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G8 SUMMIT: Poverty Campaign Throws a Final Challenge

Sanjay Suri

GLENEAGLES, Scotland, Jul 6 2005 (IPS) - The Make Poverty History campaign threw down a final challenge to the industrialised world’s leaders to end poverty and save lives as the Group of Eight summit got under way here Wednesday.

Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign members reminded leaders of the G8 countries (United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and host Britain) that they were confronting “the largest anti-poverty movement the world has ever seen.”

The call went out from a briefing room in a marquee constructed some distance from Gleneagles Hotel where the G8 leaders were arriving. But the campaign has become widespread in a bid to force itself upon the G8 agenda.

The campaign was backed by an earlier rally in the Scottish capital Edinburgh, drawing a quarter of a million people. As the summit got under way, a couple of thousand demonstrators also made it through constricted routes to Auchterader town, near the Gleneagles Hotel, to stage a demonstration in support of the poverty campaign’s demands.

Britain, as host of the G8 summit, has made two issues the top priorities of the agenda for the July 6-8 meet: promoting development in Africa and containing global climate change.

The debt relief announced prior to the summit by finance ministers of the G7 countries (G8 minus Russia) is only a “small, belated step in the right direction,” Kumi Naidoo, chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), said at a press conference addressed by members of the anti-poverty protest.

The debt relief measures should extend to more than 60 countries, and not just 18, he said. Not enough had been written off, considering that Iraq was forgiven more than 30 billion dollars of debt, he said. “And the debt cancellation was linked to obscene conditionality, like privatisation of basic services.”

The aid being offered too is a pittance in relation to the 300-billion-dollar price tag of the U.S.-led war and occupation of Iraq, he said.

The MPH campaign has clearly drawn strength from the rallies in Edinburgh and London, and the massive attendance at the Live 8 concert in London and in other cities around the G8 countries. “No G8 leader can say their citizens have not spoken with a sense of common humanity with others,” Naidoo said.

Yassine Fall, president of the African Women Millennium Initiative on Poverty and Human Rights, emphasised that the campaign is calling more for trade justice than for aid or debt relief. Aid would be of little use as G8 leaders pressure Africa to “open more markets to privatise services like health and education.”

Responding to a suggestion that Africa had been given 500 billion dollars in aid over the last 40 years, but still remained poor, Fall said that as much as 60 to 70 percent of aid to Africa “goes back to donor countries to pay for consultants and for products they insist be bought from their countries.”

The structural adjustment programmes enforced by international agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in exchange for aid had instead thrown millions into poverty. “In my community in Senegal, poverty has trebled as a result,” she said.

The Commission for Africa set up by the British government “recognises that the policies of the IMF and the World Bank have failed in Africa,” Fall said. The G8 countries need to address the damage they are doing while they speak of more aid and debt cancellation, she said.

John Hilary from the group War on Want warned of “significant steps backwards” rather than any progress on several fronts. The G8 countries, he said, have launched “a new assault on developing country markets,” and the EU had hardened its stand on agricultural subsidies.

He asked also for regulation of multinational corporations around the world. These corporations that control two-thirds of world trade currently enjoy a “laissez-faire capitalism”, he said.

Matt Phillips from the MPH campaign in Britain challenged G8 leaders to deliver better quality of aid, and to deliver it to lower income, and not middle income countries.

The MPH leaders also challenged the G8 leaders on the issue of corruption that Africa is so often whipped with.

“That Africa and the developing world have a monopoly on corruption is a fallacy,” Naidoo said. “There is petty corruption, and there is big corruption,” he said. While the group will press developing countries to address the issue of petty corruption, “large-scale corruption is not possible without the collusion of rich country governments and corporations.”

Rich countries keep one set of standards for multinational corporations in their countries, and another for the same corporations in other countries, Naidoo said. The G8 countries, as much as Africa, need to clean up this kind of corruption, he added.