Rich countries are not living up to their pledges to help developing countries weather the effects of the global economic crisis, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Monday, Reuters reported. "I am seeing little being done by the rich countries in the help they are supposed to give," Lula said on his weekly radio broadcast ahead of this week's meeting in Italy of G8 industrial nations and the main developing economies. "We need to demand the things we agreed that the International Monetary Fund would do and that the World Bank would do, and I think this meeting is extremely important," said Lula, who is currently visiting France. The G20 group of nations, which includes leading emerging markets, agreed in London in April to triple the resources of the IMF to $750 billion to help cushion the impact on countries from the economic crisis. The summit also set a target to more than double lending to the world's poorest countries and said additional resources for them would be raised through already agreed IMF gold sales. Lula, who has positioned Brazil as a leader of the developing world, has accused rich countries of causing the global crisis and forcing poor nations into hardship. Ahead of April's summit, he blamed "white people with blue-eyes" for irrational behavior that set off the financial crisis last year. Italy has invited 40 nations and organizations, representing 90 percent of the world economy, to next week's G8 summit in a bid to make the Group of Eight more relevant as world economic power shifts to include large developing nations like Brazil and China. Lula said the G20, whose next summit is in September, had now overtaken the G8 in importance. "The big forum for economic questions should be the G20," he said. "The truth is that the situation is so complicated that today it is very difficult for the rich countries to take a position that does not take into account the so-called BRICs." The BRIC group is made up of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
