World

The president of the world football body called Tuesday for a one-month ceasefire in Ukraine to mark the World Cup, saying sport could bring people together.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino, addressing leaders of the Group of 20 major economies gathered in Bali, said the World Cup opening Sunday in Qatar could serve as a “positive trigger” in the nearly nine-month Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“My plea to all of you is to think of a temporary ceasefire for one month for the duration of the World Cup,” he told a G20 lunch for the leaders.

If not a full ceasefire, there can be “the implementation of some humanitarian corridors or anything that could lead to the resumption of dialogue,” he said.

Describing football as a unifier, he pointed out that Russia had hosted the 2018 World Cup and that Ukraine is submitting a joint bid with Spain and Portugal for 2030.

“We are not naive to believe that football can solve the world’s problems,” Infantino said.

But the World Cup offered a “unique platform,” he said, as an estimated five billion people — more than half of humanity — are expected to watch on television.

“Let’s take this opportunity to do everything we can to start putting an end to all conflicts,” he said.

The G20 talks included President Joe Biden and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov although it was not immediately clear if they were listening to Infantino, who later asked leaders to sign a souvenir football.

FIFA suspended Russia days after President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, booting the Russians from World Cup qualifying matches after several countries refused to play them.

The 2022 World Cup, the first to take place in the Middle East, has already been full of controversy, including over Qatar’s alleged human rights abuses, suppression of dissent, mistreatment of foreign workers and persecution of LGBTQ people.

Human rights groups including Amnesty International last week appealed to Infantino to set up a FIFA remediation programme to compensate labourers.

Infantino defended the track record of the World Cup, saying that “hundreds of thousands of workers enjoy better conditions than some years ago”.

Qatar has accused its critics of racism and said that it was already handing out hundreds of millions of dollars for unpaid wages.

As part of reforms, the gas-rich kingdom has ended its much-criticised system in which labourers could not change jobs or leave the country without permission from their employer.

Russia faced mounting diplomatic pressure to end its war in Ukraine Tuesday, as G20 leaders meeting in Indonesia rued the high cost of the eight-month-old conflict.

In a draft communique, countries including Russia deplored the impact of “the war in Ukraine” — a conflict that “most members strongly condemned”.

The group is also expected to declare that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons” is “inadmissible”, a veiled rebuke of President Vladimir Putin who has repeatedly raised the spectre of nuclear conflagration.

Putin was forced to skip the summit as he reckons with a string of embarrassing battlefield defeats and a grinding war that threatens the future of his regime.

Rubbing salt in his wounds, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky — fresh from a visit to liberated Kherson — delivered an impassioned video appeal to G20 leaders.

Zelensky told leaders from China’s Xi Jinping to America’s Joe Biden that they could “save thousands of lives” by pressing for a Russian withdrawal.

“I am convinced now is the time when the Russian destructive war must and can be stopped,” he said, sporting his now-trademark army-green T-shirt.

Putin’s delegate, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, remained in his seat throughout Zelensky’s address, two diplomatic sources told AFP.

The veteran diplomat had preparations for the summit disrupted by two trips to a Bali hospital in as many days for an undisclosed ailment.

– ‘Immense’ suffering –

The United States and its allies sought to use the summit to broaden the coalition against Russia’s invasion and scotch Moscow’s claims of a war of East versus West.

Many “see Russia’s war in Ukraine as the root source of immense economic and humanitarian suffering in the world” said a senior US official.

Russia and its G20 allies China, India and South Africa refrained from criticising Putin’s war explicitly, and the draft joint statement is replete with diplomatic fudges and linguistic gymnastics.

But it gives a growing sense of the worldwide impact of the war.

G20 members Argentina and Turkey are among the nations worst hit by food inflation worldwide, but there was scarcely a country around the table unaffected by high food and fuel prices.

“The war is affecting everyone” said Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero. 

“In the northern hemisphere the merchants of death broker lethal arms sales, but in the southern hemisphere food is costly or scarce — what kills are not bullets or missiles, but poverty and hunger.”

There was also a hint at growing Chinese unease with Russia’s prosecution of the war 

when presidents Xi and Biden met late Monday.

Both men voiced opposition to the “use or threat of use” of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the White House said, although Beijing did not repeat that concern in public.

“It’s clear that the Russians are very isolated,” said one Western official. “I think some countries engaged with Russia but… I did not see any gestures of great solidarity.”

– Grain corridor –

A deal allowing Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea was another focus of conversation.

It expires November 19, and Russia has already threatened to rip it up.

Ukraine is one of the world’s top grain producers, and the Russian invasion had blocked 20 million tonnes of grain in its ports before the United Nations and Turkey brokered the deal in July.

