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A summit in Paris this month offers a way to tackle this disastrous failure, but only if western leaders bother to turn up
Broken promises, missed opportunities and a failure to see the bigger picture: that’s the story of the west’s approach to developing countries in recent years. Money to help with climate breakdown has been pledged but not delivered. Vaccines have been hoarded. Aid budgets have been cut.
From any perspective – be it geopolitical, economic, humanitarian or ecological – the indifference to what is happening elsewhere is disastrous. If the west wants to counter Beijing’s influence in Africa, to secure the raw materials and metals it needs for its green industrial revolution, to prevent a debt crisis and to have any hope of tackling global heating, it needs to sharpen up its act fast.
Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor
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