Posted on 07/07/2008 8:10:10 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
Tony Blair's flagship promise of more aid for Africa, secured at the Gleneagles summit three years ago, is being pulled apart as "backsliding" leaders assemble for a G8 meeting in Japan.
On the opening day of the gathering on Japan's island of Hokkaido, a draft communiqué prepared for leaders of the world's eight richest nations showed how the pledge which Mr Blair negotiated with such fanfare was being steadily watered down.
The central promise made by G8 countries at Gleneagles, as rock concerts and demonstrations took place across the world, was to raise their aid budgets by £25 billion by 2010. Of this new money, £12.5 billion would go to Africa.
Yet so far, only £3.5 billion of extra aid has been delivered - barely 14 per cent of the total promised.
Britain, America and Germany have raised their development budgets by enough to redeem their pledges. But France, Canada and Italy have not. President Nicolas Sarkozy has actually reduced French spending on aid.
These three countries are thought to be leading a behind-the-scenes effort in Japan to dilute the original Gleneagles pledge. The draft communiqué for the Hokkaido summit, obtained by The Daily Telegraph, exposes the success of their diplomatic campaign.
Paragraph D1 of the section entitled "Development and Africa" says only that G8 nations are "committed to working to fulfil" the Gleneagles promise to raise their aid budgets. Crucially, there is no mention of the specific target of Pounds 25 billion by the deadline of 2010.
Max Lawson, from Oxfam, singled out Mr Sarkozy and Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, as the chief "backsliders".
He said: "This is all about the French and the Italians and their desire to step away from this promise. It's in their interests that these numbers are left out of the communiqué."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Africa truly needs to improve upon itself on a variety of issues, and no amounts of money will truly resolve everything that Africa truly needs to do to improve upon itself. Also, if the U.N. truly wasn’t such a POS “entity” during its entire duration of existence, then Africa, as well as the rest of the third world, would truly be much better today on all of the important issues.
The UN is third world entity. It is there to be exploited.
yitbos
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