Category: Foreign

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation echoed African leaders’ calls for countries to rapidly scale-up finance for climate adaptation and pledged to invest $1.4 billion to help smallholder farmers address the immediate and long-term impacts of climate change.

CEO Gates Foundation Mark Suzman announced this at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27).

“The effects of climate change have already been devastating, and every moment the world delays action, more people suffer, and the solutions become more complex and costly,” said Suzman.

“Our commitment will help smallholder farmers adapt today and build resilience for the future. It is essential for this climate summit to produce bold commitments that address immediate and long-term needs. Leaders must listen to the voices of African farmers and governments to understand their priorities and respond with urgency.”

The foundation’s commitment will fund immediate action and long-term initiatives over four years to help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia build resilience and food security. Funding will focus on spurring African-led innovation to build a pipeline of climate-smart agriculture projects, new applications of digital technologies, climate-smart innovations for smallholder livestock farming, and support for women smallholder farmers to capitalize on their untapped potential.

“Women in rural Africa are the backbone of their food systems, but they have never had equal access to the resources they need to reach their full potential or build resilience to looming climate threats,” said Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“As the climate crisis accelerates, women’s vital role in their economies is too important to overlook. With the right financing and marketing support, women smallholder farmers could earn more in a day than they currently earn in a month, ultimately transforming these regional food systems and unlocking a healthier, more sustainable, and more prosperous future for families and communities across the continent.”

Read Also: #COP27: Nigeria committed to tackling climate crisis — Buhari

To improve the livelihoods of rural women in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, the foundation is deepening its ongoing partnership with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The goal is to scale up initiatives that empower women farmers, support innovations at the nexus of gender and climate adaptation, and increase climate finance that gives rural women better access to the climate-smart resources they need to strengthen food systems.

“The climate crisis is causing enormous harm every day as it jeopardizes entire regions of people and economies,” said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “More funding is necessary to ensure agricultural and technological innovations are widely available to vulnerable communities, helping them to adapt to climate change, save lives and increase economic growth.”

Additional investments included in the commitment announced will support:

• The Africa Adaptation Initiative (AAI) to quickly build a pipeline of climate-smart agriculture projects across 23 countries in Africa. Funding will provide targeted support for the technical capacity, planning, and project development required to implement programs.
• The development of new applications of digital technologies to ensure smallholder farmers can anticipate and respond to climate threats. This includes an innovative weather intelligence platform developed through a new partnership between the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) and TomorrowNow, which provides climate-smart agriculture strategies to farmers in East Africa via text messages.
• African-led innovations to develop climate-smart options for improving livestock health and productivity while also reducing their climate footprint. This will be done in partnership with Canada’s International Development Research Center (IDRC).

This funding builds on more than a decade of investments and the foundation’s recent announcement during the United Nations General Assembly of $100 million in funding to help alleviate the current food crisis in Africa and South Asia and address its underlying causes. It also builds on funding commitments focused on agriculture adaptation made at previous climate summits:

• 2021 at COP26: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Pledges $315 million to Support Innovations That Help Smallholder Farmers Adapt to Climate Threats
• 2017 at One Planet Summit: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Commits $300M (€255M) to Help Farmers in Africa and Asia Cope with Climate Change

U.S. voters on Tuesday headed for the midterm elections which will have a powerful effect on the final two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Eligible voters will determine the majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as well as decide numerous governorships and other important offices.

Voters may punish the Democrats, who currently control the White House and Congress, against the backdrop of surging inflation and headwinds for the economy.

Read Also: Failure of democracy in Nigeria and the United States

The party in power traditionally suffers losses in the midterms.

If the Democrats lose their majority in Congress, Republicans are likely to block majority of Biden’s policies until the next presidential election in Nov. 2024.

According to opinion polls, the House of Representatives is likely to go to the Republicans while a close race is expected in the Senate.

Biden has repeatedly warned against Republican candidates openly questioning or even denying election results. (dpa/NAN)

Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and a key figure in the war in Ukraine, admitted bluntly yesterday to interfering in U.S. elections.

“Gentlemen, we interfered, we are interfering, and we will interfere,” declared Prigozhin in a statement quoted by his company, Concord.

The oligarch has been sanctioned by Washington for running a “troll factory” to influence the outcome of votes in the U.S. and elsewhere.

“Accurately, precisely, surgically, and the way we do it, the way we know how to,” Prigozhin quipped in response to a request for comment on the specifics of the interference from a Russian news outlet.

