Google Speech-to-Text API Automatic Transcription (Chirp). Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:00pull of through
00:00:00communities and
00:00:04settle where we call
00:00:07of
00:00:09of home
00:00:10of and here is where the world becomes
00:00:13personal.
00:00:20a
00:00:25a
00:00:37This was Jamaica in October 2025 after
00:00:40Hurricane Melissa slammed into the
00:00:43in Caribbean Island with sustained winds of nearly 300
00:00:46km per hour. I don't know how
00:00:48of any of us going to manage how we're going to recuperate from this. This town
00:00:52Black River like many others was devastated. Melissa
00:00:56caused an estimated 8.8 billion dollars in direct. damage
00:01:00that's equivalent to around
00:01:02in 41% of Jamaica's GDP. The international monetary fund
00:01:06projected public debt would rise from
00:01:09in 62.4% to 68.6% of GDP,
00:01:13showing how one climate intensified disaster can begin
00:01:16reversing years of economic progress. So on this episode
00:01:20we'll talk about debt, what it is, how it accumulates and
00:01:24what happens when the climate crisis is added to the bill.
00:01:28Jamaica has over 30. in long, painful
00:01:31years
00:01:33in corrected its fiscal indiscipline
00:01:34of the past. we don't come as some as nation
00:01:38of that has not acknowledged its own mistakes, 30, 40, 50 years
00:01:42a ago in its own development journey. we corrected lot of that, but
00:01:46to have quite a bit of that success wiped
00:01:50a out
00:01:51in a single 24-hour period by a
00:01:54of storm that was
00:01:55a stronger, lasted
00:01:56a longer, came a time of year that is unusual. and
00:02:00brought more rain than is usual,
00:02:03in because
00:02:03of the actions of others, is
00:02:05a difficult bill to
00:02:06swallow.
00:02:10governments borrow for many reasons, including the financing of
00:02:14of development of and covering budget shortfalls, but lower income nations often
00:02:18a pay in more for credit and borrow in foreign currencies. when their
00:02:22own currency falls, that debt becomes even harder to
00:02:25repay, then disaster
00:02:28strikes.
00:02:34major flood or cyclone creates
00:02:36in a a financial crisis as
00:02:37of well as humanitarian one, the government must fund relief and
00:02:41reconstruction, that the same disaster destroys businesses and
00:02:44cuts economic output, and with little money available, the
00:02:48government borrows again further raising the debt, interest
00:02:52payments consume more
00:02:53of the budget and investment and climate protection becomes harder to
00:02:57afford. dominica exp. to this after hurricane Maria
00:03:01in
00:03:02of 2017. the international monetary fund and world bank
00:03:05estimated the damage and economic losses at
00:03:08226%
00:03:10of the island's annual GDP, that's more than twice what its
00:03:13economy produced
00:03:14in a year. dominica had already been carrying around public debt
00:03:18with around 72% of its GDP. Maria then
00:03:22devastated infrastructure and
00:03:24in disrupted two critical sources of income: tourism and
00:03:27agriculture. rebuilding, required external support, but the
00:03:31IMF and World Bank warned that without enough grants,
00:03:35reconstruction could push public debt towards 90% of
00:03:39GDP.
