标签： Suriname

At the 81st United Nations General Assembly General Debate in New York, President Jennifer Simons delivered a wide-ranging address centered on forest conservation, sustainable resource development, global conflict resolution, institutional reform and climate justice, addressing pressing challenges facing small and vulnerable states against this year’s summit theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: A United Nations that delivers for all”.

Opening her remarks on environmental protection, Simons drew attention to the growing threats facing the world’s remaining intact rainforests, noting that her country – where over 90% of territory is covered by forest and which already holds carbon-negative status – faces emerging pressure from actors seeking to clear large swathes of old-growth rainforest for industrial-scale agriculture. This adds to long-standing risks from extractive industries targeting gold, diamonds and other mineral resources that Simons first warned of one year prior. She emphasized that the global climate finance framework is deeply flawed: nations with high forest cover and low deforestation rates should not be required to lose their natural carbon sinks to qualify for international climate funding, a systemic bias that penalizes early conservation action.

To counter these threats, Simons revealed that her administration is rolling out new legal and institutional frameworks to strengthen forest protection and safeguard the traditional territories of Indigenous and Tribal communities. These reforms center on centering Indigenous traditional knowledge and community participation at every stage of development planning, recognizing Indigenous peoples as the most effective stewards of intact forest ecosystems. “We must stop large-scale forest clearing, and we welcome all international support to advance this goal,” Simons said.

Turning to the country’s offshore oil and gas reserves, Simons struck a balanced tone, acknowledging that these natural resources present a unique opportunity to accelerate national development and lift living standards for all citizens. But she warned against the risk of overreliance on fossil fuel extraction, stressing that “we must convert temporary resource wealth into lasting national prosperity.” Under the government’s plan, resource revenues will be invested strategically to broaden and diversify the domestic economy, rather than funding short-term spending. The energy transition will also balance fossil fuel development with expanded renewable energy deployment, with renewables remaining a core component of the country’s long-term energy mix alongside gas-to-shore and gas-to-power infrastructure projects.

Moving to global peace and security, Simons delivered a blunt assessment of the United Nations’ current shortcomings, noting that the body has failed to adequately prevent or end ongoing armed conflicts around the world, eroding public and state trust in the multilateral system. For small and vulnerable states, a rules-based international order is not a political priority but a matter of survival, she said: consistent application of international law is foundational to advancing peace, security, human rights protection and sustainable development everywhere. Conflicts do not stay contained within their battlefields, she added: disruptions to global energy markets triggered by war push up energy and food prices worldwide, inflicting harm on communities thousands of miles from active conflict zones.

Against this backdrop, Simons called for a renewed commitment to the core principles of the UN Charter and the peaceful resolution of all international disputes. She specifically called out the long-running economic, commercial and financial embargo on Cuba, noting that the Cuban people bear the direct negative costs of the policy, and urged all relevant parties to pursue dialogue and negotiation to end the embargo. On Haiti, Simons called for sustained international support to help the country restore security, constitutional order and democratic governance, stressing that all solutions must center the needs and priorities of the Haitian people.

Simons also renewed long-standing calls for comprehensive reform of the UN Security Council, arguing that the body must become more representative, accountable and effective to address 21st century challenges. She expressed strong support for permanent Security Council representation for African nations, and called for greater representation for small island developing states and low-lying coastal developing countries, which are disproportionately impacted by climate change despite contributing next to nothing to global emissions.

Reparations and restorative justice for the harms of slavery and colonialism also featured prominently in Simons’ address. She argued that the global conversation has moved beyond debating whether these systems of exploitation created lasting, intergenerational harm – the focus now must shift to how those harms can be remedied, and what form reparative action should take. She highlighted the 10-point plan for restorative justice developed by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) as a key framework for moving forward.

Looking ahead to regional leadership, Simons announced that her country is already preparing to assume the CARICOM presidency in 2027, identifying food and energy security, climate resilience, improved connectivity, the free movement of skilled workers and the streamlined flow of goods and services as core practical priorities for the regional bloc. She also reaffirmed the importance of cross-border collaboration through regional bodies including CARICOM, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) and the Brasilia Consensus.