Prigozhin is the financial benefactor behind a so-called Russian “troll farm” previously called the Internet Research Agency.

The group, which has changed it’s name multiple times, creates and uses inauthentic social media pages to spread misinformation or incendiary speech to affect voters and sow discord. Such organisations are believed to exist in Russia, China and Iran, at least, with the same intent.

The U.S. Treasury Department accused Prigozhin and the Internet Research Agency of interfering in the 2016 presidential election and the 2018 midterm elections. The organisation was frequently mentioned by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his probe into Russia’s election interference.

In July, the State Department offered a reward of up to $10 million for information on Prigozhin in connection with his “engagement in U.S. election interference.”

Read Also: Billionaire renounces Russian citizenship over Ukraine invasion

Prigozhin’s own admission came on the eve of this week’s round of U.S. midterm elections, which will be key to shaping the rest of President Joe Biden’s presidency. It was the first such admission from an individual who has been formally accused by Washington of efforts to influence American politics.

Speaking on Sunday to CBS’ “Face the Nation” moderator Margaret Brennan, Chris Krebs, the former director of the U.S. government cybersecurity agency said, “we’ve seen reports of Russia, China, Iran back at their old tricks,” referring to online interference operations.

Krebs said two U.S. research firms had released information suggesting trolls linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency “are back at it and are undermining Democratic candidates for Senate” in this week’s midterms.

Combined with Elon Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter, Krebs said it was all “going to create a very chaotic environment” for the U.S. democratic process.

The Kremlin has repeatedly denied ever seeking to influence elections in the U.S. or any other outside nation. Russian President Vladimir Putin ridiculed Mueller’s 2018 indictment of 13 Russians accused of a conspiracy to meddle in the presidential election that put Donald Trump in the White House.

“How low the Western information and political environment has fallen if a restauranteur from Russia could influence elections in the United States or a European country,” the Russian leader said at the time, referring to Prigozhin.

The businessman is sometimes called “Putin’s chef” for the lucrative catering contracts he received from the Russian state.

The oligarch has kept a low profile for years, but recently Prigozhin has emerged as an increasingly public figure as the mercenaries from his Wagner Group have become a key force in bolstering Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Prigozhin denied bankrolling the Wagner Group for years, but in September he admitted to funding the pseudo-military company since 2014. Since then, the private Wagner army has helped advance the Kremlin’s geopolitical and business objectives in conflicts from Syria and Africa to Ukraine.

American voters were fractured politically and culturally yesterday ahead of Election Day.

They were anxious about where their country was heading — on inflation, abortion, immigration, crime, and much more.

They also sensed something more fundamental at stake at a time of rising mistrust of institutions and each other: the future of democracy.

All 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are up for grabs, as are 35 US Senate seats and 36 governorships.

Republicans would need to pick up five seats to take a majority in the House and just one to control the Senate. Non-partisan election forecasters and polls suggest Republicans have a very strong chance of winning a House majority, with control of the Senate likely to be closer fought.

A massive wave of Republican support could lead to declarations of victory hours after polls close.

Some Americans remain hopeful, but a fretful outlook emerges from interviews with more than two dozen Democratic, Republican and unaffiliated voters before today’s midterm elections — the first since followers of former President Donald Trump tried to halt the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

These midterm elections are also the first since the Supreme Court took away a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy, leaving the matter to states.

Read Also: Tinubu’s election a done deal, says Abiodun

“This election is hugely consequential,” said Edward Foley, a professor at Ohio State University who directs its election-law programme. “It’s a question of where our democracy is and how we are doing with our collective self-governance.”

Midterms are always important because a switch in control of the House or Senate can stunt the plans of a sitting president. Control of Congress could also affect various investigations into Trump, including his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.

Dozens of statewide candidates have said the 2020 election was stolen; some running for positions that validate elections have refused to say if they will certify the 2024 results. And there are already more than 100 legal challenges against this year’s election.

The United States has stood at the precipice before. Not long after Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, 11 states withdrew from the nation and the Civil War began.

Ultimately, Foley said, the election turns on a question: “Can we actually build the system and produce accurate, honest outcomes, and will enough people believe them?”

Brian Montes’ Mexican-born parents told him that America is “a shining city on a hill” and urged him to take his responsibility as a U.S. citizen seriously.

Montes, 21, is majoring in political science at Portland State University, and will vote this election for the second time in his life.