The G20 is expected to urge “full, timely and continued implementation”.

The summit build-up focused heavily on Xi, who is making only his second overseas trip since the pandemic began.

Xi and Biden cooled Cold War rhetoric during three hours of talks on Monday, taking some of the heat out of their simmering superpower rivalry. 

“The world expects that China and the United States will properly handle the relationship,” Xi told Biden.

Former US diplomat Danny Russel described the meeting as broadly positive. 

“We should beware of prematurely declaring the strategic rivalry over. However, we saw a deliberate effort to stabilise a dangerously overheated relationship.”

A baby born somewhere on Tuesday will be the world’s eight billionth person, according to a projection by the United Nations.

“The milestone is an occasion to celebrate diversity and advancements while considering humanity’s shared responsibility for the planet,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement.

The UN attributes the growth to human development, with people living longer thanks to improvements in public health, nutrition, personal hygiene and medicine. 

It is also the result of higher fertility rates, particularly in the world’s poorest countries — most of which are in sub-Saharan Africa — putting their development goals at risk.

– How many is too many? –

Population growth has also magnified the environmental impacts of economic development.

But while some worry that eight billion humans is too many for planet Earth, most experts say the bigger problem is the overconsumption of resources by the wealthiest people.

“Some express concerns that our world is overpopulated,” said United Nations Population Fund chief Natalia Kanem. “I am here to say clearly that the sheer number of human lives is not a cause for fear.”

Joel Cohen of Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Populations told AFP the question of how many people Earth can support has two sides: natural limits and human choices.

Our choices result in humans consuming far more biological resources, such as forests and land, than the planet can regenerate each year. 

The overconsumption of fossil fuels, for example, leads to more carbon dioxide emissions, responsible for global warming.

“We are stupid. We lacked foresight. We are greedy. We don’t use the information we have. That’s where the choices and the problems lie,” said Cohen. 

However, he rejects the idea that humans are a curse on the planet, saying people should be given better choices.

– Slowing growth –  

The current population is more than three times higher than the 2.5 billion global headcount in 1950.

However, after a peak in the early 1960s, the world’s population growth rate has decelerated dramatically, Rachel Snow of the UN Population Fund told AFP.

Annual growth has fallen from a high of 2.1 percent between 1962 and 1965 to below 1 percent in 2020.

That could potentially fall further to around 0.5 percent by 2050 due to a continued decline in fertility rates, the United Nations projects.

The UN projects the population to continue growing to about 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and peaking around 10.4 billion in the 2080s.

Other groups have, however, calculated different figures.

The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimated in a 2020 study that the global population would max out by 2064, without ever reaching 10 billion, and decline to 8.8 billion by 2100.

– Black Death – 

Since the emergence of the first humans in Africa over two million years ago the world’s population has ballooned, with only fleeting pauses to the increasing number of people sharing Earth.

Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, who had few children compared to later settled populations in order to maintain their nomadic lifestyle.

The introduction of agriculture in the Neolithic era, around 10,000 BC, brought the first known major population leap.

With agriculture came sedentarization and the ability to store food, which caused birth rates to soar.

From around six million in 10,000 BC, the global population leapt to 100 million in 2,000 BC and then to 250 million in the first century AD, according to the French Institute for Demographic Studies.

As a result of the Black Death, the human population dropped between 1300 and 1400, from 429 to 374 million.

Other events, like the Plague of Justinian, which hit the Mediterranean over two centuries from 541-767, and the wars of the early Middle Ages in western Europe, also caused temporary dips in the number of humans on Earth.

From the 19th century on, the population began to explode, due largely to the development of modern medicine and the industrialization of agriculture, which boosted global food supplies.

Since 1800, the world’s population has jumped eight-fold, from an estimated one billion to eight billion.

The development of vaccines was key, with the smallpox jab particularly helping zap one of history’s biggest killers. 

It could be the beaches and palatial hotels. It might be Chinese President Xi Jinping’s warm smile. But there is no doubt: Joe Biden is enjoying his Bali G20.

“I don’t think I’m going home,” Biden joked to his host, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, enthusing about the beach stretching outside his hotel.

Later Monday, at an evening press conference in a tropical garden, Biden’s first words to journalists were: “Welcome to Bali.”

Said with a chuckle, he seemed to refer to what everyone was experiencing: the cocktail of humid heat, stunning decor and abundant nature that felt a million miles from the stiff formality of the White House.

TV journalists were using towels to mop sweat from their faces. A chorus of crickets was so loud that even the garden waterfalls became inaudible. And the fatigue of flying to the other side of the world for back-to-back summits in Egypt, Cambodia and Bali had set in for many.

Biden himself croakily admitted to having caught “a little cold.”