00:03:45Floods
00:03:45in Pakistan in 2022 show the same
00:03:48pressure a much larger scale. 33
00:03:52million people were affected. A joint assessment by the Pakistani
00:03:55government and international agencies put the cost of physical
00:03:59damages. at
00:04:01of $14.9 billion dollars and economic losses at $15.2
00:04:05of billion dollars. Reconstruction would require additional
00:04:08$16.3 billion dollars. The
00:04:11of flood struck while
00:04:12of Pakistan was already struggling with debt and
00:04:15of critically low foreign reserves. Agricultural production fell and
00:04:18economic growth suffered, as many as
00:04:21of 9.1 million more people risked being pushed below the poverty
00:04:24line. The country needed billions to recover at precisely the
00:04:28moment it could least. Ford it. These disasters sit within a much
00:04:32wider dad
00:04:34a emergency. of UN of trade and development says developing countries owed 31
00:04:38trillion dollars in public debt in 2024
00:04:41of and paid a whopping $921 billion dollars in
00:04:44interest. The world banks says low and middle income countries paid
00:04:48creditors 741 billion dollars more between
00:04:522022 and 2024 then they received a new
00:04:55external financing. That flow of money matters because every dollar
00:04:59used. to service debt is dollar governments cannot spend
00:05:03elsewhere, including on protection from the next climate
00:05:06shock. climate finance should help break that cycle,
00:05:10developed countries provided and mobilized one 136.7
00:05:13billion for developing economies in 2024, but the
00:05:17organization for economic cooperation and development says
00:05:2067% the public portion was supplied as loans,
00:05:24just 29% came as grants. that means some
00:05:28volnable countries are taking on new debt to protect themselves
00:05:32from crisis they did little to
00:05:34create. meanwhile, report by
00:05:38climate justice organization action aid says the country's least
00:05:41responsible. for global emissions are paying the highest price in climate
00:05:45damage and interest rates on sovereign debt. actionate adds that
00:05:49global south nations are trapped in a cycle of borrowing to rebuild
00:05:53after climate disasters and are locked a debt trap that makes
00:05:57climate resilience nearly impossible. just before this
00:06:00interview I spoke with economist
00:06:04um who was basically
00:06:07championing debt and was saying
00:06:11that uh banks... do not use that
00:06:14any way to benefit,
00:06:18particularly after climate disasters um at
00:06:22all, which which which goes quite
00:06:26against some things that some organization i heard have
00:06:28said, but that said, I would love for you to respond,
00:06:32ironically I can't use the interview because it turned out quite pixelis
00:06:36and the audio is really bad, but what do you what is your response
00:06:40to banks? sort of innocently
00:06:44using debt, mayly for a profit and truly to help
00:06:47people. I think
00:06:51that debt has not really been understood so far as
00:06:55climate issue. um, in fact, as you're right,
00:06:58the banks and and some actors say that
00:07:02lending can be climate solution, but actually we're
00:07:05starting to understand that debt really is climate
00:07:09issue, debt is actually supercharging the... crisis and the
00:07:13climate crisis is also supercharging the
00:07:17debt crisis um and as action aid we did some
00:07:20analysis to try to put some numbers and understand the scale
00:07:24and the connection between these issues um
00:07:27and and what we what we realized was
00:07:31actually there is
00:07:32a really toxic relationship between debt and climate
00:07:36if we put it in gen z terms um really the really there's
00:07:40a vicious cycle happening. in the aftermath of climate
00:07:43disasters when countries that are already on their knees after
00:07:47disasters uh desperate for for income take
00:07:51on loans that they then struggle to repay um that means they
00:07:55have to cut their um public services it means they in
00:07:59the long term they're also cutting climate action some countries
00:08:03even uh are obliged to find
00:08:06ways to repay their uh their loans
00:08:10and a forced to actually expand their fossil fuels
00:08:14in order earn the foreign currency in order to
00:08:17repay loans, so that's leading to higher
00:08:21emissions and supercharging the climate crisis, which is
00:08:24then causing a vicious cycle. the cycle starts again with
00:08:28countries experiencing disasters and taking on more loans, so
00:08:32we've done some analysis and seen some numbers which
00:08:35really put these two issues in
00:08:38context, so basically what we uh we looked
00:08:42at um the data, the the national budget data
00:08:46of uh the third most climate vulnerable
00:08:50country, so the countries that are experiencing the most climate impacts and
00:08:54are struggling to really cope with them, um, and
00:08:58what we learned
00:09:00was that um, was that actually those countries are spending
00:09:0325 times more on
00:09:07repaying debt then they are on climate action,
00:09:11they're desperate to... money on climate action, they know that is the thing
00:09:15that they need to