Montes was appalled to see election deniers attempt to overturn President Biden’s victory. For him, democracy is on the ballot this November.

“Protecting our democracy truly is … paramount. We can’t really fix climate change, we can’t, you know, help the health care system, we can’t bring relief to students across this country until we have faith in our democracy,” he said.

Montes, who is gay, also worries that political beliefs are now such a part of personal identity that it’s almost impossible to separate politics from hate.

In the past, someone on the other side of an issue simply had “a different perspective as to why or how we can better our country,” he said. “Now it’s whether or not somebody believes you have a right to be here, whether or not somebody believes you have a right to exist. And that is deeply personal.”

But as the first person in his family to vote, Montes is also optimistic in the long-term.

Tony Bergida, a 27-year-old father from the Kansas City, Kansas suburb of Olathe, said pocketbook issues carry more weight for him in this election than abortion, transgender rights or the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

Bergida, the chair of the Kansas Young Republicans, cast his ballot in advance and picked Republican Amanda Adkins over the incumbent, Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids.

Democratic ads have focused on abortion protections but the election is “really going to be the economy, first and foremost,” said Bergida, who said his grocery bill has soared over the past two years.

“The cost of living has got to be on everyone’s minds right now.”

Ohio and Indiana are two states whose roles in the American economy cannot be downplayed. Their microelectronic sector has particularly contributed immensely to the economy of their region and their country and they are enjoying a renaissance in manufacturing and investment not seen in decades, writes United States Bureau Chief OLUKOREDE YISHAU.

David Roberts, the Chief Innovation Officer of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, and Kenny McDonald, who is the President and CEO of the Columbus Partnership, are passionate about America’s Midwest. Both are seriously involved in building the economy of silicon’s heartland in Ohio and Indiana. They are doing this by growing an important component of microelectronics known as semiconductors.

Speaking at a briefing organised by the New York Foreign Press Centre, they breathed life into how their organisations have helped improve the American economy. McDonald, who leads the Columbus Partnership, which is a coalition of civic leaders, CEOs of major companies, and academic leaders in Ohio, helps to attract new employers from around the world to help existing companies grow.

“Our vision is to become the most prosperous region in the country. We represent 11 counties there in red in the center of Ohio. Ohio is America’s seventh-largest state and is enjoying a number of successes that have been announced throughout the last two or three years and is enjoying a renaissance in manufacturing and investment that we haven’t seen in decades. Columbus and our metropolitan market is in the center of that,” McDonald said.

The Ohio market is about 2.3 million people and is growing daily. In the last 12 years, its metropolis has ranked number one in population growth, number one in private sector job growth, and number one in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth and is one of the fastest growing regions in the country.

According to McDonald, the area has a long list of great companies that call it home. They include Battelle, one of the largest defense contractors and private research organisations in the world, NetJets, DHL, Wendy’s, ScottsMiracle‑Gro and others.

“It’s also home to major operations – companies such as Honda, which has called the Columbus region home now for 41 years; Abbott nutrition, which has been here for several decades and is one of the largest cloud computing centers with facilities from AWS and Amazon, Google, and Google Cloud, as well as Meta; and JPMorgan Chase is actually our largest private sector employer with over 18,000 people in our market, a trading for and a number of people that report directly into the largest center here in New York. It does encompass the second largest technology operation in JPMorgan Chase’s global operations with over 5,000 technology workers here in the Columbus market, producing JPMorgan Chase’s financial services products,” he said.

Read Also: #COP27: We are on highway to climate hell, UN chief warns

McDonald added that the area has recorded major investments over the course of the year. Intel, he said, has committed over $20 billion in capital investment and created over 3,000 jobs in the first phase of the project. The project, he explained, will encompass about 7,000 construction jobs to help build those first two fabs and the core facilities.

“They’ve already invested, along with the National Science Foundation, over 100 million in U.S. universities and colleges, mostly here in Ohio. It’s the first greenfield site for Intel in over 40 years from around the world. They have global operations, including in many of your countries, but this is the first true greenfield they’ve had in over 40 years, and over time the investment could total well over $100 billion and over 12,000 jobs in our region. So the largest investment in Ohio’s history in manufacturing and one of the largest investments in U.S. history for a non-oil and gas project.

