Africa tells west: scrap trade barriers by Ashley Seager and Ewen MacAskill The Guardian 8:17pm 6th Jul, 2005   July 6, 2005    "Africa tells west: scrap trade barriers ",by Ashley Seager and Ewen MacAskill. (The Guardian)    The world's rich countries should spend less time telling African countries how to run their economies and instead concentrate on scrapping their harmful trade-distorting subsidies and stop hiring African health workers, South Africa's finance minister, Trevor Manuel, said yesterday.    Attending a conference in London on business in Africa ahead of this week's G8 summit, Mr Manuel said Africa was becoming an economic success story, with growth set for another strong 5% this year and budget deficits reduced to almost zero.    "It's not about lecturing African leaders any more. We will maintain these growth rates and good fiscal management," he said. "What we need is a timetable to get rid of trade-distorting subsidies."    Mr Manuel's views were reinforced at a summit in Libya of the 53-member African Union, which ended yesterday. The pan-continental body passed a resolution expressing thanks for efforts on aid and debt but calling on the G8 "to establish a fair and equitable trading system and to facilitate Africa's access to fair markets through ... the elimination of tariff and non-tariff barriers ... and trade-distorting subsidies and domestic support, especially in agriculture".    Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, who attended the AU meeting, said that while debt cancellation and aid were necessary, fairer trade between the west and Africa was crucial.    He told reporters: "Most countries, given the chance, would prefer to trade themselves out of poverty rather than live on handouts." He will repeat the message in a speech at St Paul's cathedral tonight.    The prime minister, Tony Blair, has made securing a better deal on debt, aid and trade for Africa key targets at Gleneagles, but while aid is set to be increased and some debt written off, a deal on getting rid of harmful agricultural subsidies in Europe and the US looks as far away as ever.    Europe's Common Agricultural Policy slaps high tariffs on many imports from poor countries and subsidises exports of surplus produce from Europe, undermining the livelihoods of many African farmers.    Mr Manuel said that dismantling agricultural protectionism in the west would have to be accompanied by support for African countries which would have to adjust to freer world trade flows.    He also said Africa was in urgent need of a million health workers to combat diseases such as HIV/AIDS and malaria but was afraid of losing them to rich countries. "Please don't steal our health workers," he said.    He said it was not acceptable that so many Africans were going to university in Britain and the US.    July 6, 2005    "Rich Countries spend 25 Times more on Defence than Aid", by Larry Elliott. (The Guardian)    UN shows how the west, especially Britain and America, have put military spending way ahead of help for Africa.    Rich western countries spend up to 25 times as much on defence as they do on overseas aid and have increased their assistance to the poorest African countries by just $3 (£1.70) a head since 1990, according to United Nations figures.    Research to be unveiled in the UN's human development report later this year shows that every country in western Europe and North America has a bigger military budget than overseas development budget, with the biggest disparities in the United States and Britain.    Although the UK has increased its aid budget in recent years, the UN data reveals that for every £1 spent on development, £8 is spent on defence.    In the United States, 1% -one cent in every dollar - goes on aid compared to the 25% of the budget that is spent by the Pentagon.    The figures emerged as development campaigners step-ped up their pressure on the G8 to deliver an immediate $50bn increase in aid at its summit starting today.    "G8 leaders are hiding behind each other and are stuck in a swamp of inertia", said Jo Leadbeater, head of advocacy at Oxfam. "We need to see leadership from countries such as Canada in order to get a breakthrough on aid. If this doesn't happen, the UN's plan to halve world poverty by 2015 lies in tatters. This is the first time in history that the text of the final G8 communique has been up for grabs this late in the game. There's still a lot to play for, but so far no sign of the breakthrough that people all over the world are demanding."    War on Want said the deal on offer this week would provide only 20% of the extra aid needed for Africa.    John Hilary, director of campaigns and policy, said: "The paltry deal on the table at Gleneagles is an insult to poor people the world over. G8 governments have failed to listen to the 225,000 protesters who came out on to the streets of Edinburgh to call for a response to the crisis of global poverty. If this is the best they can come up with, the G8 clearly has nothing to offer the world's poor."    Defence spending in both the US and the UK has increased in recent years as a result of the war in Iraq, taking the total in the G7 (the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada) to more than $660bn a year - 10 times the spending on aid in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the poor countries of Europe.    