The overwhelming vibe for the veteran Democrat, however, was pure Bali — a sense of relief.

– ‘Ready to play’ –

Just over a week ago, Biden faced the prospect of having to travel in the wake of what were forecast to be humiliating midterms election losses.

Those predictions, however, proved wrong and instead he is spending the trip celebrating his party retaining the Senate and, more surprisingly, limiting Republican opponents to slim victories in the House.

Even better for Biden, the election marked a repudiation of Donald Trump-backing Republicans and their campaign to cast doubt on US democracy. This reinforces Biden’s overarching message that his 2020 defeat of Trump was no ordinary contest but the start of an existential battle for the country’s future.

Last week’s election “sent a very strong message around the world that the United States is ready to play,” Biden said.

The results signalled that “we’re going to stay fully engaged in the world and that we, in fact, know what we’re about.”

– Superpower smile –

Biden carried that self-confidence — and sunny outlook — into his meeting with Xi on the sidelines of the G20 conference.

The men know each other from their long political careers, but this was the first in-person talk since Biden became president. That, according to US officials, was really the main achievement on a day where expectations were kept deliberately low.

Flashing a smile, Biden strode up to the Chinese leader and clasped his hand. They looked more like old friends meeting in a beautiful tropical resort than adversaries.

“I’m really glad to be able to see you again in person. We spent a lot of time together and — back in the days when we were both vice presidents, and it’s just great to see you,” Biden said.

Xi is not known for his personal warmth in public. And after recently securing a third term as the president of China, he speaks from a position of increasing strength.

But he too seemed to catch the island vibe.

Noting that he and Biden had placed many phone calls and exchanged letters, he added that nothing can “substitute for face-to-face exchanges”.

“We finally have this face-to-face meeting,” he said.

That both men were “shaking hands and smiling” caught the attention of English-language Chinese state media outlet the Global Times.

“This long-awaited scene between China and the US has timely relaxed and comforted the world’s tense emotions,” read its enthusiastic account.

– Shadows –

Even Biden was quick to caution that from now on Washington and Beijing will not be all “kumbaya”.

There was no sign of movement on the dangerous standoff over Taiwan. No one is expecting thaws in the tense and increasingly competitive trade relationship.

At the G20 summit, he has his work cut out in getting countries that aren’t part of the West to up the pressure on Russia over Ukraine.

Back home, Biden’s midterm victory lap will likely soon run into the rough reality of life with a Republican House.

Even with a fragile majority, the far-right wing of the party is itching to turn the last two years of Biden’s first term into a political war zone.

Perhaps not by coincidence, Trump has set Tuesday evening in Florida for his expected announcement that he will seek the presidency again in 2024 — just  before the same time on Wednesday in Bali that Biden boards Air Force One to return to Washington.

For a few days though, Biden can enjoy his wins — and the beach.

“I guess all of you are going swimming from here,” he teased travelling journalists. “It’s not far.”

China’s Xi Jinping was the leader everyone wanted to meet at this week’s G20 summit, where he took centre stage in a carefully choreographed appearance after three years of self-imposed pandemic isolation.

President Xi strode into Tuesday’s G20 summit the morning after a three-hour meeting with his US counterpart Joe Biden in which they promised to dial down the rhetoric and work to close the yawning gap between the two powers.

With smiles and handshakes — as well as promises of fresh talks on climate change and trade — Xi appeared keen to paint himself as a magnanimous diplomat ready to confront global challenges and build bridges.

“Xi Jinping is certainly working to make up for lost time on the international stage,” said Danny Russel, Vice President at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, adding that Xi’s burst of diplomacy resembled a “charm offensive”.

“The Biden-Xi summit raised hopes that the two powers might now be willing to separate their global responsibilities from their bilateral differences.”

Also on Xi’s checklist of world leaders to schmooze are Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo — the G20 summit host — Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Japanese premier Fumio Kishida.

And the conspicuous absence of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin — isolated on the world stage because of his brutal war in Ukraine — solidifies Xi’s place as the prime global counterweight to the US-led international order.

Xi and Biden both entered their tete-a-tete in Bali from a position of strength — the former secured a historic third term as China’s top leader at the Communist Party Congress last month, and the latter’s Democratic Party exceeded expectations in the US midterm elections.

Flanked by foreign policy and political figures from his reshuffled Party top brass, Xi did not waver on Beijing’s hardline position on Taiwan and told Biden it was the “core of China’s core interests” and an “insurmountable red line in US-China relations”.

Nor did he appear to make any clear concessions on the Ukraine war or North Korea’s weapons tests.

“(Biden’s) prime emphasis is still prevention of US-China military conflict,” said Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing and an advisor to China’s State Council.

