KUWAIT: National Assembly Speaker Marzouq Ali Al-Ghanem participated, through a video conference on Tuesday, in the third preparatory committee meeting, for the fifth conference of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), scheduled to be held next August in Vienna, Austria. Ghanem participated as a representative of the Arab Parliamentary Group, as he had previously participated in the last two meetings in Geneva.

During the meeting, Ghanem made several remarks in which he affirmed the position of the Arab group towards many of the issues presented at the meeting, including climate change, refugee issues, and demographic changes in many countries around the world, in addition to discussing the developments of coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, which was later included in the meeting's agenda.

Parliamentarians from more than 14 countries representing the geopolitical groups in the world participated in the meeting today, in addition to the President of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Gabriela Cuevas Barron and the Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union Martin Chungong.

Meanwhile, Finance Ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries discussed Tuesday preemptive and preventive measures they were implementing to address ramification of the coronavirus. The finance ministers, in a virtual meeting, discussed means of boosting confidence in economies of the six GCC countries and achieving sustainability in their finances, Saudi Press Agency reported. The ministers also discussed recommendations by their committees.

In the meantime, UN Secretary-General representative and the Resident Coordinator in Kuwait, Dr Tariq Al-Sheikh, and the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council for Planning and Development, Dr Khaled Mahdi, discussed online the continuous joint cooperation and global development opportunities and challenges related to the coronavirus spread.

Both sides discussed the priorities for planning, future forecasting and different scenarios to reduce the epidemic effects on the economy, society, demography and dealing with the crisis as an opportunity for Kuwait to introduce and amend policies, said the representative' office in a press release Tuesday.

The statement noted that the meeting witnessed a presentation of a cooperation draft proposal between the UN and the Kuwaiti government in a risk management plan and a rapid development response in the areas of community health awareness, safety, economic and social resilience and education. The two sides stressed the continuous cooperation in studying the risk management resulting from the slowdown in achieving the sustainable development goals in view of the reality of this pandemic, it added.

Furthermore, the statement quoted Dr Tariq as saying that the UN with all its institutions undertakes to provide and submit recommendations, plans, response programs, international guides and directives for countries to cooperate in dealing with the current emergency and its effects on various sectors in Kuwait and the rest of the countries.

Dr Khaled emphasized that the current policies that resulted from the current situation and in which focus will be demonstrated showed that the post-COVID-19 world will be completely different and that the interests will focus on health problems, volunteer management, online education, major economic issues and food security. - KUNA