00:09:15do to save themselves, but they are forced because their debt
00:09:18obligations to um to prioritize
00:09:22that, so in fact the numbers show that overall
00:09:26two-thirds the national budgets, the national
00:09:29revenues in fact of of
00:09:33climate vulnerable countries is going towards debt
00:09:36repayment, just under two thirds,
00:09:3965% of climate vulnerable countries are:
00:09:42spending the all that amount on on debt
00:09:46repayment, so that's leaving nothing for public services,
00:09:49you know, education, health, all climate action, and so
00:09:53it's not really surprising when we also learn
00:09:56that 93.5% of climate
00:10:00vulnerable countries are in or at risk of debt
00:10:04distress, so really for us these numbers
00:10:08really show that there is very clear relationship, very clear
00:10:11toxic. relationship between the debt and climate crisis,
00:10:15they are supercharging each other, and really we need to
00:10:19address them, yeah, and
00:10:22think those numbers are going, and i think those one the reasons why your
00:10:26organization is calling for debt cancellation,
00:10:29however, critics argue that that
00:10:33cancellation would reward poor financial management
00:10:37or possibly make future lending more difficult, how do you answer that
00:10:41criticism um and guess which debts should
00:10:45be cancelled? great question, well firstly i
00:10:49would say that there is a widespread generic
00:10:52assumption that the debt crisis is... to poor
00:10:55financial management, but actually
00:10:59in the majority of cases these debts go
00:11:02back uh much further. they're steeped in
00:11:06legacy of colonial, post-colonial
00:11:09eras. the cold war was an era when a lot
00:11:13the the glo when debt was being used as
00:11:16a geopolitical tool for control, and many countries have
00:11:20never managed to get out from under that,
00:11:23you know, they were encouraged to take on loans they found that
00:11:27um rising interest rates and
00:11:30dropping and um currencies uh currency
00:11:33devaluations and now the escalating climate crisis
00:11:37means that the debt repayment finish line it just is never
00:11:41out of well is permanently out of reach um
00:11:45and so um the the idea that they is
00:11:49just pure financial mismanagement that people now should be punished
00:11:52for over and over again in every gene ation is is
00:11:56absurd. many times actually those debts have even been repaid,
00:12:00but um, but uh, but it just makes it challenging and they get
00:12:04deeper into debt with every new crisis. these aren't the countries that have caused the
00:12:08climate crisis, but they're the ones that are suffering the harshest
00:12:11impacts. and actually, it also
00:12:14supports automatically suspending repayments when
00:12:18a country is hit by climate
00:12:21disaster. um, do you think that would
00:12:25uh genuinely reduced the briding, I mean what about the interest
00:12:29that continues to accumulate
00:12:31for example? great question, I mean there are several levels at
00:12:35which uh action can be taken, so it should be
00:12:39standard any case, whenever a country uh
00:12:42experiences climate disaster, it should automatically be
00:12:46able to use its resources to pay to recover
00:12:50from the crisis. I mean, it's absurd that a country is sending the
00:12:54majority of... budget abroad when it's trying to deal with
00:12:58a with the aftermath of disaster, so that should be standard any case,
00:13:02but so much of this debt is um is
00:13:05unsustainable, illegitimate, unfair, and so
00:13:09basically there are there's a growing call for debt
00:13:12cancellation above a certain level, let's say 10% of external
00:13:16debt would allow countries to really systematically be
00:13:20able to um retain their own income, retain their
00:13:24own revenue and developed for the benefit their own
00:13:27citizens um and a further system systemic change
00:13:31we want to see is that because the global debt
00:13:34architecture is is run by by the
00:13:38wealthiest countries and the wealthiest um
00:13:41financial agencies and
00:13:44that the power imbalance is really really stark um and
00:13:48and to be honest we're a situation where the loan sharks are running the
00:13:52planet is deeply unfair so what we need need is
00:13:56a is fair debt architecture where
00:14:00all countries have equal voice, equal say, and
00:14:04then you would get much fairer decision makings and
00:14:07structures around debt where the loan sharks aren't in charge of
00:14:11running the planet. guess you're talking about more like a united nations
00:14:15framework there, mean how would that work exactly to give indebted countries
00:14:19more power? exactly, a united nations framework
00:14:22convention on sovereign debt is issue. that's on the table,
00:14:26um, the African Union is is calling really
00:14:30heavily for it, um, and civil society groups of have run
00:14:34the numbers and realize it's a really
00:14:36strategic um and good proposal
00:14:40for equity, for debt, for economies, for debt
00:14:43sustainability, but including for the climate, because this
00:14:47is something we need to come back to, we have to realize unless address
00:14:51the cl the debt crisis, we are not going to address the...