“We coupled that with just a few weeks ago announcing a major announcement from Honda to call Ohio and the Columbus region their electric vehicle home, their hub for all-electric vehicle operations. They are one of our largest employers and have been in their 40-year existence. The retooling of these facilities, three across our region, and the production of a new battery facility and a partnership with LG will create as many as 2,500 new jobs, retain over 8,000 jobs that exist today, and help move our automotive operations into the next generation of electric vehicles, making this one of the largest automotive centers in the whole world. Honda is a great investor across the U.S., including in Indiana and Ohio, of course, and has its North American manufacturing and engineering headquarters here in the Columbus region.

“We’re working with over – well over a hundred companies that are actively looking for new facilities and places to create jobs and investment somewhere in the country, so we’re competing for over 137 active projects. Most of those, 70 percent of those, are new to our region, and so the world is discovering the Midwest, discovering Ohio, and it’s discovering the Columbus market. Very interestingly for this group, over 50 percent of those projects are foreign-owned companies considering the U.S. for either their first investment or for additional investment in the United States, speaking well of the business environment we have here in Ohio, in Columbus, but also in North America and the U.S. market.

“You can see that the activity is very, very much focused on manufacturing. This is welcome news for the Midwest and for all of North America in that we’re recruiting manufacturing at these levels for the first time in decades, and this makes up – this has made up a consistent part of our pipeline for well over the last three years as we rebuild our supply chains and our companies reinvest in the United States. We’re very thankful that we’re seeing some of that here in Ohio in the Columbus region, and obviously, Intel and Honda are two great examples of that,” he said.

He went on: “The semiconductor industry, there were really no fabs within the Midwestern part of the United States. Intel was the first one to make that announcement at the beginning of the year. And now a full 28 percent of our pipeline is semiconductor-related projects, and that is tool makers, the direct suppliers into Intel, and then some of the people that service the broader industry that will service not only this facility but the rest of the country from an Ohio location.

“Both projects I mentioned are some of Ohio’s largest investments in their history, and we’re living through a very interesting time where there’s almost everything that we’re working on has a major impact. So there’s more projects with over 500 jobs and $500 million than our area has really ever seen. And this speaks to healthy balance sheets of companies, companies that have pent-up dollars to invest in the world, and we’re glad that they’re looking at our market.”

Buttressing McDonald’s points, Roberts said Indiana and Ohio function as a region and share a history of great industry. He added that throughout the last hundred and fifty years since the Industrial Revolution, Indiana and Ohio have been particularly strong in manufacturing.

“And Indiana, by a per capita basis, is the most manufacturing-intensive state in the union, so as we think about our future, it’s necessarily impacted by our past. And just to carry a theme that Kenny mentioned, we believe that the world is rediscovering what it once knew, and that is that when you need things made well that the Midwest is the place to be. And so we’re grateful for Intel and their decision to commit to the Midwest, and we see a lot of those opportunities expanding and trickling over into Indiana as well,” he said.

Indiana, Roberts said, has the second-highest gross state product behind Michigan only on the automotive sector. Recently, Indiana, according to him, secured Samsung SDI, and Stellantis’s commitment to build a $2.5 billion EV manufacturing facility and battery manufacturing facility. Roberts added that MediaTek, one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world, recently made a commitment to make their first non-coastal investment in the state.

“Similar to Ohio, we are seeing an incredibly strong pipeline and the numbers – I don’t have them with me like Kenny did, but they’re roughly similar. Some of the projects, I’m sure, are maybe the same target, but I think what this shows is just a strong interest in the Midwest and developing opportunities here.

“We also see a tremendous push in what we’re calling economy-of-the-future opportunities. And as our Secretary of Commerce has instructed us, we are going and getting the economy we want, not taking the economy we get. And we’re much more focused on the economy in 2032 and 2042 rather than just 2022,” he said.

Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, has been elected President of the Conference of Parties (COP) 27 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Shoukry was elected by the parties during the opening plenary on Sunday in the city of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

COP27 began in the Egyptian city on Sunday and would last until Nov. 18, where issues bordering on how to address the impact of climate change take a front burner.

In his address after the election, the newly-elected president called on countries to show faith in multilateralism over the next two weeks as they negotiate to deliver on the goals of the Climate Convention and the Paris Agreement.

“It comes as no surprise to anyone that the COP is being held this year in a world which is witnessing political turmoil that cast a long shadow on all our nations and has resulted in energy and food crises.

“However, these challenges should be no reason for delaying our collective effort to fight climate change.

Read Also: What is COP27 and why is it important?

