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G8: Uninspiring, Unrepentant, Untargeted
G8: Uninspiring, Unrepentant, Untargeted
The good folk at ActionAid have sent along a fine precis of the G8 Summit in Hokkaido.
Africa: uninspiring
- Existing policies and aid pledges have been heavily recycled this year.
- Last year's G8 pledge of US$60bn for health now has a timescale (five years), but there is still no indication of who will pay up and exactly when.
- Agriculture proposals focus on commercial farming and largely ignore the potential of smallholder production and the role of women as Africa's main small-scale food producers.
Food and hunger: unrepentant
- Food aid and other emergency measures so far announced only address the extremes of hunger, not the food insecurity facing hundreds of millions of people.
- Astonishingly, no recognition of the role of biofuels in the food price crisis. No action against the EU and US targets and subsidies that have encouraged their use.
- Lip-service to smallholders; but investment in agriculture, for the G8, still means investment in high-tech, industrial agriculture.
- Misplaced faith in trade liberalisation. Ill-conceived liberalisation is part of the problem: it brings in cheap food but in many countries it has destroyed local agriculture.
Climate change: untargeted
- Support for 50% global emission cuts by 2050, but no indication of what the G8's share of this might be, and no commitment to action until India and China agree to curb their emissions. Confusion over the extremely contentious issue of the baseline year for emission cuts, with the Japanese suggesting 2008 and the Europeans saying 1990.
- No mid-term targets, though the G8 admits they are needed. The Bali target of 25-40% reductions by 2020, supported by NGOs and the "+5" group (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa), is not mentioned.
- G8 supports 'second generation' biofuels despite evidence (from ActionAid and others) that even these non-food crops are taking land out of food production and causing hunger.
- Misplaced enthusiasm for the Climate Investment Funds as a way of promoting adaptation and clean technology. The most vulnerable countries are under-represented in the funds' management. The funds will provide much of their money as loans, not grants. And all this counts towards the G8's aid targets, instead of being additional.
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Posted on 12 July, 2008 - 05:25
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