00:14:55climate crisis, these two issues are so inextricably linked,
00:14:59we need to understand that addressing the debt crisis is possibly
00:15:03the most impactful thing we can do for the sake the
00:15:06climate today. I know you and I have spoken quite often in the past and
00:15:10you always advocate for climate
00:15:13finance principally taking the form of
00:15:17grants. Yeah, I wonder if concessional loans in
00:15:21any week could still be useful at all, well.
00:15:25Currently two-thirds of climate finance is in the form of
00:15:28concessional or sorry is in the form of loans, some of which
00:15:32is concessional, that means that one third of climate
00:15:36finance is is in the form of grants, so that's obviously in
00:15:39inadequate. firstly, I will say that there is
00:15:43role for countries, countries do want
00:15:46access to affordable finance, um, but those
00:15:49conditions for that finance should be where um, they
00:15:53stand very good chance of making that money back in order
00:15:57to be repaid. right now, loans are
00:16:00being, given where where there's
00:16:04not a high chance of of making that money back. in fact, very high
00:16:08chance of it leading to indebtedness, so there's a lot of bad
00:16:12lending going on out there, and um, and so that's why this
00:16:15conversation needs to be made clear and in the context of climate
00:16:19change, but um, just to put all of put the issue
00:16:22of grant-based finance and debt in
00:16:25context, um, we we also ran the numbers
00:16:29and found that across the global south, um,
00:16:33the debt crisis is larger today than it's ever been
00:16:36e e trillion dollars of
00:16:40debt payment is expected from the global south this year,
00:16:43now do you think do you think lending
00:16:46organizations actively pursue
00:16:50lending um with the goal of
00:16:54simply um receiving these huge
00:16:58interest payments? do you think it's this type of climate debt is now
00:17:01deliberate? i can't speak to the
00:17:05motivation of every single private. or public
00:17:08um uh entity doing the lending, um,
00:17:12we, but we do know that geopolitics and profit have always
00:17:16been huge factors in this through, you know, for decades
00:17:20and really the pattern seems the same, but I just wanted
00:17:24to give you another shocking data, piece of data, which is that climate
00:17:27finance, you know that we've been calling for climate finance to be key
00:17:31part the climate solution, but what we found was that debt
00:17:35repayments from the global south...
00:17:38225 times the
00:17:41amount that the global south is receiving uh
00:17:45in terms of climate grant-based climate finance,
00:17:49225 times more is flowing out the global
00:17:52south than coming in for climate finance, so this is
00:17:56a this just tells you that really this is this is where the problem
00:18:00lies, and and countries simply cannot afford
00:18:04to take climate action when they are... so deeply
00:18:08indebted,
00:18:12no doubt, I mean, and
00:18:14I know actually, you guys have many recommendations, if a government
00:18:18was to take at least just one of your recommendations, which
00:18:21one would you want them to take, that you think could make the greatest
00:18:25difference? well, I would want all
00:18:28governments in, particularly the global north governments, so the ones with the
00:18:32power, um, I would really want them to get behind and support
00:18:36um, the new UN convention. uh on sovereign
00:18:39debt, that would be wonderful proposal, embedded in that would
00:18:43come fair assessments of debt
00:18:46cancellation, automatic triggers
00:18:50um and fair in negotiations, so that would be the one big thing
00:18:54that if we could achieve that, I think that would be very helpful, but within
00:18:57that debt cancellation, let's do
00:19:00it, let's let's have fairer conversations for debt
00:19:04cancellation as a step towards that bigger picture.
00:19:08Right Thresa, it's always a pleasure seeing you and speaking with you, thank you so
00:19:12much for um giving us this information on your
00:19:16latest action A report. Thank you, thanks so
00:19:18much.
