G8 Summits: Empty promises each year

The G8 plays an important role in global governance. The world’s elite economic and political countries make up the G8. Together, these countries are able to push policies and agendas in formal world institutions. For example, G8 countries have nearly 50% of the vote in the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). G8 countries also have enormous influence in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Security Council of the United Nations (UN). It is through these formal international institutions that many of the G8’s decisions become reality in the world.

The G8 does not act as a single unit to run the world. There is just as much difference and disagreement between G8 countries as there is common ground and agreement. Other countries and groups of countries have power in the world as well and can say no to G8 policies and actions. However, through the G8, member countries can make deals and compromises with one another and then form powerful alliances to exert influence in world politics.

By virtue of its combined economic, military, and diplomatic power and influence, the G8/G7 can exercise tremendous influence over the multilateral institutions of global governance. This power gives the G8/G7 great influence on the policies, programs, and decisions of the UN Security Council, World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This is the case despite the fact that, unlike these institutions, the G8/G7 has no permanent staff, no headquarters, no set of rules governing its operations, and no formal or legal powers. For those negatively impacted by the policy agendas advanced by the G8/G7, and for countries excluded from its deliberations, the G8/G7’s influential role in global governance is highly resented and frequently criticized.

... Clearly, the wealthiest and most powerful nations have a right to meet formally or informally, just as other groupings of countries with similar interests and concerns do — such as the G77 forum of developing nations. The fundamental legitimacy problem associated with the G8/G7 is not its right to exist. Rather it’s the way that the G8/G7 has maneuvered to promote itself as the central player in global governance — and in the process undermined the influence of the United Nations.

In the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. and other G8/G7 members created a visionary system of global governance designed to preserve peace and promote prosperity through intergovernmental institutions, mainly the United Nations. Today, these institutions are plagued with identity and representational crises and find themselves ineffective in the face of new global challenges, such as responding to the outbreak of intrastate conflicts, stopping financial crisis contagion, and regulating transnational corporations. Structural reform is necessary if the WTO, World Bank, IMF, and UN are to meet some of these challenges, while other global problems will require new, visionary agendas of global governance — and new institutions. Unfortunately, the G8/G7 has shown little leadership in addressing the deepening crisis of global governance. Indeed it has contributed to this crisis by supporting policy solutions that bypass the UN and that favor transnational corporations over public welfare. A yet more fundamental challenge to global governance in the post-9.11 era is failure of Japan, Russia, and European nations to mount a challenge to the increasingly assertive U.S. expressions of hegemony and supremacy in military, economic, cultural, and diplomatic affairs.

What African leaders were hoping for

Trade

• Cuts in the high duties that African exports face in western markets
• Pledges by rich countries to cut vast agricultural subsidies that bankrupt vulnerable African farmers by pushing down world commodity prices

Debt relief

• $15bn-20bn extra debt relief for the loan repayments draining African budgets and to make up for the fall in export prices. Half the countries to have been through the west’s debt relief programme are still spending more on repayments to their creditors than on public health

Aid and investment

• $35bn in aid and investment. The UN estimates that it would cost $25bn-35bn to get Africa on track to meet its internationally agreed anti-poverty goals

And what they got

Trade

• Nothing. Position worse than a year ago as both Canada and the US plan to pump more money into farming subsidies

Debt

• $1bn in extra debt relief to make up for falling commodity prices

Aid

• $6bn of EU and US aid to be earmarked for Africa by 2006

Africans were angry and disappointed on Friday, saying the world’s richest nations had signed a no-action plan for Africa — offering words of advice but little in the way of new cash, Reuters and the International Herald Tribune report.

A core group of African presidents, led by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, had wanted full backing for their ambitious African recovery plan when they met leaders from the Group of Eight industrialized nations last week in Canada.

But the agreement signed on Thursday fell spectacularly short of Africa’s needs, analysts and aid groups said, accusing the G8 of dictating the terms of the continent’s revival. The hot-air brigade returned a scandalous plan for no action on Africa. They recycled stale commitments without saying how and when they would act, said Neville Gabriel, a director of the South African Catholic Bishops conference.

Analysts said the rich countries, on the final day of a two-day summit in the Canadian Rockies, had latched onto the cost-free aspects of NEPAD — conflict resolution, improving governance and promoting private business. But they spurned African proposals for funding large-scale infrastructure projects, side-stepped the issue of rich farm subsidies freezing out African imports, and ignored NEPAD’s ambitious targets for debt relief.

Our compassion [at the G8 Summit talking of the desire to help Africa] may be well meant, but it is also hypocritical. The U.S., Europe and Japan spend $350 billion each year on agricultural subsidies (seven times as much as global aid to poor countries), and this money creates gluts that lower commodity prices and erode the living standard of the world’s poorest people.

These subsidies are crippling Africa’s chance to export its way out of poverty, said James Wolfensohn, the World Bank president, in a speech last month.

Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the United Nations Development Program, estimates that these farm subsidies cost poor countries about $50 billion a year in lost agricultural exports. By coincidence, that’s about the same as the total of rich countries’ aid to poor countries, so we take back with our left hand every cent we give with our right.

It’s holding down the prosperity of very poor people in Africa and elsewhere for very narrow, selfish interests of their own, Mr. Malloch Brown says of the rich world’s agricultural policy.

It also seems a tad hypocritical of us to complain about governance in third-world countries when we allow tiny groups of farmers to hijack billion of dollars out of our taxes.

As in Seattle, Washington, DC, and Prague, organizers of what has been the biggest anti-globalization protest so far are worried that the street battles and the antics of the anarchists might overshadow the message that they wanted to deliver to the G-8. Over several months, the Genoa Social Forum was able to line up about 600 groups behind a pledge of non-violence.