TMP Online

On the day the annual G8 summit begins, International development policy specialist, Chichi Umunna, looks at the challenges ahead.  

Today, the heads of state and government from each of the G8 countries, plus additional invitees from other states (the “emerging economy” countries of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa), the president of the European Commission and other key international organisations, are meeting in Germany for the 33rd Summit of the G8.

While using it’s presidency to highlight the increasing importance of the emerging economies and global governance, Germany, under the leadership of its Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has declared the “Leitmotif” of the summit to be “Growth and Responsibility”.  The summit will focus on the following key global challenges: the world economy; newly industrialised economies; global governance; and, Africa’s economic, political, and social development.

In the beginning, G8 Summits were used to discuss economic issues only; it wasn’t until the ‘80s that foreign policy issues were added to the summit agenda and later, in the ‘90s, that environmental and development-policy matters became of such importance that they were considered an international collaborative issue.

Chancellor Merkel explained in a pre-summit speech that “we…must shape globalisation through political action, at [an] international level.” But is the emphasis on emerging economies, to the detriment of the developing countries? This is a question that will be hot on the lips of the critics, who have started measuring G8 progress by looking at the advances made towards the achievement of the commitments made at the pivotal 2005 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.

According to Oxfam, in 2006, one year on from Gleneagles, one child was still dying from poverty every 3 seconds, hence the TV image used for part of the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign led by Bob Geldoff.

As a G8 state, Germany is not recognised for its affinity towards solving the African development crisis, as is apparent when you consider their aid flow, which dropped in 2006 (their debt relief only increased by 0.9% in the same year).

Britain is one of the only leading western countries on track to meet its Gleneagles commitments. Blair recognises the efforts made, for example, to boost HIV/Aids treatment and the increased numbers of African children now in school since 2005 (also championed by his successor-to-be, Gordon Brown), however, he still believes that action internationally has so far not met the pledged targets and that a lot more must be done.

The critics referred to earlier, will cite these shortfalls on the commitments made at the 2005 Gleneagles’ Summit (with all its fanfare, rhetoric and celebrity campaigning), as a large “blot” on the infamous Blair legacy, in addition to the disaster which was and is the Iraq war.

But the inevitable spin and ridicule should not be allowed to detract from the achievement Blair has made in putting the deteriorating plight of the world’s poorest nations to the forefront of the international agenda. The very fact that there is an apparent annual spate of G8-bashing in response to the lack of achieved pledges in the development sphere each year, means these issues cannot be ignored - Blair deserves credit for that alone.

In the same way that the London bombings in July 2005 usurped time allocated to other issues on the G8 agenda at the time, it will not be surprising if the recent furore surrounding Russia’s missile defence policies and literal change of direction in the past few days, pushes other matters further down the G8 agenda.

If, as predicted, this results in the issues concerning Africa’s development being overlooked, there could be a heavy backlash, which would be a sad conclusion to the Heiligendamm meeting. We can only hope this will not be tthe case.

Chichi Umunna, is logistics co-ordinator for Digital Links, which provides IT disposal services to UK companies and refurbishes computers for reuse in schools, NGO’s and small enterprises across the developing world.  She is an International Relations MA Graduate who has previously worked in a large range of institutions including at an academic development institute in Cameroon and for the UK House of Commons.