June 4, 2003
Africa, trumpeted as a valued guest at the G8 summit of world leaders, ended up on Tuesday, with plenty of promises but little, apart from some money on AIDS, to suggest real progress on tackling its myriad problems.
A final statement listed a raft of measures to help alleviate famine, ease water shortages, bolster the fight against diseases, tackle poverty and speed up the pace of debt relief. But critics -- and there were many -- charged that the commitments were too vague, too little and hedged by too many conditions. "Not only are there no firm commitments," said Phil Twyford of the British aid agency Oxfam, "even the rhetoric is watered down compared to last year." French President Jacques Chirac had invited a clutch of African leaders to the summit in the French spa resort of Evian to show that the world's biggest economies cared about the smallest too. It followed last year's summit in Canada which drew up an ambitious action plan on Africa. Since then, critics say, little has changed. The G8 leaders failed to agree on arguably the key issue, access to cheaper generic medicines instead of expensive drugs from western pharmaceutical companies.
That discussion was left in the hands of the World Trade Organization with the assurance that they hoped for a deal ahead of WTO talks in Cancun, Mexico, in September. Jean-Herve Bradol, head of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in France, accused Chirac of bowing to US President George W Bush by dropping an earlier pledge to raise the issue. "Just to get a pat on the back from Bush, Chirac has sacrificed the right for millions of people to have access to the medicines they need to survive ... and the rest of the G8 are merrily going along for the ride," he said.
There was, however, a high-profile commitment that the European Union would contribute one billion dollars a year to a fund against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. It came in response to a US announcement last month of a $15-billion package against AIDS.
On famine, the G8 "committed to responding to the emergency food aid needs" and agreed on the need to ensure long-term food supplies -- vague formulas. On water, the leaders called for "redoubled efforts" to meet UN targets of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. They committed themselves to providing technical, financial and logistical support, actively pushing private-sector involvement in what one critic called "an ideologically driven push for privatization."
On trade, there was no agreement on a French suggestion of a moratorium on export tariffs on products from African countries. A German official said other developing nations had asked why it could not also be extended to them, forcing postponement of the debate. The G8 leaders acknowledged the "slow pace" of relieving the debt crippling many African countries, but offered little more than encouragement. President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria said there had been "little giving, too late," and his South African counterpart Thabo Mbeki said African nations were deeply unhappy at the pace of relief. Mbeki and Obasanjo were among five African presidents asked to the summit, the others being from Algeria, Egypt and Senegal. Obasanjo told a press conference Sunday that they were "satisfied" with the progress in realizing last year's ambitious goals. But overall, the Evian summit produced "no funding commitments whatsoever, no concrete timelines," said Sonali Thakkar, an analyst at the Canada-based G8 Research Group.
"All Africa takes away from this meeting is a fistful of conditional offers and post-dated checks," accused Abimbola Akinyemi of ActionAid Nigeria. And a joint statement of African unions and non-governmental organizations charged that "the political will of the eight most powerful countries to meet their obligations to Africa has simply dried up."
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