukraine war but stressed that it was essential to adhere to international law, including the protection of civilians caught in conflicts.