The UN figures show that while Germany and Italy cut defence spending in the four years from 2000 to 2004 and France held it steady, spending on defence in the UK rose by $92 per head to $790 (£450) a year. In the US, there was a sharper increase of $379 per head to $1,549.    The spending on defence contrasted with separate UN figures showing how little of the increase in prosperity seen in the west since 1990 has found its way to sub-Saharan Africa.    Since 1990, according to the UN figures, per capita increases in the G7 nations have averaged $5,770.    The US has enjoyed the biggest increase in per capita incomes - from just over $30,000 a year to just over $37,500 a year - while recession-affected Japan has seen the smallest increase of $3,400 a year. Over the same period, the UN figures show that spending per head among G7 countries on sub-Saharan Africa has risen by $3 - from $13 a year in 1990 to $16 a year in 2003. In three of the G7 countries - France, Japan and Canada - spending on sub-Saharan Africa is lower now than it was in 1990, the year the UN launched its annual human development report.    Britain's spending on aid to sub-Saharan Africa has doubled between 1990 and 2003 - from $11 to $22 per head - but that represents around one 40th of what the government spends on defence.    France, despite cutting its per capita spending on Africa by $11 since 1990, remains the most generous of the G7 countries, providing $41 a head in 2003. Britain was the second most generous at $22.    July 6, 2005    G8 summit :The world is watching. The Guardian.    Expectations for the G8 summit, getting under way at Gleneagles this evening, must surely be higher than for any other comparable event in living memory. Making poverty history is a terrific slogan and a noble ambition, but even its most enthusiastic backers acknowledge that it will only be achieved in a long, drawn-out and multi-faceted process over many years rather than at a single event lasting less than three days. Arrivals, drinks, dinner - and doubtless more demonstrations - will be followed by laboriously pre-cooked communiques on Africa and climate change, the twin pillars of the agenda. Today's unrelated decision in Singapore on the venue for the 2012 Olympic Games could impact on the mood of the summiteers too.    The scale of the expectations, boosted by the excitement generated by last weekend's extraordinary Live 8 concerts, means it is especially important not to confuse spin with substance. Anti-poverty campaigners such as Oxfam are right to warn the government against over-selling the outcome or rehashing old decisions and pledges as new ones. The Treasury must avoid the temptation to suggest that all poor country debt is being forgiven. The G8 as a whole should be prepared for close scrutiny of what its leaders agree and not hope for attention spans that are too short to follow the slow, percolating progress of complex multi-annual aid programmes embracing finance, health, education and trade.    But while acknowledging the rare, even historic, opportunity that presents itself on the putting greens of Perthshire, it would also be foolish to expect too much. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown may have won the trust of Bob Geldof and Bono but they have too little power over multinational corporations and are limited in their ability to influence African governments whose record on governance is somewhat dubious (the failure of this week's African Union summit meeting even to mention the crisis in Zimbabwe is a grim illustration of this problem).    The larger political issue is their ability, along with Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and the rest, to influence Mr Bush. The US president says he does not believe in returning favours to Mr Blair for his support over Iraq and the "war on terror." Aid to the developing world is less of a popular issue in the US than here, though it has been pushed up the agenda by African-Americans recently. Thinktanks in Washington have complained of exaggerated official claims about doubled aid. The US delivers a lot of food to African countries but does less to encourage farmers to grow their own; it spends just 0.16% of its GDP on aid, shamefully short of the 0.7% target formulated by the UN 35 years ago. And aid is less important than straightening out the terms of international trade - described as "the toughest issue" by Sir Michael Jay, head of the foreign office. It is a cheap shot for Mr Bush to talk about ending US agricultural subsidies if Europe ends its own; neither looks likely.    For all that, Africa seems likely to end up a bigger star at the summit show than attempts to tackle global warming. The "sherpas" have so far wrung only a grudging admission from the president that human greed has played some part in making his country the world's biggest polluter, though he has repeated ad nauseam that the US will not sign up to the Kyoto protocol - for so long the buzzword for those concerned about helping save the planet. Any plans for new and binding carbon emission targets or developing clean fuel technologies, reportedly being negotiated "down to the wire," will be welcome. So will any framework for coaxing China and India, outside the G8 but the coming giants of the world economy, into compliance with tougher standards. Will the Gleneagles agreement now go down in history? The world is watching - and holding its breath. Visit the related web page
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