50 Years Slams G8 Priorities

50 Years listserv
May 30, 2003
by 50 Years Is Enough Network

For Immediate Release: May 30, 2003
50 Years Is Enough Network

Contact: Geneva/Evian: Njoki Njoroge Njehu Washington:
Soren Ambrose / Stasy McDougall

G8 Priorities Slammed for
“Unenlightened Self-Interest”
Critics Cite Focus on Iraq While African Poverty Deepens

As the Group of Eight (G8) heads of governments converge on Evian, France
for their 2003 Summit, critical observers note that this year’s summit will
almost certainly ignore the world’s most serious economic problems and
instead focus on geopolitical issues.

“Most attention will be focused on the split in the G8 countries over the Iraq
war, on who will be in charge of Iraq’s reconstruction and who will control its
oil,” predicted Njoki Njoroge Njehu, director of the U.S.-based 50 Years Is
Enough Network, which opposes the policies of the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF). The G8 is widely acknowledged as the
controlling force behind the IMF and World Bank, and has been the source of
plans for multilateral debt relief and proposed reforms of the institutions.

“Iraq is not a trivial issue, of course,” she added, “but this group was founded
28 years ago in France to focus on systemic economic questions. Most of the
summits have invented ways to avoid seriously grappling with the
contradictions in the world economy, perhaps because business interests in
the member countries were capitalizing on those quirks. Soon it will be time
to ask if it is really worth hoping that the G8 will advance meaningful
proposals for improvements in the global economic system.”

Njehu, a Kenyan who works in the U.S., points to the downward economic
spiral that continues to grip African countries. “At last year’s summit, in
Canada, the leaders endorsed the ‘New Partnership for African Development’
(NEPAD), a collection of failed ‘trickle-down’ policies like deregulation and
privatization that the IMF and World Bank are already imposing across Africa.
Four African presidents presented it as a ‘home-grown’ plan when it was
obviously calculated to persuade the wealthy leaders that the Africans could
now be trusted to take the harsh economic medicine and police themselves.
The G8 backed up their endorsement with no money, but the same leaders
are back this weekend, hoping for a change of heart. There is little sign it will
come.”

“In Africa, people have read about NEPAD, and they reject it. It ignores the
debt crisis, snubs women, and barely deals with the HIV/AIDS crisis. Money
will pour into Iraq now, even as Africa endures famine worse than anything
that could be imagined in Iraq. Rather than submit to more humiliation,
Africans are more and more adamant that they can do without the charity of
the countries of the North. What we want now is to be relieved of false ‘help’
and the multiple strings -- the ‘conditionalities’ -- that always come with it.
Freed from that, Africans can employ their ingenuity and survive with dignity.”

With the unrelenting HIV/AIDS pandemic afflicting 30 million in Africa, falling
prices for agricultural products, and diversion of resources to Iraq and its
neighbors, it could be an especially difficult moment in Africa. Soren
Ambrose, Senior Policy Analyst for the 50 Years Is Enough Network, noted
that some people talk of a “new Marshall Plan” directed to the African
continent. “But things have changed,” he said. “The Marshall plan was a
case of enlightened self-interest: the U.S. needed markets to sell its surplus
goods, and so it literally gave away over 2% of its annual national product in
order to build those markets. Now, with disease and poverty growing, and
with the level of wealth in rich countries at extraordinarily high levels despite
recent setbacks, no one in power seems able to see the self-interest in
remedying the unendurable suffering of so many, or of narrowing the gap
between rich and poor, even in the U.S. Instead of grants, as in the late
1940s, the U.S. and institutions like the IMF and World Bank, which the U.S.
largely controls, continue making loans to impoverished countries, and
continue imposing disastrous conditions with those loans that guarantee that
the country will not get out of debt, and so will continue to need the IMF. As
we watch corporations move from country to country in search of profits, do
we ever wonder if the systems we have set up are playing ‘Robin Hood’ in
reverse? Have we achieved unenlightened self-interest?

50 Years Is Enough Network Campaign Coordinator Stasy McDougall noted
that the opening session of this year’s summit includes the heads of the World
Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization. “With those guys in the
meeting, we can be pretty sure that no new ideas will be forthcoming,” said
McDougall. “In fact, with water provision as one of the major agenda items,
we can be sure that they will be defending the move to privatize as much of
the world’s water supply as possible.”

McDougall also noted that 2004 will be the 60th anniversary of the founding
of the IMF and World Bank -- a moment that the 50 Years Is Enough Network
and its allies are already preparing for. “If they thought we made their 50th
birthday unhappy [at the time the 50 Years Is Enough Network was founded in
1994], they may want to take next year off.”

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