News Features
G8 Spends Millions While Dithering On Debt Cancellation
Time To Break Silence on AIDS
International Book Fairs Need Co-operation in Africa

Documents
GAD Exchange, Issue No.21 August 2000
SADC Communique

   A few days before the Southern African Development Community met in Windhoek to call for immediate debt cancellation for several of its 14 countries and to launch a major thrust to deal with its crippling AIDS pandemic, eight of the world's most powerful politicians met in Japan and "squandered" an opportunity to cancel more than US$100 billion of third world debt.

    In effect, the G8 summit held at enormous cost on the tropical island of Okinawa, backed away from its commitment at last year's summit in Cologne, Germany because the leaders of the U.S., Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Canada, Italy and Russia could not agree on anything more than that "further efforts were required" to speed up the debt relief promised last year. There were no new initiatives just "targets".

    The summit which lasted just three days and cost an astounding US$750 million, enough to send 12 million children to school or, as one British analyst put it: "while eight men and their entourages spent almost a billion dollars, 16 children in Africa, Asia and Latin America died of malnutrition and disease every minute they were in Japan."

    Jubilee 2000, the coalition of churches, charities and NGOs that has turned the debt issue into a global movement was bitterly disappointed at the summit's extravagance and its failure to make any significant progress on debt reduction for developing countries, more than 40 of whom are in Africa. Only US$15 billion of the Cologne promises have been kept, among them Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda, the only nations in Africa to get relief.

    The G8 targets are equally out-of-touch:

• A reduction of 25 percent of HIV-infected young people by 2010, along with a 50 percent reduction in malarial and tuberculosis deaths by the same time;
• extra resources for education so that there will be universal primary education for every child in the world by 2015, the amount unspecified;
• implementing measures to prevent conflict; and
• set up a task force to "bridge the information and knowledge divide between the rich and the poor", again without timeline and substantive amounts of money.

    Jubilee 2000, angered by the replacement of debt cancellation promised in 1999 with "targets", points out that unless something is done quickly, developing countries will fall further behind in all targeted areas. For example, if the health targets are to be met where will the money come from if Africa is forced to spend more on debt servicing, let alone cancellation, than it is able to in health care.

    President Bill Clinton made a promise to spend US$300 million to give free school lunches for nine million children as an incentive for poverty-stricken parents to send their children to school. Critics point out that there are more than 120 million children unable to attend school and wonder how this paltry sum will make the education target a success.

    The IT target is only a task force with US$15 million from Japan. Jubilee economists say these are wrong priorities for countries which lack basic infrastructure, let alone an information highway.

    Japan is reported to have located the summit's venue on a island in order to avoid the demonstrations that upset the talks of world leaders in Seattle at the World Trade Organization and in Washington at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings earlier this year.

    "The bad news is that the protesters were not needed, because the G8 did their work for them. Seldom in its 25-year history has the meeting of the world's most powerful economies been greeted with such cynicism and contempt. Clinton offered a free school lunch to a small percentage of children. And the Okinawa summiteers promised extra resources to halt the spread of AIDS.

    "But," said Larry Elliott, an economic analyst connected to Jubilee, "there were too many failed initiatives, too many broken promises, too many vacuous communiqués."

    He observed that instead of "thrashing out" problems too big to be solved at a national level, global summits such as the G8 have become a way for world leaders to escape their domestic problems.

    Issues such as massive environmental degradation, financial instability and the growing gap between rich and poor have increasingly become global problems that need global solutions. Jubilee points out that Nobel-prize winning economist James Tobin had offered a simple proposal to hasten debt cancellation.

    By levying a small international tax on financial speculation and using the money raised to fund debt relief, development programmes and environmental protection, the situation of the world could be vastly improved and the desperate lot of the poor eradicated.