00:19:31So far we've looked at what happens when climate disasters push entire countries deeper into
00:19:35debt, but the same pressure can reach right. down to the people producing many the
00:19:39things we consume every day. when a farmer owns barely enough to
00:19:42survive, one field harvest can mean boring simply to
00:19:46keep working, and while the climate risk stays with the producer, most
00:19:50the money is made much further along the supply chain. on this
00:19:53episode we are looking a bit at debt and how
00:19:57debt exacerbates um suffering in
00:20:01countries that can't afford to even adapt or pay
00:20:05for you know um... climate mitigation
00:20:08etc. so um, I wonder if
00:20:12similar uh cycle of debt and
00:20:15pushing countries further into debt
00:20:19is a cycle that occurs at the farm level, when
00:20:23extreme weather destroys a harvest, but of
00:20:26course when the cost of planting
00:20:28continues. yeah, so
00:20:32uncertainty of all kinds is something that farmers
00:20:36really struggle with, and that can come from
00:20:39volatile prices, that can come from
00:20:43extreme weather events, and farmers
00:20:46will have various options available to them to... respond to
00:20:50this, but increasingly when farmers are not
00:20:53receiving the proper pay for their products,
00:20:57those options are limited, and so within
00:21:01fair trade we see that farmers, they can go into dead in
00:21:05order to respond to climate events, so for
00:21:08example, we saw flooding in Indonesia at the beginning of
00:21:12this year and the end of last year in 2025, and coffee
00:21:15farmers there suffered severe damage, not just to their farms, but
00:21:19als so they lost their homes and their entire livelihoods, and
00:21:23so of course, like anywhere, particularly when insurance
00:21:27is expensive or difficult to receive, it can be difficult for farmers to
00:21:31respond to these climate events, and so of course
00:21:35farmers like anywhere in Europe or or anywhere
00:21:39in the world can incur dent as a response to that, and it's
00:21:42why before the crisis happens, it's so important for
00:21:46farmers to be able to build resilience, and a core part of... that is
00:21:50making sure that farmers, when they're growing the food that we all
00:21:54consume in Europe and around the world, they're paid appropriately to
00:21:57invest ahead of time adapted practices on their farm
00:22:01to reduce the chance that later on they need to incur debt to
00:22:05respond. yeah, i was just about to mention of
00:22:08course uh farmers need to be paid um well
00:22:12enough to affect their ability to survive about season without
00:22:15borrowing, what does fair trade do to help in those
00:22:19circumstances? Yeah, so fair trade operates
00:22:23a number of different ways: we're a global certification body and also
00:22:27movement, so some the things that we do are working directly
00:22:31with farmers to provide training and direct support,
00:22:34but we also operate through something called the fair trade minimum price, which
00:22:38helps protect farmers against volatility and makes it easier for them to plan
00:22:42and invest, but also probably in my opinion, the
00:22:46most unique benefit of fair trade is something called the fair trade premium.
00:22:50and this is a small amount of money that farmers receive addition to
00:22:54the to the price that they receive, and they're able to invest this on their
00:22:58farms and also within their communities, and oftentimes, for
00:23:01example, we've been working very closely with a cooperative called
00:23:05Yayaso in Code divoir. what we've seen in the last few years is that
00:23:09they have invested this fair trade premium in things like organic inputs for
00:23:13their farmers to be able to improve the resilience on their farms, they're
00:23:16invested in agro forestry which protects the coco plant. for
00:23:20when heat gets too extreme and they're also investing
00:23:24in things within their community like education as well and so all these
00:23:28interventions from protection from volatile prices
00:23:32to the fair trade premium to direct support come together to
00:23:36really help farmers and workers invest in their long-term resilience against the
00:23:40climate crisis. out of curiosity, when farmers
00:23:44do need credit to recover or to replant to
00:23:47pr, what sort of lending is available to? and how
00:23:51easily can that borrowing become available? it can be a
00:23:54challenge, so it varies, um, but what we see is
00:23:58oftenimes for particularly small holder farmers, it can be
