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G8: Japanese Commitment to Africa Challenged

Ramesh Jaura

TOYAKO, Japan, Jul 7 2008 (IPS) - Japan received kudos Monday from the leaders of seven African states as they met with their counterparts from the group of eight (G8) major industrialised nations in Toyako on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. But others raised doubts over the extent of commitment to Africa by Japan and the other G8 countries.

The leaders of Algeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania as well as the African Union were invited by Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fakuda to discuss their concerns with the heads of state and government of the G8 countries (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, Canada and the United States). Monday was the first day of the annual G8 summit.

The meeting was also attended by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and World Bank president Robert Zoellick.

The invitation to African leaders to interact with the G8 marks a significant milestone in Japan’s relations with Africa that began in 1993 with the first international conference on African development, Tomohiko Taniguchi from the Japanese foreign ministry told IPS.

“It was music to Japanese ears when President Thabo Mbeki (of South Africa) said Japan’s commitment to Africa should be understood thoroughly by G8 leaders,” Taniguchi said.

Presenting the results of the fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD, held every five years, the last in May) to the G8 leaders Monday, Prime Minister Fakuda said that Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) to Africa will be doubled in the next five years, bringing the country’s annual aid from the current 900 million dollars to 1.8 billion dollars by 2012.

While welcoming Fakuda’s remarks that reaffirmed the announcement he had made in May, African leaders expressed concern that the aid commitments made three years ago at the G8 2005 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, had not been translated into practice.

At the Gleneagles summit, the industrialised nations agreed to double aid to Africa from 25 billion dollars a year as part of a wider plan to alleviate global poverty.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon backed the African leaders, and called on the G8 to live up to its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to double aid for Africa by 2010.

“The world faces three simultaneous crises – a food crisis, a climate crisis and a development crisis,” he told journalists Monday. “The three crises are deeply interconnected and need to be addressed as such.”

The African leaders’ concern was backed by the group Debt, AIDS and Trade in Africa (DATA) founded by U2 singer Bono and music producer Bob Geldof. DATA says that collectively, the G8 has delivered just 3 billion of the 25 billion dollars in additional aid pledged to Africa in 2005.

Germany, the United States and Britain were following through on commitments, while progress from Japan, France, Italy and Canada was either unclear or weak, DATA said in a press statement Monday.

Japanese foreign ministry spokesman Kazuo Kodama said there had been no backtracking on the commitments made to Africa. “I don’t understand the criticism. The G8 leaders are very aware of the commitments they have made to African leaders,” he told IPS.

The British advocacy group Oxfam said Monday that G8 members were also trying to water down a pledge made at last year’s summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, to meet the Gleneagles goals.

Max Lawson, policy adviser to Oxfam, said the present summit was arguably the most important G8 gathering in a decade. “The world is clearly facing multiple crises – serious, serious economic problems, both rich and poor countries. But it is poor people who suffer.”

Kumi Naidoo, co-chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) said: “We hear from the people who live day to day with the realities of failed trade deals, unmet commitments on aid, poor delivery of health and education services, crop failures due to climate change and now the soaring cost of food, which is driving millions of Africans into hunger.”

He added: “If the G8 can find one trillion dollars to bail out their banks in the past six months, then we have to ask why they will not meet the 50 billion dollar 2010 target, needed to save millions of lives in Africa.”

Oxfam International’s Jeremy Hobbs decried the imbalance between the G8’s new clean technology fund (amounting to between 4 and 5 billion dollars) and its adaptation fund (worth 500 million dollars).

“The G8’s priorities are out of whack,” said Hobbs. “Billions for their own companies to fund technology, and peanuts for the poorest to adapt (to climate change). They talk of a promise to reduce emissions by a date when none of them will be alive, yet refuse to address the next years when they can make a difference and which are absolutely crucial.”

Climate change is not unrelated to the devastating rise in food prices in the past year, Oxfam said.

A new World Bank report that has been leaked to the media attributes 75 percent of the price increase to the diversion of crops to biofuels, especially corn-based ethanol in the U.S. and Canada, and oil seeds based bio-diesel in Europe.