On emerging challenges, Simons called for proactive planning to manage the rise of artificial intelligence, noting that AI offers transformative opportunities for inclusive development but must be governed responsibly to mitigate downside risks. She also warned that with just four years remaining to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the world is falling badly behind on its commitments. Achieving the SDGs will require greater political will, lasting peace, improved climate and development finance, technology transfer and expanded international cooperation, she said, adding that global stakeholders must already begin planning for a post-2030 global development framework.

Closing her address, Simons referenced the upcoming selection process for a new UN Secretary-General, noting that for the first time in history, a female candidate from the Caribbean has been put forward for the role, with the full backing of CARICOM. She closed with a call to large, influential UN member states to prioritize the preservation of global peace, stressing that only a United Nations capable of guaranteeing universal peace and security can deliver tangible progress and benefits for all nations, large and small.

As ongoing armed conflicts, accelerating visible impacts of climate change, and outpacing artificial intelligence development outstrip the ability of global regulators to keep pace, more than 130 heads of state and government will convene in New York this week for the opening of the 81st United Nations General Assembly general debate. The high-stakes gathering comes at a moment of profound existential reckoning for the UN itself, as the organization grapples with urgent questions about its institutional role, long-term financial stability and future global relevance.

Officially opening on September 22, this year’s assembly has been themed “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all.” The packed agenda covers nearly every major pressing global challenge: active conflicts in the Middle East, Ukraine and beyond, unfolding humanitarian crises in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar, accelerating climate change, fragile global economic conditions, and growing global alarm over the unregulated development and deployment of artificial intelligence. Beyond these global issues, the assembly will also grapple with the future of the UN as an institution.

### Armed Conflicts Overshadow Diplomatic Progress
Long-running conflicts dominate the opening conversation, casting a long shadow over diplomatic efforts. The standoff between the United States and Iran approaches its seventh month, the war in Ukraine is entering its fifth year, and the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains a top priority for debate. Ahead of the gathering, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeated urgent calls for strengthened international cooperation and de-escalation of global tensions, but the conflicts lay bare a core structural flaw at the heart of the UN: the body can facilitate diplomatic dialogue, but it lacks independent authority to force major powers to reach political resolutions.

This gridlock is most visible in the UN Security Council, where the five permanent members — the United States, China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom — hold veto power over binding resolutions. When these major powers are divided on an issue, decisive action on conflicts and sanctions becomes nearly impossible. That dynamic was on full display just last week, when Russia and China jointly blocked a resolution to extend international sanctions monitoring on Iran, ending the mandate of an independent panel tasked with enforcing compliance.

### Key Absences Shape the Diplomatic Landscape
One of the most notable features of this year’s General Assembly is not just who will speak, but who will not be present in person. U.S. President Donald Trump will address the assembly on Tuesday, alongside French President Emmanuel Macron. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian are scheduled to speak on Wednesday, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing delegates on Thursday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will once again deliver his address via pre-recorded video, after the United States refused to grant him a travel visa to enter the country for the event.

Major leaders including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will not attend the gathering in person. Xi’s absence is particularly notable this year: he will instead travel to Washington for a high-profile state visit at Trump’s invitation September 23–25. The bilateral summit will cover U.S.-China relations and a range of pressing global issues, carrying its own diplomatic weight separate from the UN General Assembly. Key topics on the bilateral agenda include trade disputes, technology competition, artificial intelligence governance and access to strategic critical materials.

### Artificial Intelligence Moves to Center Stage
Once a peripheral issue on the UN agenda, artificial intelligence governance has taken a prominent spot in this year’s debate. The rapid development of increasingly powerful AI systems has sparked urgent global discussion over safety risks, disinformation campaigns, cyber threats, military applications, and the risk that new systems could evolve faster than governments can implement effective regulatory frameworks.

The UN Security Council will dedicate an official session this week to examining AI’s impact on international security, organized by France. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is expected to brief the council on both the transformative opportunities and catastrophic risks of advanced AI. Notably, the AI industry itself is now pushing for binding international regulations. Just this week, OpenAI called for a U.S.-led international initiative to set technical safety standards for cutting-edge AI systems, including shared testing protocols, global shared standards and mandatory cross-border incident reporting systems.

That approach faces significant pushback from the Trump administration, which has opposed regulatory measures that could slow AI innovation. The administration fears overbearing regulation would erode the United States’ current technological lead over China. The debate over AI therefore extends far beyond safety rules: it goes to the core question of how much international cooperation is possible between major powers that are simultaneously locked in fierce competition for global technological leadership.

