One year after the g8 - what has changed?

A year after the G8 meeting at Gleneagles has anything really changed for the world’s poor?

Roz Paterson looks at the legacy of a week of protest by the people, and the empty promises of the planet’s most powerful leaders.

We protested, they promised, and Africa prospered. Or did it?

Much as it galls to have to say anything that might make Tony Blair look good, but one year on from the big Gleneagles photo opportunity, the signs are good. In Zambia, the $50billion in debt relief has freed up monies to recruit 4500 teachers and establish HIV/AIDS control and mitigation programmes, while in Burundi, an extra 300,000 children can now go to school.
Hurrah for Tony! Actually, bollocks to Tony.
These positive tweaks on an otherwise bleak landscape of accelerating poverty, famine and disease are the equivalent of sticking your penny change in the box and congratulating yourself that you’ve done all you can to stamp out animal cruelty/homelessness/whatever.
A few pockets of deprivation may be enjoying a slight boost, but meantime, millions are still dying of starvation and curable diseases, millions have HIV/AIDS yet no access to treatment, children are still sitting in classes of 100 with only one teacher, health workers are still working on a ratio of one per thousand patients...and the richest nations on earth, the G8, are now moving on from Africa, having ‘done their bit’.
Except, of course, they haven’t. The G8 promises were puny in the first place, and even so, are unlikely ever to be fulfilled.
In July 2005, they promised to cancel Third World debt to the world’s poorest 40 countries, and increase aid to same to the tune of $50billion by 2010.
As Kumi Naidoo, of the Global Campaign Against Poverty, observed: “The people have roared and the G8 has whispered.”
In 1970, the G7 as it was then, signed up to giving 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income to aid/debt cancellation. The 2005 summit saw them commit to only 0.36 per cent of GNI.
Naidoo added that phasing in the increase between 2005 and 2010 was “like waiting five years before responding to the tsunami.”
It was worse than that. Most people assumed that the debt cancellation and the aid were two separate things. They weren’t. Most of the $50billion was in fact debt cancellation; Oxfam calls this ‘double counting’. The 2005 ‘increase’ in aid - $21billion - was mostly, $17billion’ worth, in the form of one-off debt cancellations, to places like Iraq and Nigeria. And even then, the debt cancellation was accounted for over two years, to make figures look good, rather than over 20 years, which is how it would be felt in the countries affected. For instance, in Nigeria, the debt relief would manifest as $1billion a year for 20 years, not two big boosts in two years, and thus its impact would be neglible.
And that’s assuming the debt cancellation actually happened. It didn’t in most cases, or not to the extent that was promised. Within days of the G8, countries including Germany were humming and hawing that they might not be able to honour their commitments after all.
Furthermore, when you consider Iraq, the debt cancellation simply allows the country to rebuild much of what was bombed by the US/UK invaders - almost certainly using contracts with US-based multinationals. Talk about giving to receive!
Not that they gave. The US may have pledged more than any other country, but it was still the least generous of all the G8 countries. And in any case, although Bush asked for $3billion to be added to the US aid budget, Congress turned him down. Which suggests this plea for aid was mere showboating, as Congress is dominated by Bush’s own Republican party.
As for the European nations, as noted above, they have dragged their heels shamefully, and remain, in any case, much less generous than poorer, non-G8 nations, giving $90 per person per year, compared to the Netherlands’ $300 pppy.
But even had the G8 lived up to its aid promises, and not indulged in dubious accounting practises, there would still be one major, underlying issue. An issue that, unless addressed, undermines every aid initiative in the world. Trade.
The G8 made a commitment to allow countries receiving aid to nonetheless have control over their own economies. Yet to qualify for debt cancellation, these same countries are, according to Oxfam, “still obliged to implement harmful economic reforms, such as inappropriate privatisation or trade liberalisation.”
The same G8 leaders who promised Bob Geldof they would be a bit nicer in future, are now taking a hatchet to developing countries’ protective tariffs. Thus, these nations’ agricultural economy is under threat as they are flooded with cheap, subsidised goods, such as cotton and grain, from rich nations, and their industrialisation is stalled by a tariff escalation that slaps duty on anything processed or manufactured, anything with ‘value added’ in other words.
This discourages industrialisation, forcing poorer nations back into the position of being exporters mainly of raw materials which, as just noted, leaves them at the mercy of  the world markets manipulated in favour of the already-haves, not the would-like-to-haves.
Cancelling debts and donating a few quid, which is all the G8 promises amount to, without radically altering trade laws and giving poorer nations even a level playing field, is no better than cancelling someone’s overdraft but still paying them below the cost of living wages. Sooner rather than later, that debt is going to mount up again.
Finally, and this was studiously avoided by the G8, many of the debts currently being serviced by developing nations were run up by corrupt regimes that never had a mandate from their people. Think apartheid South Africa and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. South Africans and Iraqis were never liable for these debts, so why should they ever have been expected to pay them? Indeed, it is the lenders who are liable, for having knowingly shelled out money to dictatorial regimes that oppressed people by violence and starvation. Is it not time the lenders made amends?
Doubtless Blair will make much of the scant success stories emanating from the Gleneagles summit, but only the lazy and ill-informed will believe him. The G8 leaders know they did less than nothing, and so do we.
“Despite these stories of progress, in (2005/06), 500,000 women died in either pregnancy or childbirth and 11 million children died from poverty, conflict and disease. This is the equivalent of a woman every minute, a child every three seconds.”
(Oxfam: The View from the Summit - Gleneagles G8 One Year On)

