By Amjad Qaimkhani
NEW YORK: Pakistan had called for a stronger, more coordinated voice for developing nations grappling with mounting debt pressures, as its envoy to the United Nations urged greater participation in a proposed borrowers’ platform designed to rebalance global financial dialogue.
Addressing an ambassadorial-level meeting of the Group of 77 at UN headquarters, Pakistan’s permanent representative, Asim Iftikhar Ahmad, said the debt crisis facing poorer countries had deepened in both scale and complexity. He noted that rising debt servicing costs, tighter global financial conditions and diminishing fiscal space had left many governments struggling to sustain development priorities.
Ahmad argued that these vulnerabilities were not solely the result of domestic mismanagement but were also shaped by long-standing structural imbalances in the international financial system. For decades, he said, debt resolution frameworks had largely been dominated by creditor-driven mechanisms, leaving borrowing countries without a comparable institutional platform to coordinate their positions or share experiences.
He said this imbalance had long represented a gap in the global financial architecture, one that member states had sought to address through last year’s Sevilla Commitment, which called for the creation of a UN-supported forum for borrower countries. The initiative, he stressed, was not intended to function as a negotiating bloc or a “club of borrowers”, but rather as a cooperative space for dialogue, technical exchange and peer learning.
The proposal had gained momentum following discussions among finance ministers on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Washington last October, where participants agreed to move forward with preparations.
