G8 leaves poor to fend for themselves

It is like "waiting five years before responding to the tsunami" says Kumi Naidoo, Chair of Global Call to Action against Poverty

"The people have roared but the G8 has whispered," said Kumi Naidoo, chair of Global Call to Action against Poverty at the end of the G8 summit in Gleneagles. Even Tony Blair, weighed down with events, was downbeat. On climate change, which affects poor countries (and all of us) more than anything else, the summit was a non-event and he almost admitted as much. He barely bothered to defend an agreed "plan of action" and an impending "dialogue" on trade in the run-up to the World Trade Organisation meeting in December.
He did trumpet a promise to double aid to $50bn (around £29bn) as a genuine achievement - but the headline is better than the text. One flaw is that, according to Oxfam, less than half of this is "new" money. Then there is the fact that it isn't due until 2010, which, as Mr Naidoo put it, is "like waiting five years before responding to the tsunami". The rich countries pledged to raise the amount of aid they give to 0.7 per cent of their national incomes. They did so in, wait for it, 1970. France currently plans to hit the target in 2012,42 years later; Britain 43 years later, and Italy and Germany 45 years later. Japan, the US and Canada haven't even reaffirmed this target.
On debt, G8 finance ministers announced early in June the "historic breakthrough" of 100 per cent debt cancellation. It sounded fabulous; it is less than that. The deal includes IMF debt - which is positive - but only covers 18 recipient countries (with the promise of more in the future), saving them around $lbn a year in debt servicing over the next 10 years. But Eurodad, the European Network on Debt and Development, calculates there are 62 countries paying $10bn each year that need total debt relief if they are to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
That countries like Kenya, Angola and Haiti are excluded gives you an idea of the limits of this deal.
In addition, the debt cancellation comes with the damaging conditions that Make Poverty History has been campaigning against, including privatisation of basic services and what the G8 has described as "the elimination of impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign". Thirdly, the cancellation applies only to three multilateral institutions (the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank); it excludes 19 other multilateral creditors. So, for example, five Latin American countries are left paying the Inter-American Development Bank $3.3bn in debt service over the next 10 years. Even the Make Poverty History campaign, which many observers had criticised for acting as the civil society arm of the Treasury in the run-up to Gleneagles, took Gordon Brown
to task for over-hyping the offer. And so to trade. There is now broad agreement that trade discrimination by the developed world against the developing world on a truly staggering scale, along with a
Can the entente cordiale end the CAP and throw down the gauntlet to the US and Japan on farm subsidies? Pigs were flying from Gleneagles
parlous post-colonial record of political leadership, has held Africa back. Look at export numbers: in 1979, Africa's share of world exports was 5.2 per cent; by 2004, for all the fabulous wealth of this continent's natural resources and a robust ex-
pansion in world trade overall, it had more than halved to 2.5 per cent. A large part of the answer lies in another set of figures: in 2003, governments in the 30-member Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) subsidised farm exports by $350bn - compared with $22bn in aid to Africa.
We all know what has to be done: export subsidies, punitive barriers to the imports of the developing world, and huge subsidies paid to rich country farmers all need to be scrapped. The Common Agricultural Policy shouldn't be reformed, it should go. The US, which preaches the free market to the poor countries of the world but practises protectionism for its own, must stop. Will they? The answer, on current evidence, is a resounding no.
Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico and an authority on trade and development, said in
Edinburgh, at a meeting hosted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, that the big countries have just not moved. The trade round, he added, is in "big trouble" if not "deceased". Far from removing protections against developing world imports, the rich countries are motoring ahead with bilateral free trade deals that open up developing country markets for their own products. The European Union is in the process of negotiating "economic partnership agreements" with 77 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. These will replace existing agreements that give some preferential access to EU markets and will open up their own to EU exports. The US is doing the same.
The UN estimates that unfair trade rules deny poor countries $700bn every year, dwarfing the value of debt cancellation and aid. Rumour has it that the UK and France have worked well together at Gleneagles on aid, but can the revived entente cordiale deliver an end to the CAP and in the process throw down a gauntlet to the US and Japan on farm subsidies? Pigs, as well as Chinooks, were seen flying away from Gleneagles.
So the real conclusions of this summit, despite all the energy and passion put into it by campaigners and the public, are that the rich world doesn't deliver and Africa should stop expecting it to; and that it should continue to fight, along with civil society and colleagues with clout such as Brazil and India for a level playing field, full debt cancellation and fair trade. Then it should roll up its sleeves and use its ingenuity, imagination and energy to lift its people into prosperity. The message is clear: Africa can rely, in the end, only on itself.
Janet Bush is a director of Advocacy International