G8 summit: more broken promises (PR5)

The annual G8 summit is an opportunity for the leaders of the richest nations in the world to wear their hearts on their sleeves. The media are primed to expect great progress in solving the big issues of the day – climate change, AIDS, third world poverty.

By all measures then, the Rostock summit was a resounding failure. The G8 leaders were resolutely vague as to when they would meet their 2005 Gleneagles commitment to increase aid by $50bn by 2010. Having missed their targets on their “binding commitments” at Gleneagles they would only declare that they would “continue their efforts” to increase funding for AIDS treatment.

Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal, commented that his country had “not received one extra dollar in aid” since the Gleneagles pledge at the summit two years ago. Global aid actually fell last year from $61bn in 2005 to $56bn in 2006 and even then it was tied to the privatisation of state assets.

In 2005 there was a record number of privatisations in the countries of the global south, transferring $90bn of resources to the corporations. So flagrant were the G8 leaders that even Bono condemned the G8 for “broken promises”, fretting that their failings would play into the hands of the anti-capitalist militants on the streets.

As a result of these broken promises millions of people will die. Since the Gleneagles summit, AIDS has killed nearly six million adults and children – the population of a country the size of Denmark.

In Kenya an estimated 1.3 million people are HIV-positive and more than half are women. Kenya has an external debt burden of $6.8bn. Each year it pays $364m in debt and just $430m per year on health. But that’s not the end of it. In order to meet the demands of the IMF, the Kenyan government agreed to a budget deficit of just 1.5% of GDP and a freeze on employing new teachers. In 2005, 340,000 children could not be admitted to secondary school because of a shortage of places.

Sucking up to the rich clearly doesn’t work. Remember, Bob Geldof at Gleneagles gave the G8 “Ten out of ten on aid, eight out of ten on debt.” Ten thousand demonstrators blocking the entrances into the Rostock summit clearly thought differently.

So what about climate change?

Claude Mandil, executive director of the International Energy Agency, told the Financial Times: “It was very, very good progress. I’m very happy.” Speaking of the failure to agree to halve emissions by 2050, which was blocked by the US and Russia, he said: “Of course, there was a compromise but what was dropped was something that was not important.”

All the G8 really agreed to do was talk about climate change at another conference in December. The US suggested that China take some of the burden for reducing emissions, while Russia, one of the world’s largest exporters of gas and oil, wants nothing to do with limiting consumption. And indeed Russia’s growing assertiveness even meant that the G8 couldn’t pretend to agree on how to rule the world. Tony Blair remarked he was “worried and fearful about what is happening in Russia today and Russia’s external policies,” hinting at the effective expropriation of BP’s gas interests and Putin’s threat to point his missiles at the EU in retaliation for Poland and the Czech Republic providing bases for a new US missile warning system.

In early 2007 in an interview with the Guardian, Bono remarked that:

“It’s not just the credibility of the G8 that’s at stake, it’s the credibility of the largest non-violent protest in thirty years. Nobody wants to go back to what we saw in Genoa, but I do sense a real sense of jeopardy.”

Forward to Japan.

Mon 08, October 2007 @ 19:24