The G8 Summit - Being Pro-Life On Poverty

The G8 Summit begins in Gleneagles, Scotland tomorrow - one of the World's most luxurious hotels and one of the World's finest golf courses all in a fold of the hills amongst some of the World's most beautiful scenery. Over 5-star gourmet cooking and vintage brandy, nestled in lush antique leather chairs and surrounded by Victorian aristocratic opulence, the World's great leaders will discuss poverty. Talk about cultural dissonance.

The irony of the situation becomes the driving force behind the Glasgow Sunday Herald's lead up to the Summit, as Ian Bell looks at previous promises and their results.

Such irony will doubtless escape the world’s leaders, much as it escaped them in 2003, when they met in France. Jacques Chirac wanted to make an issue of the fact that two million people died annually for want of clean water. What better venue than Evian?

The history of the G8 as it nears its 30th birthday is rich in blackly comic moments. Perhaps the biggest joke is that some of the most powerful men on the planet convene annually for profound and serious discussions before failing utterly to do the things they have promised.

Blair has an "anti-poverty agenda". Chirac had one of those in 2003. Blair wants to tackle third world debt? The G8 made that a priority in Cologne, in 1999. How about an "Action Plan for Africa"? That was Kananaskis, Canadian Rockies, 2002. Trade reform? They’ve been going on about that since the turn of the century. Even Blair has noticed a certain lack of resolve in the developed world. In 2002, he said: "It really is hypocrisy for us, the wealthy countries, to talk of our concern to alleviate the poverty of the developing world while we block their access to our markets." That should have done the trick, shouldn’t it?

The litany of failure continues:

European Union ministers have again promised to reach a United Nations target by devoting 0.7% of their national incomes to aid by 2015, only 45 years after the target was first set, and only after Germany, Italy and Portugal gave warning that their budgets were proving "difficult to balance". Still, it is better than Japan and the US, the historic tigtwads of the G8, have promised.

America’s latest aid vehicle is called the Millennium Challenge Corporation. It was established by George W Bush in 2002 to disburse funds to governments with "sound" economic policies who can prove they are not crooked. In April, three years on, the corporation made its first grant , $110m to Madagascar. The Economist editors, normally supportive of the US, are on record as saying the US has "showered its official aid on countries that either did not greatly need it or did not much deserve it" - like Israel, Pakistan and Egypt.

30 very poor countries owe the World Bank and the African Development Bank $40 billion, a sum they will never be able to pay. That amount is less than one tenth the annual American defense budget. The UK government has agreed to take on 10% of the debt owed to the World Bank, but has yet to extract anything more than that agreement "in principle" from other rich countries. Gordon Brown wants "additional" funding for poor countries, paid for by the sale of IMF gold reserves. His point is that in simply writing off debt you do not increase the flow of funds to the third world. You might stop the absurdity of new loans being used to service old ones, but you would not make much of a dent in poverty. But the US doesn’t want to risk destabilising the gold market. Besides, as it turns out, goldmining companies have been lobbying senators to block any deal.

Then there is Brown’s pet project, the international finance facility. If brought to fruition, this scheme to "front-load" development aid would, through the sale of bonds, double assistance and raise $50 billion. However, the Americans have said that this "doesn’t fit our budgetary process".

In Cologne in 1999, a promise was made to write off £100bn owed by the 42 poorest countries. Five years later, less than 20% of the proposed debt cancellation had gone ahead. The Chancellor might want to destroy trade barriers, but the fact is that the G8 nations are spending between $350bn and $450bn annually subsidising agribusiness while using trade barriers to blackmail developing countries into allowing advantages for multinationals.

The Herald puts it thus:

The American right likes to describe the UN as a failed institution. Clearly, the conservatives have not examined the G8’s record. For all the criticism, much of it thoroughly deserved, that has been heaped on the World Bank and the IMF, they at least have identifiable functions in aid and development. The G8 specialises in posturing....The truth is that the G8 is the problem, not the solution.

I would suggest, though, that it is only a part of the problem.

There are those who say that it is corrupt government in Africa and elsewhere who create such extreme poverty and that regime change is the real way to improve situations, not aid. There is no doubt that this is to a great extent true, but it also neatly sidesteps moral responsibility for the actions of the "civilised world" in setting up and supporting such regimes and their corruption in the first place, as another Sunday Herald article today shows.

The first crude oil began flowing from Chad two years ago along a 700-mile, £3 billion pipeline, ending at a tanker loading terminal seven miles off the coast of Cameroon, en route to the US. The pipeline is the biggest single ever investment project in Africa. As oil flowed last year, Chad’s gross domestic product grew 40%. This year it will grow 55% and even more next year.

Nevertheless, more than seven million of Chad’s nine million people live on less than a dollar a day. Most of the oil proceeds go into the coffers of US oil companies and their Malaysian partners and into the offshore bank accounts of President Idriss Déby and his relatives and ministers. Déby rigs votes, with French help. Little wonder that the military attempted a coup last year.

The history of "black gold" in Africa so far is that it curses the poor who, in some parts, describe oil as "the Devil’s gold". Déby used his first $4.5m cheque from the US, which had it earmarked for power generators, water pumps and road construction, to buy weapons. [80% of the world's arms sales are by G8 nations]

Tiny Equatorial Guinea has new oil wealth that has seen it dubbed the Kuwait of Africa, with an average per capita income greater than that of Saudi Arabia. Its people, nevertheless, remain among the poorest on Earth because President Teodoro Nguema and his family siphon off most of the income with the co-operation of US oil companies. A US Senate investigation found that hundreds of millions of Equatorial Guinea’s oil dollars have been laundered through Riggs Bank in Washington, in a complex web of 60 accounts belonging to Nguema and his family.

Even were regime changes to be effected, it remains a fact that any more sensible government would still be crippled by the debt it would owe to the rich nations. "As a matter of dismal truth, 30,000 children die each day in Africa. And as matter of astonishment, there is the statistic that proves poverty to be quite a nice little earner: for every £1 given to the developing world in aid, £13 wings its way back to lenders in the form of debt service payments." The two must go hand in hand, along with reform of unfair trade practises, if the deaths are to end - and writing off the debt will help even before regime changes and trade reform can take effect.

President Bush is without a doubt the most recalcitrant of the G8 leaders when it comes to helping the Third World, following in the footsteps of American Presidents both red and blue. U.S. banks and corporations lobby for the status quo which provides financial benefits to them while repressive governments enjoy the shelter of Bush's foreign policy, much as Reagan stood alongside the racist South African regime which practised apartheid against it's own people. Yet a large segment of the American Right say the stand for a pro-life philosophy - these are the very people who have a chance to pressure Bush into doing what is moral and just. Like my own UPC colleague who blogs as RightWingSparkle, they claim to stand firm against the deaths of 4000 unborn children each day in the USA yet say nothing about the deaths of 50,000 people a day, two thirds of them children, from preventable poverty in the Third World - or worse, parrot the Bush line which actively encourages those deaths to occur. Thus they become, by their silence or complicity, pro-life in the US but pro-death elsewhere. Perhaps they can justify this stance to themselves - maybe by saying the US Constitution provides the right to life only for US citizens. I don't know. May the divine have mercy on their souls.