The communiqué signed at the conclusion of the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland is a set of promises for future action. Sadly, as summit watchers know, the Group of 8 countries (France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Canada) have a long record of backpedaling on their promises.
Though the G8 countries possess two-thirds of global wealth, they are notoriously stingy in sharing that wealth with others. They fail to acknowledge the fact that Africa was the main source of human labor (millions of slaves) that led to enormous wealth creation in the United States and elsewhere, or that western European powers enriched themselves at Africa’s expense for a century, gorging on the best of Africa’s agricultural land and vast mineral riches. They also fail to acknowledge that colonialism (with its concomitant racism, thwarting the creation of good governance and keeping the population illiterate) and Cold War politics (including support for dictators, peddling massive arms sales, and granting inappropriate loans) created and/or exacerbated many of Africa’s present woes.
One British economist has noted that if the latest G8 promises are kept, then child mortality due to extreme poverty will decline by 2010. Whereas one child dies every three seconds today, by 2010 one child will die every three and a half seconds. Not exactly a stellar improvement. And not exactly good news for the millions and millions of people who will die needlessly in the interim.
With that said, and in keeping with the adage “it’s better than nothing,” the Summit took some steps forward. The leaders agreed to double all foreign aid to $50 billion per year by 2010. It is a minimal sum, but an improvement. They reaffirmed an agreement reached June 12 to support canceling the debt of some of the world’s poorest nations. They expressed their intention to provide access to cheaper AIDS medications and to train 75,000 African peacemakers to help alleviate conflicts that impede development. And, of course, Mr. Bush finally admitted that human activity is the main cause of global warming.
The problem is that the world’s poor don’t need a few small steps forward; they need a large and sustained effort involving the canceling of debt, direct aid to programs that work, and stringent guidelines for good governance. The G8 Summit provided meager relief for the scores of people living (and dying) in abject poverty. The American aid pledge, for instance, represents no new money beyond that which had already been promised. Therefore, the US will not fulfill its Millennium Development Goal of spending 0.7% of GNP on foreign aid. In fact, Mr. Bush opposed any target based on a percentage of GNP. We will continue to be one of the stingiest nations of the industrialized world, spending only 0.1% of our GNP on foreign aid. And we will continue with the policy of giving aid more often to reward political and military partners than to advance social or humanitarian causes abroad. (Remember as well that billions of dollars in our foreign aid go toward financing and training foreign militaries.)
The failure to act on free trade was a glaring omission at the Summit. Credible studies have estimated that global trade liberalization would save the developed nations $141 billion a year and deliver to developing countries economic benefits worth $87 billion a year. While the G8 leaders praise free trade in countless speeches, they continue to subsidize their own farmers and prevent Africa from entering into competitive trade that would enable that continent to lift itself out of poverty. Today, millions of African farmers are being kept out of lucrative trade because they cannot compete in markets subsidized by European and American governments. Each year, US farmers (mostly the wealthiest farmers and huge agro-businesses) are paid $47 billion to produce crops and dump those crops at rock-bottom prices in the marketplace. The European Union spends $133 billion on its farm subsidies. Poor countries without subsidies therefore produce crops at higher prices and cannot sell them in the marketplace.
Mr. Bush said he will advocate the end of US subsidies to cotton farmers. (That had been in the works to prevent a potential trade war with Brazil.) Oxfam has surmised that U.S. cotton subsidies directly led to losses of more than $300 million in potential revenue in sub-Saharan Africa during one growing season alone. While Mr. Bush was making his statement at the Summit, his Doha Round negotiators in Geneva clung tenaciously to farm subsidies. The same is true of other G8 nations. The G8 leaders merely paid lip service to free trade for Africa, without any timeline or specifics for actually achieving free trade. We will get to see their real commitment to this issue when the next Doha Round talks are held in December in Hong Kong.
With 30,000 people dying every day from extreme poverty, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the agreement reached by the G8 leaders provides too little too late. It was, once again, a tragic shame, but not an unexpected one. Campaigners against poverty need to keep the pressure up and not become distracted or discouraged by this latest series of inadequate promises.
