Rich countries came up short on fund-raising promises for poor nations and were to meet yesterday to figure out how to direct aid resources at a time when their own budgets are squeezed.
The G8 nations were to meet in Huntsville, Ontario, north of Toronto yesterday, having fallen an estimated US$18 billion short of a 2005 pledge to raise their combined aid to the poorest countries by at least US$50 billion.
The G8’s meeting in the sleepy lakeside community provided a respite from Toronto’s hectic urban pace and the difficult tasks that await the larger G20 summit today and tomorrow.
The US, Britain, Canada, Japan, Italy, France, Germany and Russia make up the club of G8 members.
Although the G8 cannot avoid talking about its own economic troubles — namely the strength of the global recovery and the state of public finances — the smaller group wanted to carve out some time to discuss problems facing poor countries, G8 officials said.
Canada, host of the G8 and G20 meetings, wants to ensure that donor countries follow through on their commitments.
The hosts also want mother-and-child health and the rebuilding of Haiti from a devastating earthquake to be the focus, officials said. Haiti was invited to attend the G8 meeting along with Jamaica and some African countries.
The US is pushing for more agricultural investment in Africa and has created a fund to boost food production in poorer countries.
The G8 will discuss progress toward meeting the eight UN Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, on poverty by 2015. The group will also review the US$18 billion shortfall in reaching the US$50 billion total pledged in 2005 at the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.
The Gleneagles meeting also promised to provide an extra US$25 billion a year for Africa as part of the overall US$50 billion increase in financial assistance by this year. Citing figures from the Paris-based OECD, the World Bank said the G8 had provided just US$11 billion of the US$25 billion for Africa.
In a report prepared before the summits, the World Bank urged rich countries to make good on their aid pledges, warning that poor countries were vulnerable to any setbacks in the global economic recovery.
It urged rich countries to secure the economic recovery, arguing that the resources of poor states were already overstrained by the last two years of economic crisis, which has hit exports and worker remittances.
Development groups called on industrialized countries to renew their aid commitments from Gleneagles, arguing that rich countries should not be let off the hook when many African governments had kept their pledges to follow policies that promoted growth and tackled corruption.
“We’re asking them to make good on those pledges over the next two years,” said Mark Fried, policy coordinator for international development group Oxfam. “They need to set clear targets to come up with the money they missed,” he added.
Fried said that African countries had lost an estimated US$63 billion since the global financial crisis began in 2008 because of lower export earnings from a collapse in demand and declines in foreign aid.
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
‘A THREAT’: Guyanese President Irfan Ali called on Venezuela to follow international court rulings over the region, whose border Guyana says was ratified back in 1899 Misael Zapara said he would vote in Venezuela’s first elections yesterday for the territory of Essequibo, despite living more than 100km away from the oil-rich Guyana-administered region. Both countries lay claim to Essequibo, which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens. Guyana has administered the region for decades. The centuries-old dispute has intensified since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world. Venezuela would elect a governor, eight National Assembly deputies and regional councilors in a newly created constituency for the 160,000
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
RSS