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8-9/2005
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[ Development aid ]
G8 summit disappoints NGOs
The seven leading industrial nations and Russia have pledged that Official Development Assistance (ODA) will be $ 50 billion higher in 2010 than it is currently. This promise implies an increase of almost 64 % compared to last year, when global development aid amounted to $ 79 billion. Half of the increase is to be earmarked for Africa. The G8 heads of state and government, however, did not reach agreement on new financing mechanisms at their summit in Gleneagles (Scotland) in early July. The official communiqué does not mention the International Financing Facility proposed by the British government, which wants to issue ten-year government bonds in order to increase aid immediately. Nor does the communiqué mention a tax on plane fares as was recently discussed by European Union leaders. There is merely a reference in an annex that some countries want to further consider such mechanisms.
According to media reports, summit delegates argued until the very end over whether there should be a commitment to concrete figures for the aid increase. Some countries, including Germany, evidently wanted to go no further than expressing an intention to reach an ODA ratio of GDP of 0.51 % by 2010. According to newspaper reports, the terror attacks in London advanced the view that the summit should send a clearer sign of fighting poverty, whereupon the promise of $ 50 billion US dollars was made. The delegates also confirmed the decision made by the G8 finance ministers in early June to cancel the debts owed by the 18 most highly indebted countries to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank (see D+C/E+Z, 2005:7, p. 268).
While Germany’s Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, rated the G8 Summit as “an impressive indication of determination”, non-governmental institutions appeared disappointed. The chairman of the Association of German Development NGOs, Reinhard Hermle, said that additional funds were needed immediately, rather than after a five year wait. The aid organisation Oxfam expressed the same view: the world’s richest nations had fallen short of an opportunity for a “momentous breakthrough”.
The German newsletter Weltwirtschaft und Entwicklung (World Economy and Development) pointed out that recent calculations in the UN progress report on the Millennium Goals show that, even before the G8 Summit, donor countries had – through various commitments – already implicitly announced an aid increase to $ 100 billion by 2010. In that sense, only an additional
$ 30 billion was promised in Gleneagles. The development spokesperson for the conservative Christian Democrats in the Bundestag, Christian Ruck, said that it was not enough to re-announce a decision already made or “to issue bad cheques”. (ell)
Website:
http://www.g8.gov.uk
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