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.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
RSS