From Africa Recovery, Vol.17 #2 (July 2003), page 3

More G-8 promises for Africa

Some extra aid, but no new trade concessions

A year after leaders of the Group of Eight (G-8) industrialized countries adopted an "Africa Action Plan," they again took up the continent's predicament during their annual summit, held this year in Evian, France. "Africa is a continent of challenges," French President Jacques Chirac said at the 1-3 June meeting. "Currently, it is the only continent that is slipping backward in terms of external trade."

Mr. Chirac recognized that the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), adopted by African leaders in 2001, "is the sole response to this African challenge," and that therefore it will be a recurrent element on the G-8 agenda. This was despite the G-8 leaders' preoccupations with Iraq, terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the state of the world economy, which dominated the main summit sessions.

Photo : ©Office of the French President

Five African presidents were invited to Evian to take part in an "enlarged" session, which included the G-8 leaders and several heads of state from Latin America and Asia. The five from Africa are all central promoters of NEPAD: Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. They also took part in a special dialogue on NEPAD, with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan joining in.

President Obasanjo remarked that he and his colleagues were "generally satisfied" with the G-8 countries' efforts on Africa since their last summit in Kananaskis, Canada. President Wade hinted that more could have been expected, but added, "It's necessary to be realistic." He also expressed "all my sympathy" with the tens of thousands of civil society activists who protested the G-8 summit, especially those "who believe that Africa has made enormous efforts but has not benefited from its labours."

Additional aid

The G-8 leaders' "personal representatives" on Africa submitted a report on the implementation of the previous summit's Africa Action Plan. It catalogued various initiatives on aid, debt relief, investment promotion, health, education and other areas. Towards the Kananaskis goal of increasing G-8 aid to Africa by an additional $6 bn per year by 2006:

France will increase its official development assistance (ODA) to Africa from 2.3 bn euros in 2002 to an estimated 3 bn euros this year. This is part of France's aim to raise its ODA, as a share of gross domestic product, from 0.32 per cent in 2001 to 0.5 per cent in 2007.

Italy has pledged to raise its share from 0.2 per cent in 2002 to 0.33 per cent in 2006, and Germany from 0.27 per cent to 0.33 per cent over the same period.

The UK seeks to boost its share from 0.32 per cent in 2001 to 0.4 per cent in 2005/06, and to reach the goal of providing at least £1 bn in direct ODA to Africa by 2006.

The US government will raise its aid requests to Congress from $1.3 bn in fiscal year 2004 to $5 bn by fiscal 2006.

Canada has begun to increase its aid allocations by 8 per cent annually, towards a goal of doubling it by 2010.

Japan already has provided about $700 mn to Africa for basic human needs, as part of its commitment at the 1998 Tokyo International Conference on African Development (see article "Building on the 'Dakar-Tokyo axis'). It also has committed more than $1 bn for infrastructure development in Africa, beginning in 2003.

On debt, the Russian Federation cancelled $3.4 bn of African debt in 2002, while 22 African countries are set to benefit from $32 bn in debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative.

Conflict, famine and trade

Responding to the proliferation of armed conflicts in Africa -- and as part of the G-8's general concern for global security -- the African and G-8 leaders adopted a joint plan to enhance African capacities to undertake peace operations. Among other measures, it projects the creation, equipping and training of African multinational standby brigades by 2010, under the direction of the African Union and sub-regional African organizations.

The G-8 leaders also approved separate action plans on water and health, both of which prominently highlighted Africa's needs. A plan on famine focused mainly on Africa, and emphasized that combating famine requires both short-term emergency relief and longer-term efforts to promote rural development, fight HIV/AIDS and improve governance.

However, Mr. Phil Twyford, spokesman of Oxfam, a UK-based non-governmental development organization, maintained that the G-8 famine plan was "completely empty." He noted that it did not address the problem of the high agricultural subsidies that Europe and the US pay to their own farmers, a practice that tends to flood world markets with agricultural surpluses and depresses the prices that African farmers receive for their crops.

The issue of subsidies came up in the discussions among G-8 leaders, but no breakthroughs were achieved (although a few weeks later the European Union did indicate greater willingness to consider eventually reducing some of its subsidies). Commenting on the impasse at the summit, President Wade called Northern agricultural subsidies "a great injustice that is against the interests of Africans."

The Senegalese president noted that while Africans did not get everything they wanted from the G-8 summit, "We are not bitter, since we cannot act politically with bitterness. But we do have the will to make ourselves heard. We are defending the interests of Africa with the means we have."

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