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FinalCall.com News
World News
African leaders raise doubts on G-8 commitments
By Ramesh Jaura
Updated Jul 22, 2008 - 2:26:00 PM
TOKYO, Japan (IPS/GIN)—Japan received kudos from the leaders of seven African states, but many African leaders also raised doubts about the strength of Japan’s commitment to supporting development on their continent.
The African leaders were meeting with their counterparts from the Group of Eight major industrialized nations in Toyako on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
The leaders of Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania as well as the African Union were invited by Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fakuda to discuss their concerns with the heads of state and government of the G-8 countries.
The G-8 is composed of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, Canada and the United States. The first day of the annual G-8 summit was July 7.
The meeting was also attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and World Bank president Robert Zoellick.
The invitation to African leaders to interact with the G-8 marks a significant milestone in Japan’s relations with Africa that began in 1993 with the first international conference on African development, said Tomohiko Taniguchi from the Japanese foreign ministry.
“It was music to Japanese ears when President Thabo Mbeki (of South Africa) said Japan’s commitment to Africa should be understood thoroughly by G-8 leaders,” Mr. Taniguchi said.
Presenting the results of the fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development, a summit held every five years, to the G-8 leaders, Prime Minister Fakuda said Japan’s official development assistance to Africa will be doubled in the next five years, bringing the country’s annual aid from the current $900 million to $1.8 billion by 2012.
While welcoming Mr. Fakuda’s remarks that reaffirmed the announcement he had made in May, African leaders expressed concern that the aid commitments made three years ago at the G-8’s 2005 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, have not been translated into practice.
At the Gleneagles summit, the industrialized nations agreed to double aid to Africa from $25 billion a year as part of a wider plan to alleviate global poverty.
Secretary-General Ban backed the African leaders and called on the G-8 to live up to its millennium development goals to double aid for Africa by 2010.
“The world faces three simultaneous crises—a food crisis, a climate crisis and a development crisis,” he told journalists July 7. “The three crises are deeply interconnected and need to be addressed as such.”
The African leaders’ concern was backed by the group DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa) founded by U2 singer Bono and music producer Bob Geldof. The group said that collectively the G-8 has delivered just $3 billion of the $25 billion in additional aid pledged to Africa in 2005.
Germany, the United States and Britain were following through on commitments, while progress from Japan, France, Italy and Canada was either unclear or weak, the group said in a press statement.
Japanese foreign ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama said there had been no backtracking on the commitments made to Africa. “I don’t understand the criticism. The G-8 leaders are very aware of the commitments they have made to African leaders,” he said.
The British advocacy group Oxfam said G-8 members were also trying to water down a pledge made at last year’s summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, to meet the Gleneagles goals.
Max Lawson, a policy adviser to Oxfam, said the present summit was arguably the most important G-8 gathering in a decade. “The world is clearly facing multiple crises—serious, serious economic problems, both rich and poor countries. But it is poor people who suffer.”
Kumi Naidoo, co-chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, said: “We hear from the people who live day to day with the realities of failed trade deals, unmet commitments on aid, poor delivery of health and education services, crop failures due to climate change and now the soaring cost of food, which is driving millions of Africans into hunger.”
He added: “If the G-8 can find $1 trillion to bail out their banks in the past six months, then we have to ask why they will not meet the $50 billion 2010 target needed to save millions of lives in Africa.”
“The G-8’s priorities are out of whack,” Oxfam International’s Jeremy Hobbs said. “Billions for their own companies to fund technology, and peanuts for the poorest to adapt (to climate change). They talk of a promise to reduce emissions by a date when none of them will be alive, yet refuse to address the next years.”
Climate change is not unrelated to the devastating rise in food prices in the past year, Oxfam said. A new World Bank report that has been leaked to the media attributes 75 percent of the price increase to the diversion of crops to biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol in the U.S. and Canada, and biodiesel manufactured from oil seeds in Europe.
