The world’s poorest countries are reeling from debt made worse by exchange rate fluctuations and worsening climate shocks, a new study has found, as officials considered ways to ease the burden at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank this week.
On Friday, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) issued new research showing that Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have been required to take out loans for their growth and development in foreign currencies – usually US dollars – forcing them to spend billions of dollars every year repaying sovereign debt.
These poorer countries become vulnerable to currency volatility – and when extreme weather like powerful storms batters their fragile economies, their debt burden grows even bigger.
“With every climate-driven disaster, their requirement to borrow more money increases while their currency simultaneously devalues,” said Ritu Bharadwaj, IIED principal researcher and the paper’s lead author. Moreover, because the global economy is largely structured around the US dollar, “these countries are taking on all the risk associated with currency fluctuations,” she added.
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IIED researchers examined how debt repayments and currency volatility affected 13 representative countries, and cross-referenced that data with climate modelling, showing a clear link between climate disasters and currency depreciation – which in turn leads to spiralling debt.
To solve the problem, they proposed that international financial institutions offer new loans in local currencies, while debtor nations should be allowed to swap existing debt for investments in climate, nature or social protection.
“What we’re suggesting is that creditors should take on some of that risk as part of reforms to make the global financial system fairer,” said IIED’s Bharadwaj.
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The research – which focused on 13 countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas, using data from 1991 to 2022 – showed that over that 31-year period, the average value of SIDS currencies fell against the US dollar by around 265% and that of LDCs by 366%. As a result, the local currency cost of repaying their debt jumped.
Using the 2022 value of the US dollar as a baseline, the cumulative extra cost for SIDS over those three decades was $10.25 billion, the equivalent of 3% of their GDP per year. For LDCs, the cumulative value of extra repayments was $9.98 billion, equal to 6.6% of GDP.
These huge sums vastly outweigh the amounts SIDS and LDCs can spend on curbing their planet-heating emissions and adapting to climate change, and paying back debt diverts scarce resources from other day-to-day spending on healthcare and education, the study found.
Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, said the analysis provides an “urgent and credible foundation for action”, adding that “the paper makes clear that the hidden cost of repaying debt in foreign currencies, especially during times of crisis, is a silent drain on our economies”.
“For every dollar lost to currency depreciation, there is a clinic not built, a road not repaired, a social protection programme left underfunded,” he said.
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Ghana’s fossil fuel trap
Separately, another report from the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and ActionAid Ghana argued that fossil fuel companies have profited from World Bank support for multi-billion-dollar oil and gas projects in Ghana, while its people continue to suffer from power outages, unaffordable electricity and rising public debt.
In the report published on Thursday, the researchers said $2 billion in World Bank funding for oil and gas projects had led to surplus supplies and mainly benefited the private companies running the projects.
Oil and gas projects backed by big multinationals – including the Sankofa gas deal, Jubilee oil and gas project and the West African Gas Pipeline – have over-promised but under-performed, the report said. As a result, they have failed to solve Ghana’s energy and power crisis, causing the country to spend more on fuel imports or buying up costly unused gas.
Joseph Wilde-Ramsing, acting executive director of SOMO, said: “Ghanaians are paying high prices for electricity they can’t afford, while foreign oil and gas companies reap guaranteed profits.” He described the situation as one of “utter negligence, exploitation and a climate disaster rolled into one”.
“Ghana has been compelled to enter into energy agreements that are unaffordable and unsustainable,” said John Nkaw, country director of ActionAid Ghana. “These contracts seem to guarantee profits for oil giants while our government struggles to pay off debts.”
According to the World Bank, which provides guarantees for such projects in the host country to leverage capital investment, the Sankofa Gas Project – approved by the bank in 2015 – had the objective of increasing the availability of natural gas for “clean power generation”.
Multinational energy firms Eni and Vitol served as private sponsors alongside the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, while the World Bank provided $700 million in guarantees to reduce financial and political risks.
Makhtar Diop, then World Bank Vice President for Africa, said at the time that the guarantee was the largest provided by the bank, and would allow the country to leverage up to $8 billion in foreign direct investment, thereby transforming electricity, enabling lower-carbon power generation, increasing electricity access and reducing oil imports.
The World Bank also provided guarantees to cover any risk eventualities for the West African Gas Pipeline, including $50 million from its International Development Association, $75 million from its Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, and $125 million from the Steadfast Insurance Company. Those political risk guarantees helped the project get to financial closure, with the bank saying the project would not have gone forward without them.
The World Bank was contacted for comment but had not responded by the time of publication.
Global finance system reform
Speaking to journalists this week at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington DC, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, the IMF’s strategy chief, agreed there is an urgent need to address the high debt service burden facing many countries, adding that the situation is becoming more acute in the current global economic environment, Reuters reported.
Noting the growing challenges facing vulnerable low- and middle-income countries, Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF’s managing director, said the global lender must be more active in debt restructuring processes.
Commenting on the IIED’s research, Prime Minister Browne of Antigua and Barbuda said that, as SIDS face worsening climate shocks, deepening debt burdens, and volatile currency markets, the findings provide evidence to advance reforms that are “fair, feasible, and necessary”.
Browne called for change to the current global financial architecture, which he said places an unfair burden on the most vulnerable and creates structural barriers to investment in climate resilience, adaptation and long-term development. “As Co-Chair of the Debt Sustainability Support Service (DSSS), I am committed to taking this issue to the highest levels of international decision-making,” he added.
Under Ghana’s ongoing debt restructuring, SOMO and ActionAid are advocating for an independent process that assesses the historical and current levels of fossil fuel-related debt affecting Ghana’s finances, followed by the cancellation of that debt.
They called for greater transparency and fairness in global energy investments, adding that all energy contracts that shift financial risk onto countries should be reassessed.
“As the US calls for the World Bank to continue investing in fossil fuels, our latest report is a stark warning on what the World Bank’s fossil fuel investment can do to a country’s economy and energy sector,” SOMO’s Wilde-Ramsing said.
The post Climate shocks and volatile currencies hike debt burden for poor countries appeared first on Climate Home News.
Climate shocks and volatile currencies hike debt burden for poor countries
The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.
City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.
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Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.
As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.
The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.
With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.
Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile
On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.
At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.
We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.
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Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.
Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.
Agroecology as an alternative
There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.
In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.
In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.
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Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.
These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.
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We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.
As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.
This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.
The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.
Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems
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