G8 SUMMIT: Live Up To Your Promises, NGOs Say

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Ramesh Jaura

BERLIN, Jul 17 2006 (IPS) - Civil society organisations and a Euro-parliamentarian have tabled a wish list to G8 leaders ahead of the summit that begins Saturday in St. Petersburg.

“The G8 must live up to their Gleneagles promises or risk the disdain of millions,” Member of the European Parliament Glenys Kinnock warned Friday.

She was referring to the 2005 summit meeting of the Group of Eight heads of government of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, Canada and Japan.

Kinnock, Labour’s European spokesperson on international development said: “In the 12 months since the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, calculations have revealed that 85 percent of the G8’s recorded investments have been one-off debt cancellation. This means that the G8’s real overall aid increase in 2005 was a puny 9 percent.”

“In 2007 the G8 will no longer be able to ‘cook the books’ by bundling debt write-offs with aid because it is unlikely that debt cancellation will continue at recent levels,” she said in an e-mailed statement to IPS.

“So we need to know from the leaders meeting in St Petersburg just how exactly they propose to deal with the ensuing shortfalls,” said Kinnock who is also co-president of the African, Caribbean and Pacific states-EU joint parliamentary assembly.

“Grand summit promises that turn into creative accounting breed cynicism. More must be done – and quickly.”

The Labour leader called for better scrutiny and accountability of national aid programmes.

“The obligations undertaken at Gleneagles last year are achievable,” she said. “If donor nations stuck to their promise to provide 0.7 percent of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in development aid, the world would have the funds with which to tackle poverty.”

Better scrutiny and accountability is essential. That means ‘naming and shaming’ the countries that do not pay their way. U.S. aid, for example, amounts to 4 billion dollars a year, in stark contract to U.S. military spending of 550 billion dollars a year.

In Europe, Germany will have to more than double its aid by 2010 to meet the G8 target, while Italy will have to triple it.

“Governments have to be more transparent, and all national parliaments should be given the opportunity to study their overall development aid figures,” Kinnock said.

Action Aid International’s Alexandre Polack said in a telephone interview to IPS from St Petersburg Friday that the G8 had decided to put Africa on the summit agenda at the insistence of Britain and France.

“This is a welcome decision. There are signs that some concrete decisions might also be forthcoming on HIV/AIDS.”

But the fact is that at Gleneagles in Scotland last July, the G8 countries had promised to double aid to Africa as part of an extra 50 billion dollar package by 2010, and take immediate action on better aid.

“Currently they are not on track to achieve this target, with the countries that need to do most, currently doing the least. On key aspects of aid, donors are failing to reform,” he said.

The G8 had also pledged to achieve universal access to AIDS treatment by 2010. But donors are failing to back the pledge with sufficient money, leaving an annual funding gap of at least 10 billion dollars a year, Polack said.

As aid and debt relief for the world’s poorest countries is “ramped up”, Transparency International (TI) said recipient and donor nations must ensure that assistance takes place within a framework of mutual accountability.

“In countries with weak public financial management and accounting systems, this should include a time-bound programme of measures that can be monitored and that enables involvement of local citizens in all steps of the aid cycle, from needs assessment to monitoring the use of funds, to implementation,” TI said in a media release Jul. 13.

G8 had made advances on fighting domestic and international corruption and in supporting good governance at home and abroad but it still has promises to fulfil.

In line with their Gleneagles and Evian (France) commitments at the previous two summits, G8 governments should vigorously enforce the OECD anti-bribery convention by swiftly prosecuting companies that pay bribes to foreign public officials, TI chair Huguette Labelle said.

Although the United States and France have significantly increased the number of prosecutions in the past year, and Germany has a few pending prosecutions, of the other G8 signatories, Japan and Britain have brought no prosecutions at all, and Canada and Italy have only brought one each.

Russia is not a signatory to the anti-bribery convention of the 30-nation Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) based in Paris.

“This is a shockingly low level of enforcement for countries that account for a substantial share of the world’s trade and investment,” TI, the Berlin-based global civil society organisation leading the fight against corruption said.

In another media release Friday TI appealed to the G8 to:

– Reiterate its full commitment to and support for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a voluntary programme in which governments publish revenues received, and companies publish payments made. Independent auditing then flags any discrepancies;

– Push disclosure of payments by home companies to host governments for the extraction of energy resources, as previously called for by Transparency International and the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) coalition;

– Support a robust validation system to ensure that EITI is implemented effectively by both countries and companies, with active participation of civil society in all phases of its implementation;

– Commit to financial and technical assistance for governments and civil society organisations to help countries implement their EITI commitments through 2011;

– Include extractive transparency criteria in aid and debt relief programmes, and expand the EITI to emerging economies;

– Support the establishment of an adequately resourced and professional secretariat for EITI for at least the next five years.

Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) campaigner Jan Kowalzig said in a telephone interview from Brussels that the G8 appeared to be taking “a 180 degree turnabout” on climate issues.

Despite pledges to take action against climate change, he said the draft plan currently includes regressive proposals for major investment in finding new oil and gas reserves, for increased oil refining capacity and for greater reliance on nuclear power.

“We are particularly concerned about recent attempts to revive the nuclear industry despite its economic failures over the past 50 years,” Kowalzig said.

Not a single nuclear power plant has ever been built without direct or indirect subsidies through taxpayers’ money, he said. And, each Euro invested in nuclear energy would save ten times more greenhouse gases if it was invested in energy efficiency measures.

FoEI welcomed the fact that European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, who is attending the G8 summit, has highlighted the need to promote greenhouse gas reduction and large-scale use of renewable energy.

“But the energy policy of the 25-nation European Union (EU) is still strongly dominated by political and financial support for fossil fuels and nuclear power,” Kowalzig said.

FoEI wants to see an agreement by G8 nations for specific, substantial and timetabled cuts in their domestic emissions of greenhouse gases.

“G8 leaders must commit themselves to strong future actions to combat climate change. These should include increased efforts to meet Kyoto targets, and a clear signal that their commitments will increase after 2012 (when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol is due to end),” Kowalzig said.

Crucial talks on international action to tackle climate change are scheduled to take place in Nairobi, Kenya, later this year.

FoEI also wants the G8 to agree on innovative and substantial financing mechanisms to increase and diversify the energy mix. This must include more renewable energy and greater efforts towards energy efficiency.

“Urgent assistance is needed for those developing countries already facing the devastating effects of climate change,” said the FoEI climate change campaigner.