After two days of negotiations, the G8 Summit drew to a close last week. Isolated in a lakeside resort hotel, secure from the thousands of protesters that convened on Hokkaido, the G8 has shown itself to be out of touch with the problems it seeks to fix. Before discussing the soaring costs of food, for example, the leaders enjoyed a sumptuous banquet featuring white asparagus and truffle soup, sea urchin, and imported champagne. The final communiqué basically recycles old promises repeated in every summit since the landmark Gleneagles meeting of 2005.
Max Lawson of Oxfam and Oliver Buston of Debt Aid Africa headed a coalition of non-governmental organizations that presented to the G8 leaders on Monday. They demanded the G8 live up to its commitments on aid and health in Africa: “Bureaucratic sleight of hand is not an appropriate response to these important development assistance and AIDS treatment targets.” A related press release from HEALTH-GAP breaks down each G8 promise about global health and details what still needs to be done.
In a similar vein, more than 150 organizations signed onto this challenge to the G8, calling out the rich countries for their responsibility to promote people driven solutions to the global food and climate crises and reverse the injustices of the world’s remaining illegitimate debt burden. The statement implicates G8 nations as the perpetrators of the self-serving economic policies that have created these agricultural and environmental challenges today. In addition to an unequal system of global trade, aid packages for decades have stipulated that developing countries import expensive and harmful chemical fertilizers to boost exports of cash crops, at the expense of the production of staple crops. Food sovereignty, it appears, is not yet a term in the G8 vocabulary.
Rather than systemic issues of economic justice, much of the Africa-focused portion of the G8 talks dealt with crisis control concerning the recent sham elections in Zimbabwe. At the same time, the Summit made no mention of the ongoing genocide in Darfur. As the former Archbishop of Cape Town wrote in this editorial, “to allow one country’s problems to take precedence over those of the rest of the continent, given the gravity of problems, was a big disappointment.” G8 leaders came no closer to reaching consensus on any meaningful action on climate change, despite the fact that “half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the G8 countries.” Climate change has disproportionately affected Africa and the rest of the Global South.
Not only did the G8 fail to make good on its promises, it ignored the voices of the continent of Africa. Seven African heads of state (out of 53) were invited to participate in a special session at the meeting. While that is better than zero representation, in practice, these leaders were denied a meaningful role in the crafting of solutions to global problems. In protest to this skewed balance of power, more than 1,000 leaders from labor unions, farmer and migrant groups, and NGOs gathered in Mali for a Summit of the Poor. The alternative summit protested the West’s tradition of “deciding what is good for the continent without the participation of Africans”, and hosted its own parallel dialogues on climate change, agriculture, and the challenge of competing against the prosperous farmers subsidized by Western governments.
Terming the G8 Summit “an exercise in escapism,” ActionAid’s John Samuel questioned the legitimacy of the G8 in an age where all problems are truly global. Samuels argues that G8 is not, and never has been, “a credible forum to develop any viable solution for the ongoing problems of hunger and injustice,” especially since these problems are “partly perpetuated by the corporate and institutional interests of G8 countries”. Rather than spend hundreds of millions on the next summit, we should concentrate those resources on reforming the United Nations and bringing all countries together. Walden Bello of the Freedom from Debt coalition agrees, concluding “the greatest gift that the Japanese movement can give to global civil society is by leading the struggle to make the Hokkaido Summit the final summit of the G8."
In a final indicator of the lack of seriousness with which the G8 approaches these issues, George Bush reportedly look his leave of the other world leaders by punching the air and exclaiming, “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter!” Tellingly, American media has ignored the incident.
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