### Climate Change: From Long-Term Threat to Daily Reality
Climate action is another top priority for the assembly. On September 23, the UN will host a dedicated summit on climate action and a just global energy transition, followed by a separate high-level summit focused on the growing impacts of sea-level rise the following day. A decade after the landmark Paris Climate Agreement, the global conversation around climate change has shifted: no longer are delegates debating whether climate change is real and needs to be addressed, but instead how nations can adapt to the already visible and destructive impacts of a warming planet.

For most developing nations, the priority is securing climate finance, building resilient infrastructure, protecting food security and shielding communities from extreme weather events. Wealthier major economies are meanwhile grappling with the rising costs of the energy transition and the fallout from disrupted global supply chains. The UN is working to tie climate action to broader global goals for sustainable development and poverty reduction.

### The UN Faces Its Own Period of Transition and Reform
This year’s General Assembly highlights a core paradox: the global community is calling on the UN to tackle more global challenges than ever before, even as the organization faces severe institutional and financial instability. The UN is currently carrying out a broad reform process called UN80, designed to create a more efficient and coordinated global UN system. In April, the General Assembly passed a resolution to improve how institutional mandates are created, implemented and evaluated.

Financial instability remains a persistent vulnerability. Just last week, the United States paid $725 million in overdue regular assessed contributions and an additional $102 million for UN peacekeeping operations, narrowly avoiding losing its voting rights in the General Assembly. Even after the payment, the U.S. still holds a large unpaid balance to the organization. These funding gaps do not just affect administrative operations: they can directly reduce the capacity of UN peacekeeping missions and global humanitarian aid programs.

Beyond institutional and financial reform, the UN is also preparing for a leadership transition. Guterres is entering the final months of his second term as Secretary-General, which will end December 31, 2026, with a new leader set to take office in January 2027. The selection process is already in its late stages. Recent reports indicate that after multiple rounds of voting in the Security Council, leading candidates include Rebeca Grynspan of Costa Rica, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett of Guyana and María Fernanda Espinosa of Ecuador. Because the five permanent Security Council members hold veto power over the selection, the final choice remains tightly tied to the current balance of power between major global powers.

### A Critical Test for International Cooperation
Despite widespread criticism of the UN’s gridlock and inefficiencies, the General Assembly remains a one-of-a-kind global diplomatic forum: all 193 UN member states hold a single seat and a single vote, and no other global body brings nearly every national government together at this scale. That said, the UN’s power to act has clear limits. The organization can facilitate negotiations, set global norms, and coordinate humanitarian aid, but it relies on member states — and most critically the willingness of major powers to cooperate — to implement its decisions.

That makes this week’s gathering in New York less a moment to expect immediate, unified solutions to all global crises, and more a critical test of how much cross-border cooperation remains possible in an increasingly divided world. The core paradox of this moment is clear: at the exact time that conflicts, climate change and technological change make cross-border cooperation more necessary than ever, political divisions between the world’s most powerful nations are at their widest in decades.

The coming days will reveal whether the UN General Assembly will merely serve as a public stage to display global division, or whether it can create space for concrete diplomatic progress on the world’s most pressing challenges.

By Nita Ramcharan
September 22

Beijing sits 11 hours ahead of Suriname. When the capital Paramaribo is still wrapped in nighttime sleep, China has already entered its next working day. For a 10-person delegation of Surinamese journalists on a seven-day tour across China, this time difference quickly gained a far deeper meaning than a simple shift in clocks. More than just traveling 11 hours ahead of our home schedule, it often felt as though we had jumped decades forward into the future.

China overwhelms first-time visitors with the sheer scale and pace of its progress. This transformation is visible everywhere: in world-class infrastructure, cutting-edge digital technology, thoughtful urban planning, high-speed rail networks that connect the country in hours, industrial robots, and widely deployed artificial intelligence. Above all, what stands out is that this is a nation that does not merely discuss technological advancement – it actively implements it, even in industries as familiar to us as media.

For our group of working journalists, seeing the tools Chinese newsrooms use on a daily basis was a fascinating, eye-opening experience. Top-tier camera equipment, professional audio and lighting systems, mobile camera dollies integrated with teleprompters, and even AI tools already integrated into daily content production and presentation are standard now. These are tools that many of us in Suriname have only dared to dream about for the future of journalism, yet they are already in everyday use across China.