“It is inherent on us all in Sharm El Sheikh to demonstrate our recognition of the magnitude of the challenges we face and our steadfast resolve to overcome it,” Shoukry said to climate envoys and delegates at what is considered to be one of the largest COPs ever in terms of attendance.

The Egyptian minister asserted that the host country made sure that COP27 would provide the optimum setting to align and converge multiple views, as well as facilitate transparent, inclusive and fruitful discussion, to ensure the most positive outcome achievable.

He acknowledged the challenging economic and geopolitical factors, but noted, however, that external circumstances should not be allowed to negatively affect the negotiating process.

The president added that as a COP hosted in Africa, it must consider the needs of the developing countries and ensure climate justice through availing the appropriate finance and other means of implementation.

This, he said, is necessary as African countries are the most affected by climate change.

The new COP president acknowledged the tireless efforts of his predecessor, COP26 President, Alok Sharma, and commended him and his team for their efforts and dedication with everything they achieved in hosting COP26.

He commended the outcomes and agreements their work helped to secure, reiterating the commitment of the Egyptian Presidency to deliver on an impactful and inclusive COP.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the conference of the parties adopted its agenda, and for the first time since the adoption of the UN climate convention, parties agreed to introduce loss and damage funding as an agenda item at the climate conference.

Loss and damage refer to the destructive impacts of climate change that cannot be avoided either by mitigation or adaptation. (NAN)

The UN climate change conference, COP27, takes place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt from November 6-18.

COP stands for Conference of the Parties, and the summit is open to countries that signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – a treaty that came into force in 1994.

The conference is usually attended by world leaders, ministers, negotiators, representatives from civil society, business, international organisations, and the media.

The COP is hosted by different countries annually and the first meeting – ‘COP1’ – took place in Berlin, Germany in 1995.

Each of these meetings produce set of decisions which are given different names. Last year (COP26), it was called the Glasgow Climate Pact.

The most popular COP was the third (COP3), in 1997. It established the Kyoto Protocol: a set of commitments to achieve the decarbonisation of society and limit the damage from climate change. Another particularly important COP was COP21, held in Paris in 2015.

This year’s COP has been tagged as the “African COP” because it will involve concrete actions and commitments for the development of African continent and it will also focus on how African countries are facing more damage from climate change.

Each day of the COP will deal with different workshops, side events, discussions, plenary meetings on finance, energy, adaptation, loss and damage, others – which serve as focus for events and discussions. Importantly, Egypt’s goals for this year’s COP are mitigation, adaptation, finance, and collaboration

COP27 comes at a critical moment in the fight against climate change. It provides the critical opportunity for business and government leaders to double down on their climate goals, forge new collaborations, and achieve innovative solutions together.

This year, COP27 is also focusing attention on strengthening adaptation and resilience, mitigating emissions, facilitating a just transition, and increasing funding and collaboration for essential climate solutions.

Discussions on chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, global emissions must halve by 2030 and reach ‘net-zero’ by 2050, will top the agenda

This year’s COP is seen as the one that will bring concrete actions and commitments on emission reductions and also on the financing of losses and damages resulting from climate change to the global south.

In order to deliver on the goals, developed countries are usually tasked to make good on their promise to mobilise at least $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020, and the conference would provide an opportunity to interrogate how this will be done.

Read also: PHOTOS: Plane crashes into Lake Victoria 

At the last COP, the most significant commitment was that made by all nations to come back with enhanced emission-cutting pledges but COP27 takes place as the world is watching Ukraine. One of the side effects of the Russian invasion is an energy crisis. Russia’s war in Ukraine has stifled progress, as many countries that promised climate action have been unable to take any steps.

So, the agenda at COP27 will principally be focused on climate change and solutions, scene-setting for which has been provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports over the last year.

All eyes are on this year’s COP, will it be a springboard to action or series of statements of intent? Time will tell.

• Alao is a 2022 Fellow, United Nations Reham al-Farra Memorial Journalism Fellowship

Billionaire serial entrepreneur Tinkov has renounced his Russian citizenship, saying he does not want to be associated with “fascism” or people who collaborate with “killers”.

Tinkov, whose upstart digital credit card company, TCS Group Holding (TCSq.L), grew to become one of Russia’s largest financial institutions, has been an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine invasion.

In an Instagram post on Tuesday, the 54-year-old founder of Tinkoff Bank said the decision was based on the invasion of independent Ukraine.