– ‘Trying to thread a needle’ –

Indeed, Chinese officials may have been relieved by Putin’s G20 absence, which spared them from having to show more concrete support for him in the face of united Western condemnation of Russia, analysts said.

“Xi is trying to thread a needle between trying to look like a respectable leader in the international system and supporting Putin,” said Michael McFaul, professor of international studies at Stanford University and former US Ambassador to Russia.

Putin’s isolation at home and international pariah status could not contrast more sharply with the image Xi is projecting this week. 

And his remarks to Biden that he agreed nuclear war should not be fought and cannot be won represent a clear rebuke to the Russian leader.

“Putin’s absence puts more attention on Xi, giving him more opportunity to put forward his views,” Chong Ja Ian, associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, told AFP.

“Not having to deal with Putin, with whom Xi has created an image of having close ties, also means that Xi does not have to defend or criticise Russian actions.”

Despite the lack of major breakthroughs, the warmer-than-expected meeting with Biden paves the way for Xi’s subsequent talks with a train of foreign dignitaries relieved at the prospect of no immediate escalation in the US-China rivalry.

“Neither Biden nor Xi went into this meeting expecting to get concessions on the contentious issues,” said Russel, formerly a top State Department official working on China.

“It seems, though, that they were able to get at least a tacit agreement that those disagreements should not preclude cooperation on unrelated global priorities.”

Russia faced mounting diplomatic pressure to end its war in Ukraine Tuesday, as G20 leaders meeting in Indonesia rued the high cost of the eight-month-old conflict.

In a draft communique, countries including Russia deplored the impact of “the war in Ukraine” — a conflict that “most members strongly condemned”.

The group is also expected to declare that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons” is “inadmissible”, a veiled rebuke of President Vladimir Putin who has repeatedly raised the spectre of nuclear conflagration.

Putin was forced to skip the summit as he reckons with a string of embarrassing battlefield defeats and a grinding war that threatens the future of his regime.

Rubbing salt in his wounds, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky — fresh from a visit to liberated Kherson — delivered an impassioned video appeal to G20 leaders.

Zelensky told leaders from China’s Xi Jinping to America’s Joe Biden that they could “save thousands of lives” by pressing for a Russian withdrawal.

“I am convinced now is the time when the Russian destructive war must and can be stopped,” he said, sporting his now-trademark army-green T-shirt.

Putin’s delegate, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, remained in his seat throughout Zelensky’s address, two diplomatic sources told AFP.

The veteran diplomat had preparations for the summit disrupted by two trips to a Bali hospital in as many days for an undisclosed ailment.

– ‘Immense’ suffering –

The United States and its allies sought to use the summit to broaden the coalition against Russia’s invasion and scotch Moscow’s claims of a war of East versus West.

Many “see Russia’s war in Ukraine as the root source of immense economic and humanitarian suffering in the world” said a senior US official.

Russia and its G20 allies China, India and South Africa refrained from criticising Putin’s war explicitly, and the draft joint statement is replete with diplomatic fudges and linguistic gymnastics.

But it gives a growing sense of the worldwide impact of the war.

G20 members Argentina and Turkey are among the nations worst hit by food inflation worldwide, but there was scarcely a country around the table unaffected by high food and fuel prices.

“The war is affecting everyone” said Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero. 

“In the northern hemisphere the merchants of death broker lethal arms sales, but in the southern hemisphere food is costly or scarce — what kills are not bullets or missiles, but poverty and hunger.”

There was also a hint at growing Chinese unease with Russia’s prosecution of the war 

when presidents Xi and Biden met late Monday.

Both men voiced opposition to the “use or threat of use” of nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the White House said, although Beijing did not repeat that concern in public.

“It’s clear that the Russians are very isolated,” said one Western official. “I think some countries engaged with Russia but… I did not see any gestures of great solidarity.”

– Grain corridor –

A deal allowing Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea was another focus of conversation.

It expires November 19, and Russia has already threatened to rip it up.

Ukraine is one of the world’s top grain producers, and the Russian invasion had blocked 20 million tonnes of grain in its ports before the United Nations and Turkey brokered the deal in July.

The G20 is expected to urge “full, timely and continued implementation”.

The summit build-up focused heavily on Xi, who is making only his second overseas trip since the pandemic began.

Xi and Biden cooled Cold War rhetoric during three hours of talks on Monday, taking some of the heat out of their simmering superpower rivalry. 

“The world expects that China and the United States will properly handle the relationship,” Xi told Biden.

Former US diplomat Danny Russel described the meeting as broadly positive. 

“We should beware of prematurely declaring the strategic rivalry over. However, we saw a deliberate effort to stabilise a dangerously overheated relationship.”