Saint Bob’s pointless half-baked plan

They turned what could have been one of the biggest, most dynamic popular protests in a decade into a sideshow to a London rock concert.
Then went on to praise the two men currently most culpable for the suffering in Africa as that continent’s saviours.
One look at the evidence and you can’t help wondering if Bob Geldof and Bono weren’t working for the other side.
Without doubt, Tony Blair and George W Bush would have been savaged by the world’s media for their mealy-mouthed promises and subsequent inaction, had Geldof and Bono not publicly patted them on the back and made them out to be little short of saints in suits.
“A great justice has been done. On aid, ten out of ten; on debt, eight out of ten...Mission accomplished, frankly,” trilled Geldof, shortly after possibly the most cringeworthy photo opp between a prime minister and an elderly, talentless pop act in the history of the universe.
Bono, every inch Geldof’s equal on the ill-informed and egomaniac fronts, went one further. He said, “Bush deserves a place in history for turning the fate of the continent around.”
People with a little more knowledge of the issues, such as Action Aid, saw things differently. “The G8 have completely failed to deliver trade justice,” they said.
“A disaster for the world’s poor.” That’s how the World Development Movement described it.
The damage was done long before the final reviews, of course.
The Make Poverty History demo had been in the planning for months, and hundreds of thousands of protesters were on their way to Edinburgh to take part in it.
Why then did Geldof, who hasn’t sold a record since Clement Atlee was a lad, feel the urge to organise one of his weary, all-white rock concerts in Hyde Park for the same day, thereby diverting the world media’s attention away from real people making real protest and onto middle-aged rockers like Madonna squeaking about starting revolutions while playing a selection from their new CD?
“He did it for his self-promotion. This is why he marginalised African singers, putting the limelight on himself and Bono, rather than on the issues,” said Demba Moussa Dembele, of the African Forum on Alternatives.
Adding, “The objectives of the whole Live8 campaign had little to do with poverty reduction in Africa. It was a scheme intended to project Geldof and Blair as humanitarian figures coming to the rescue of ‘poor and helpless Africans.’”
The lack of black at Live8 was a sore point.
“It seems like a great white man has come to rescue us while the freedom fighters never get a mention,” observed London-based Black Information Line at the time.
Clearly they didn’t think that Robbie Williams, Mr Heather Mills (ex), or Coldplay constituted ‘freedom fighters’.
Rather than boost the anti-poverty protests against the G8, they neutralised them. Every bit as much as Gordon Brown did when he announced he’d be joining the marchers in Edinburgh.
The demands for fair trade, no strings aid and real debt cancellation were drowned out by Vicar of Dibley stars saying that poverty wasn’t nice.
And Geldof helped this happen, just as he colluded with the British government in drawing up the Commission for Africa report which purposely ignored the fact that we already know the answers to the crisis in Africa, instead claiming the situation could be resolved with a ‘reformed’ version of what we have now.
“The mutual admiration club between Bono, Bob Geldof, Tony Blair and Bush - rock stars and men who would love to be them - has been the abiding symbol of the G8. It is deeply disturbing,” said Bianca Jagger, a long-time campaigner for social justice.
As a former celebrity herself, she should know.

G8 - St Petersburg

This year, the G8 will be held in St Petersburg from 15-17 July, and will concentrate on energy security. A leaked document - the Communique on Energy Security - calls for trillions of dollars of investment in coal, oil and gas, plus nuclear energy, condemning us to a continuation of the hydrocarbon economy that is slowly killing the planet.
In response, much of the protest revolves around the issue of climate change.
Protests are expected to be relatively small, due to the nature of the state repression in Russia, the violent reputation of the police and the sheer difficulty and cost of getting there.
Thus, calls for protest do not focus entirely on those at the G8 itself, but include global days of action.
On 8-12 July, the Libertarian Forum runs in Moscow, focussing on energy, including nuclear power.
The Russian Social Forum runs from 13-15 July, at the Kirov Stadium in St Petersburg, and deals with issues ranging from energy and civil rights, to housing and education.
An anti-G8 demo has been planned for 14 July, though there are difficulties with this as the entire city centre has been laid out of bounds to protesters.
The 15 July is the International Day of Action against Climate Change, called by Rising Tide North America and UK.
People are urged to create their own local protests, against motorways, nuclear power stations, oil refineries, and to organise teach-ins and workshops, public meetings and stunts.
The 16 July, the anniversary of the first detonation of a nuclear missile, in New Mexico in 1945, is the Global Day of Action against Nuclear Power.
Again, we are being urged to make it local, and send a message of defiance all the way to St Petersburg.
n www.risingtide.org.uk
n http://spb8.net/en/
n www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/g82006