Thank you, Minister. We will be most interested in any new developments on the issue.
I will now share one of my concerns that I spoke about with my colleagues when we met with representatives of other western countries, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine.
One of the things that we see internationally is that a good chunk of international assistance budgets from western countries has been repurposed to provide assistance to Ukraine, which is absolutely vital, of course, but which deprives the countries of the global south of part of the funding that they would normally have received. The countries of the global south have the impression that the war in Ukraine is a spat amongst rich countries. This is obvious in the voting results at the United Nations. Countries such as Canada have over the years withdrawn from continents like Africa, which left a vacuum for countries like Russia or China to fill. We all know what has happened there and it is obvious in the voting results at the United Nations on the war in Ukraine.
Shouldn't we be increasing our development assistance budget again, rather than redirecting towards Ukraine part of the funding that would normally be given to countries from the southern hemisphere? We would avoid reducing aid for those countries and boost our support for Ukraine with new funding.