DEVELOPMENT-G8: African Leaders Get More Promises than Support

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Jun 4 2003 (IPS) - Leaders from Africa who came as special guests to the G8 summit in Evian have returned empty-handed despite new promises of support to development.

The G8 summit June 1-3 brought the heads of government of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, the United States, and the Russian Federation together at the French spa Evian, close to the Swiss border.

As host to the event, French president Jacques Chirac invited leaders from Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria, South Africa, and Senegal as representatives of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) to the opening session.

The summit produced a G8 plan for Africa, and assurances of more aid for development. Africa was prominent in other reports on health and water. But some analysts fear these proposals may not take concrete shape. Worse, they could produce counterproductive strategies that would primarily benefit private companies in North America and Europe.

The G8 communique on health stops short of demands to the pharmaceutical industry to provide medicine to African and other Third World countries at low prices. It makes no reference to the need to boost local medicine production in the countries of the South, or to the transfer of technology from the industrialized to the developing countries necessary to launch such production.

The G8 leaders disregarded their own pledges at the World Trade Organisation summit in Doha 18 months ago to ease patent restrictions and therefore to ease medicine shortages and reduce prices. Instead, the G8 chose only to welcome the private pharmaceutical industry’s ”voluntary long-term commitments to providing essential medicines at substantially discounted prices to developing countries.”

Under the action plan for health agreed by the G8 at Evian, a poor country will continue to spend 1,500 dollars a year on brand-name antiretroviral drugs for every AIDS-infected person. Generic medicines could reduce the cost to a fraction of that. This means that most money spent in treating AIDS patients in Africa and other countries of the South will simply continue to flow to large North American and European pharmaceutical corporations.

”The G8 plan of action botches health strategies that could have increased the access to basic medicine in the poorest countries,” Bernard Pécoul, director of the Campaign to Guarantee Access to Basic Medicine from Medicines sans Frontieres (MSF) told IPS.

”This plan of action is actually a plan of inaction,” Pécoul said. ”The G8 plan of inaction is a bitter pill for the populations in the developing countries, who know that behind the G8 scenes in Evian, the leaders of the richest countries have deliberately blocked access to medicine at low prices.”

The G8 has been criticised also for its failure to increase direct aid for development and debt reduction in Africa.

Chirac promised in Evian that French aid for development would reach 0.5 percent of the country’s gross national product by 2007, from the present 0..32 percent. But the French financial newspaper La Tribune points out Wednesday that ”Chirac’s talk of generosity bumps against French budgetary reality.”

Chirac’s government has decided already to block any new allocation for development aid, in an attempt to meet EU (European Union) requirements to bring down its budget deficit by 2006. Several French aid projects for African countries have been suspended as a result. These programmes include anti-AIDS campaigns in Mali and an aid mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa).

In Kinshasa, the French aid mission is now deserted. ”Nobody answers the telephone there,” La Tribune reports.

”The French mission in Kinshasa has signed several contracts with local NGOs in health, education, and other development areas worth four million dollars,” says Xavier Boutin, researcher at the European Institute for Development and Coordination. ”But the French mission has only 200,000 dollars in its cash register.”

The G8 failed also to meet repeated commitments to NEPAD, and postponed a new evaluation of the scheme.

Some French officials now see NEPAD as counterproductive, because it sets good governance as a precondition for further aid. Anthony Bouthelier, general secretary of the French Council of Investors in Africa, says an ”overshooting of aid projects with the label ‘NEPAD’ is creating confusion on the aid programmes for Africa.”

A senior official working with G8 told IPS that ”a Nepadisation of economic co- operation with Africa is taking place, and blocking further advance in multilateral aid programmes, because NEPAD’s preconditions of good governance are not being fulfilled.”

The G8 summit failed also to reduce the foreign debt of the poorest African countries. So far, 22 countries have benefited from a debt reduction of 27 billion dollars. The G8 has pledged a reduction of 85 billion dollars in 35 countries.

”This reduction is nothing compared to the total foreign debt of 2,500 billion dollars the countries of the South must pay back,” Nicolas Guihard of the French NGO Agir Ici! (Act here!) told IPS.

Chirac acknowledged that G8 had failed to make any progress on the issue of subsidies. ”I had expected to go further in this matter,” Chirac said at the end of the summit. Subsidies for rich farmers in the G8 countries are seven times higher than their official aid for development.

”When the history of the fight against poverty in Africa will be written, this summit will only deserve a footnote mention,” Justin Forsyth from the British NGO Oxfam said at the summit. And that footnote might not be a flattering one.