The meeting is taking place from June 13 to 15 in Borgo Egnazia (Brindisi Province), with the first working session dedicated to Africa
The summit of the heads of state and government of the G7 countries will be held from June 13 to Saturday, June 15 in Borgo Egnazia, (Puglia region, Italy) under the chairmanship of the head of the Italian government Giorgia Meloni.
The theme of the first working session will be “Africa, Climate Change, and Development,” followed by “Middle East,” “Ukraine,” “Migrations,” “Indo-Pacific and Economic Security,” and an outreach session on “Artificial Intelligence, Energy, Africa/Mediterranean.” Representatives of a number of countries and international organizations, including Pope Francis, have been invited to the meeting.
“Italy has decided to hold the summit in Puglia. It’s not a random choice. Puglia is a region in the south of Italy, and we want to show that the G7, chaired by Italy, wants to strengthen the dialog with the countries of the global South,” said Giorgia Meloni, opening the meeting. “We chose this location because this land is historically a bridge between the West and the East, it is a land of dialogue in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, the very Mediterranean Sea that connects the two great maritime spaces of the globe, that is, the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific.”
Italy, as chair of the G7, said it wanted to “strengthen cooperation and learn to dialogue with everyone. The G7 is not an enclosed fortress that may have to defend itself against someone. It is a value proposition that we reveal to the world in the name of co-development. There are many issues on our work agenda.”
Hot topics will include Ukraine and the Middle East, the need for creating “trusted and controlled” supply chains, and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence. The latter will be one of the issues Pope Francis will be speaking about on June 14. Africa will then be discussed, “with its challenges, its opportunities,” the related topic of migration, and what Meloni called “the increasingly disturbing role of trafficking structures exploiting their desperate situation.”