Biden urges G-20 leaders to take action now to reduce supply chain “backlogs”

The U.S. President, Joe Biden, spoke with the world’s largest economies’ leaders in Rome, during the G-20 meeting. They discussed different ways to make supply chains more resilient, with a big emphasis on weathering crisis as the one unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We have to take action now, together with our partners in the private sector, to reduce the backlogs that we’re facing. And then, we have to prevent this from happening again in the future,” Biden told world leaders at a meeting to address supply chain bottlenecks on the sidelines of the G20 in Rome.

“Now that we have seen how vulnerable these lines of global commerce can be, we cannot go back to business as usual. This pandemic won’t be the last global health crisis we face. We also need to increase our resilience in the face of climate change, natural disasters, and even planned attacks,” he said.

A written White House summary of the talks said countries expressed willingness to work together to make supply chains more resilient. It said they had agreed to work for more transparency and information-sharing between countries and on the need to have multiple reliable suppliers of raw materials, intermediate and finished goods.

“Openness and communication can promote a swift response to disruptions to supply chains - like those that the globe is facing right now - and allow other players within a supply chain to take mitigating steps,” the White House summary said.

Image: Mandel Ngan / AFP