Take Shanghai as one striking example. When you stand along the Bund at night and gaze across the Huangpu River toward the Pudong district, you are greeted by a scene that feels almost like stepping into a fairytale. On one side of the river stand the well-preserved historic colonial buildings of the Bund, and on the other rises a futuristic skyline of glass and steel skyscrapers. Light, innovative architecture, and technology merge to create a view that leaves you speechless. As we stood watching, it felt less like we were looking at tomorrow and more like we were glimpsing what the world will look like in 2050.

This same sense of awe struck me when visiting large-scale infrastructure projects that integrate cutting-edge engineering. The Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link, for instance, is a 24-kilometer transport corridor combining two bridges, an undersea tunnel, and two artificial islands spanning the Pearl River estuary. The project cut travel time between the two major cities of Shenzhen and Zhongshan from roughly two hours down to just 30 minutes.

Projects of this scale do not materialize from a spontaneous decision to build a bridge one morning. They require years of long-term vision, careful strategic planning, advanced scientific research, world-class engineering, significant investment, and above all, consistent political commitment to see the project through to completion.

Of course, China is not some perfect fairy tale from *One Thousand and One Nights*. There are well-documented discussions to be had about human rights, the status of dissenting voices, press freedom, and restrictions on social media platforms. Not every policy China pursues deserves admiration, and certainly no country should simply copy every model China has implemented. But anyone who only focuses on these criticisms and refuses to acknowledge the extraordinary progress China has achieved in other fields does themselves a disservice. The reality of the 21st century is that the world can no longer ignore China’s role in global affairs.

What this tour made even clearer is that true development is never just a matter of money. Of course, large investments are required to build bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, and digital infrastructure. But money without a clear, long-term national vision will never drive real, lasting change for a society. And that is where the story turns back to Suriname.

Suriname has recently established a broad National Development Platform tasked with drafting a national development vision extending to 2050. This initiative cannot be allowed to become just another plan that, after endless meetings, grand speeches, and thick published reports, ends up gathering dust on a shelf. How many multi-year development plans, vision documents, and future strategy reports have we written over the past decades? We have poured countless hours and significant public funds into these efforts. Now, we are once again investing heavily in developing a new national plan.

This is why the current effort must deliver more than just paper reports. Suriname can no longer afford to restart the entire development process from scratch every time there is a change in government. It is natural and democratic for different administrations to have different political priorities and ideological orientations. But the fundamental long-term development direction of a nation cannot shift completely every five years.

We need to answer critical questions that will shape our future: Where do we want Suriname to stand in 2050 when it comes to education, healthcare, energy access, agriculture, housing, infrastructure, and urban planning? What role will we carve out for technology, automation, and artificial intelligence in our economy? And most importantly, how do we prepare our children for a world that is changing faster than many of us fully comprehend? These questions grow even more urgent now that Suriname stands on the cusp of significant new oil and gas revenue. The biggest mistake we could make would be to assume that oil revenue will automatically generate widespread development. It will not. Without a clear, shared long-term vision, even billions of dollars in new revenue can disappear without delivering lasting progress.

The outbound flight to Beijing via Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport took more than 28 hours, and the return flight, which lasted nearly 37 hours, was a grueling experience. Several members of our delegation, including myself, were not allowed to leave Schiphol during our layover. Even a 24-hour transit visa proved impossible to arrange, despite high-level efforts to secure it. We were unable to meet family members who live less than half an hour from the airport, which left many of us frustrated. But we returned home safely, tired after the long journey, but our minds full of new ideas and perspectives.

The biggest lesson China taught us on this trip is what long-term strategic thinking can achieve. Suriname does not need to become China – that is not possible, and it is not something we should want anyway. Our national scale, history, social fabric, and democratic traditions are fundamentally different. China itself has lived through a turbulent history of dramatic transformation, yet it still actively preserves and celebrates its centuries-old cultural heritage. That may be another key lesson for us: moving forward does not require forgetting where we came from.

Standing on the Bund in Shanghai, a group of Surinamese journalists stood among thousands of glittering lights, gazing out at a world that felt almost unreal. Beijing and Shanghai are 11 hours ahead of Paramaribo on the clock, but the gap in development felt far larger. We did not just travel to another country – we got a glimpse of the future that awaits Suriname, too. Now, the only question that remains is: how many years will it take us to catch up?