Mexico called on the international community to better manage crises and conflicts at a meeting of the foreign ministers of the G20 group of the world's 20 leading economies, DPA reported.
International institutions are often too clumsy and bureaucratic to be effective, Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa said late Monday at the informal meeting in Los Cabos in western Mexico.
"There are many important issues that affect the lives of billions of people across the world at which the international community is failing to make any discernible progress," Espinosa said.
Numerous international institutions were failing to make headway against hunger, illiteracy, violence and human rights violations, she said.
The impact of national priorities on the international stage can hurt the world community, she said. "And on the other hand our collective inability to adress global challenges can potentially have a devastating impact on individual nations."
The G20, made up of the 19 leading countries and the European Union, was "uniquely positioned to bring about the leadership that the world currently craves," and could help in "transcending narrow national interests," she said.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed "great concerns" over events in Syria and "the challenges posed by Iran."
Clinton also spoke out against the rise of trade barriers "behind borders."
"Today, many of the most important barriers are emerging not at borders, but behind them," the top US diplomat said.
Measures such as protectionist regulations, subsidies, mandatory technology transfer, and unfair joint venture requirements "all interfere with the G20's core mandate of promoting balanced and sustainable growth," she said.
"Today we need institutions and arrangements capable of providing solutions to this new challenge."
Clinton also spoke out against "the growing presence and influence of state-owned and state-controlled enterprises."
For the interconnected global economy to grow together, "we need to work together to ensure that all companies - and states - compete by the same set of rules," she said.
The G20 summit is scheduled for June in Los Cabos. This week's event was the first time since the G20's founding in 1999 that it had met at the foreign-minister level.
The opening of the session was delayed by 90 minutes due to the ministers' late return from a whale-spotting trip.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said the outing had been in keeping with the tone of the meeting.
"We all sat in one boat. It was the theme of this meeting."