Tinkov claimed an original Instagram post published on Monday, with a picture of a certificate renouncing his citizenship as of Oct 26, had ‘mysteriously disappeared’ blaming it in Kremlin’s trolls.

Read Also: Ukraine forces break through Russian defences in south, advance in east

The billionaire banker also said that he was suing to force the bank to stop using his name.

He said: “My post of yesterday has mysteriously disappeared. Must be Kremlin’s trolls..
Reiterating: I have decided to throw out Russian citizenship after Russia invades Ukraine, and start killing innocents there.
“I can’t be associated with Putin’s fascism regime. Moreover, I am engaging lawyers to start revoking Tinkoff brand from the bank.

“I hate when my brand/name is associated with the bank that collaborates with killers and blood. Tinkoff Bank must change the name as Oliver Hughes and Stanislav Bliznuyk were telling me and the public, after they “agreed this with Kremlin government” and kick me out of the bank in March. What changed?”

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President Muhammadu Buhari, on Monday, expressed heartfelt condolences to the government and people of India, following reports that at least 141 people have died after a bridge in Gujarat’s Morbi collapsed last evening.

The President’s message was contained in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu.

Read Also: Buhari off to London for routine medical check-up

Apart from those who died, 177 of the 500 have been saved and teams are searching for several others who are still missing.

“On behalf of the government and people of Nigeria I wish to express my profound sorrow and sincere sympathy to the Prime Minister, families of the deceased, and the people of India following this tragic incident,” said the President.

He prayed for the recovery of all persons involved.

President Muhammadu Buhari has joined other world leaders to congratulate Brazil’s newly elected President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, on winning a hard-fought, divisive runoff election.

The President’s congratulatory message was contained in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu.

In congratulating the new leader on staging an astonishing comeback after leaving office and serving jail term, President Buhari said he hoped that Lula as President will further enhance the excellent relations between the two states.

“I look forward to working together with the newly elected President of Brazil to continue the excellent bilateral cooperation and growing trade relations between our two countries,” the President added.

More congratulations poured in from across the globe for the Brazil’s leftist president-elect yesterday.

Shortly after Lula was declared the winner, U.S.  President Joe Biden said: “I send my congratulations to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on his election to be the next president of Brazil following free, fair, and credible elections.”

French leader Emmanuel Macron also offered his good wishes, saying the poll opened “a new page” in Brazil’s history.

“Together, we will join forces to take up the many common challenges and renew the ties of friendship between our two countries,” the French president said minutes after the results announcement.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered a hearty “Congratulations, Lula!” and said: “The people of Brazil have spoken.”

Trudeau said he looked forward to working with Lula, who served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010, to “advance shared priorities — like protecting the environment.”

All eyes in Western capitals have been on the election’s impact on the future of the Amazon rainforest and the global climate emergency.

President Alberto Fernandez of neighboring Argentina said Lula’s win “opens a new era for the history of Latin America. A time of hope and future that begins today.”

“After so many injustices you lived through, the people of Brazil have elected you and democracy has triumphed,” he added in a tweet.

After leaving office, Lula was imprisoned for 18 months on controversial and since-quashed corruption charges.

Lula’s return to power in Brazil follows a string of left-wing wins in Latin America.

Gustavo Petro, who became Colombia’s first leftist president after his election this summer, tweeted “Long live Lula.”

He later shared a map showing that the majority of Latin American countries are now led by leftist governments.

Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also from the left wing, tweeted: “Lula won, blessed people of Brazil. There will be equality and humanism.”

And Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro offered a “big hug” to Lula, saying in a tweet: “Long live the peoples determined to be free, sovereign and independent! Today in Brazil democracy triumphed.”

Fellow members of the BRICS group of emerging economies also extended their congratulations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he hoped for “constructive” cooperation.

“Please accept my sincere congratulations… the election results have confirmed your impressive political authority,” Putin said in a telegram to Lula.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping wished the country “new successes.”

“I am willing to work with President-elect Lula to make joint plans from a strategic height and long-term perspective, and take the China-Brazil comprehensive strategic partnership to a new level,” he said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he looked forward “to working closely together to further deepen and widen our bilateral relations.”

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa also said his country “looks forward to working with the government of Brazil under the leadership of Mr da Silva.”

The European Union’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell joined the international chorus.

“Brazilian citizens went to the polls to elect their new president in a peaceful and well-organised election.”

Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he looked forward to working together on issues, including “growing the global economy to protecting the planet’s natural resources and promoting democratic values.”