00:24:02incredibly difficult to get access to finance that
00:24:06isn't at extremely unfair interest rates. so
00:24:10oftentimes, particularly within cooperatives, we actually see that
00:24:14the fair trade premium is used by cooperatives to
00:24:17provide low cost or zero interest. loans to farmers
00:24:20and going back to that cooperative in in
00:24:24cotivoir, they talked about so many farmers spoke about
00:24:28that when they saw a loss of um coco product activity in
00:24:312023 and 2024 during the last alnino,
00:24:35they actually relied on loans from their
00:24:39cooperative funded by the fair trade premium to be able to get their
00:24:43families over that hump and and it really was vitally important for their
00:24:47livelihoods and for their children to continue to um... in
00:24:50school, like within the supply chains for
00:24:53products like coffee, tea, uh, coco,
00:24:57etc., who currently carries
00:25:01most the financial risk that's created by the climate
00:25:04crisis? absolutely. i would
00:25:08say farmers are carrying so much the risk, and
00:25:12we can see this in just thinking about a bar of chocolate and where
00:25:16the value of that bar of chocolate goes. so it's estimated that... only
00:25:20around 6% the total value of the chocolate bar that you
00:25:24would buy goes to the actual farmer, and that means that only
00:25:27six% of that value is going to the farmer that not only has to cover
00:25:31their livelihood, that not only has to cover their personal expenses,
00:25:35but also investing in their farm to adapt to climate change,
00:25:39and we're seeing as well beyond just within supply
00:25:43chains, the broader finance of um of climate change and
00:25:46helping smallholders to adapt, it's it's completely insufficient. so
00:25:50it's estimated that about $150 billion a year is
00:25:54required for smallholder adaptation and we're only seeing about
00:25:585.5 billion a year going in, which is only about, i think
00:26:02it's 8% of global climate finance, and so there's
00:26:05only so much that cocoa farmers and coffee farmers can do with around
00:26:096% the value of a chocolate bar compared to the rest the
00:26:13supply chain and compared to the shared responsibility with with governments
00:26:17as
00:26:17well.
00:26:30The Balkans is at
00:26:31the crossroad. of history, foreign influence has
00:26:35always weighed heavily on the people.
00:26:39The war in Ukraine has tested a fragile
00:26:42car.
00:26:48As global powers consider their next steps, few take
00:26:52into consideration what the people here
00:26:54want.
00:26:59Across the Balkans on TRT World.
00:27:37people, a landscape of endless discovery,
00:27:41born with curiosity, driven by the people
00:27:45who live it, another America comes into
00:27:48view, creemonts, builders,
00:27:52hidden stories, forgotten voices, the
00:27:55untold on earth, all
00:27:59the way to Gaza, but now New York.
00:28:04My America on TRT
00:28:06world
00:28:13and one the world's largests
00:28:15and Andrew Hopkins is following the
00:28:19story from Ankara. Andrew Hopkins,
00:28:23Andrew, Andrew,
00:28:24just take us through again, what happened
00:28:26this morning? well, kamally, there's really been two incidence in the
00:28:30last 24 hours show the kind of...
00:28:49trying to make sense of a world full of upheaval and shifting
00:28:53power dynamics, now
00:28:57let's head over to Ankara where we have asleep live for
00:29:00us, there's been a phone call between Donald Trump and
00:29:04President Erdogan from big speeches to quiet
00:29:07talks bringing
00:29:09you the moments that shape
00:29:10tomorrow and they were discussing
00:29:14the situation in
00:29:15Gaza.
00:29:31What's your analysis of what?
00:29:35world we deconstruct neocolonialist framing of world
00:29:38events and bring you the missing perspectives. Turkey
00:29:42has recalled its berlin ambassador and speak to our
00:29:46correspondent Hassan
00:29:47Abdullah. Andrew
00:29:50Hopkins,
00:29:51Andrew.
00:30:15Saudi Arabia strikes Yemen after Houti attacks injured 13
00:30:19civilians as fighting escalates across the country. Hello
00:30:23and welcome to turt worlds live from Istanbul, I'm Jafar Hastan also
00:30:27coming up. Tensions are also high in the straight of
00:30:31Hormus where Iran Media says the heron has downed an American
00:30:35drone. Tag giant anthropic is calling for
00:30:39kill switch as AI technology grows ever more
00:30:42powerful. And how Gaza's only animal shelter
00:30:46is a struggling to keep pets and astrays alive under Israel's
00:30:50ongoing
00:30:50siege.
00:31:04The fighting between Yemen's.