The G8 summit in Japan earlier this month was a painful demonstration of the pitiful state of global cooperation. The world is in deepening crisis. Food prices are soaring. Oil prices are at historic highs. The leading economies are entering a recession. Climate change negotiations are going around in circles. Aid to the poorest countries is stagnant, despite years of promised increases. And yet in this gathering storm it was hard to find a single real accomplishment by the world’s leaders.
The world needs global solutions for global problems, but the G8 leaders clearly cannot provide them. Because virtually all of the political leaders that went to the summit are deeply unpopular at home, few offer any global leadership. They are weak individually, and even weaker when they get together and display to the world their inability to mobilize real action.
There are four deep problems. The first is the incoherence of US leadership. While we are well past the time when the US alone could solve any global problems, it does not even try to find shared global solutions. The will to global cooperation was weak even in the administration of former US president Bill Clinton, but it has disappeared entirely during the administration of US President George W. Bush.
GLOBAL SOLUTIONS
The second problem is the lack of global financing. The hunger crisis can be overcome in poor countries if they get help to grow more food. The global energy and climate crises can be overcome if the world invests together to develop new energy technologies. Diseases such as malaria can be overcome through globally coordinated investments in disease control. The oceans, rainforests and air can be kept safe through pooled investments in environmental protection.
Global solutions are not expensive, but they are not free, either. Global solutions to poverty, food production and development of new clean energy technology will require annual investments of roughly US$350 billion, or 1 percent of GNP of the rich world. This is obviously affordable, and is modest compared to military spending, but is far above the pittance that the G8 actually brings to the table to solve these urgent challenges.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made a valiant effort to get the rest of Europe to honor the modest aid pledges made at the G8 Summit in 2005, but it has been a tough fight, and one that hasn’t been won.
The third problem is the disconnection between global scientific expertise and politicians. Scientists and engineers have developed many powerful ways to address today’s challenges, whether growing food, controlling diseases or protecting the environment. And these methods have become even more powerful in recent years with advances in information and communications technology, which make global solutions easier to identify and implement than ever before.
GLOBAL ORGANIZATIONS
The fourth problem is that the G8 ignores the very international institutions — notably the UN and the World Bank — that offer the best hope of implementing global solutions.
These institutions are often underfinanced, deprived of political backing and then blamed by the G8 when global problems aren’t solved. Instead, they should be given clear authority and responsibilities, and then held accountable for their performance.
Bush may be too unaware to recognize that his historically high 70 percent disapproval rating among US voters is related to the fact that his government turned its back on the international community — and thereby got trapped in war and economic crisis.
The other G8 leaders presumably can see that their own unpopularity at home is strongly related to high food and energy prices, and an increasingly unstable global climate and global economy, none of which they can address on their own.
Starting in January when the next US president takes office, politicians should take the best chance for their own political survival, and of course for their countries’ well-being, by reinvigorating global cooperation. They should agree to address shared global goals, including the fight against poverty, hunger and disease (the Millennium Development Goals), as well as climate change and environmental destruction.
To achieve these goals, the G8 should set clear timetables for action and transparent agreements on how to fund it.
The smartest move would be to agree that each country tax its carbon dioxide emissions to reduce climate change, and then devote a fixed amount of the proceeds to global problem solving. With the funding assured, the G8 would suddenly move from empty promises to real policies.
ASK THE EXPERTS
Backed by adequate funding, the world’s political leaders should turn to the expert scientific community and international organizations to help implement a truly global effort. Rather than regarding the UN and its agencies as competitors or threats to national sovereignty, they should recognize that working with the UN agencies is in fact the only way to solve global problems and therefore is the key to their own political survival.
These basic steps — agreeing on global goals, mobilizing the financing needed to meet them and identifying the scientific expertise and organizations needed to implement solutions — is basic management logic.
Some may scoff that this approach is impossible at the global level, because all politics are local.
Yet today, all politicians depend on global solutions for their own political survival. That by itself could make solutions that now seem out of reach commonplace in the future.
Time is short, since global problems are mounting rapidly. The world is passing through the greatest economic crisis in decades. It’s time to say to the G8 leaders, “Get your act together or don’t even bother to meet next year.”
It’s too embarrassing to watch grown men and women gather for empty photo opportunities.
Jeffrey Sachs is a professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
China has not been a top-tier issue for much of the second Trump administration. Instead, Trump has focused considerable energy on Ukraine, Israel, Iran, and defending America’s borders. At home, Trump has been busy passing an overhaul to America’s tax system, deporting unlawful immigrants, and targeting his political enemies. More recently, he has been consumed by the fallout of a political scandal involving his past relationship with a disgraced sex offender. When the administration has focused on China, there has not been a consistent throughline in its approach or its public statements. This lack of overarching narrative likely reflects a combination
Behind the gloating, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) must be letting out a big sigh of relief. Its powerful party machine saved the day, but it took that much effort just to survive a challenge mounted by a humble group of active citizens, and in areas where the KMT is historically strong. On the other hand, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) must now realize how toxic a brand it has become to many voters. The campaigners’ amateurism is what made them feel valid and authentic, but when the DPP belatedly inserted itself into the campaign, it did more harm than good. The
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
Workers’ rights groups on July 17 called on the Ministry of Labor to protect migrant fishers, days after CNN reported what it described as a “pattern of abuse” in Taiwan’s distant-water fishing industry. The report detailed the harrowing account of Indonesian migrant fisher Silwanus Tangkotta, who crushed his fingers in a metal door last year while aboard a Taiwanese fishing vessel. The captain reportedly refused to return to port for medical treatment, as they “hadn’t caught enough fish to justify the trip.” Tangkotta lost two fingers, and was fired and denied compensation upon returning to land. Another former migrant fisher, Adrian Dogdodo
RSS