World leaders are convening at the heavily guarded Camp David in Maryland today for the G8 summit. The G8 comprises eight world leaders who meet face to face annually at a summit that has become a focus of media attention and protest action. The focus of this year’s summit will be the European economic crisis. But other topics on the agenda include the conflict in Syria, nuclear nonproliferation and global food security. President Obama will kick off the weekend with a speech in Washington outlining his plans for helping developing countries. He’s expected to promote private sector investments rather than public sector solutions.
The G8’s new food security initiative is facing some criticism because it includes no financial pledges. Leading nonprofits, such as Save the Children and Oxfam, are urging G8 leaders to live up to their promise of three years ago to donate $22 billion toward food security in developing nations. By the G8’s own accounting, it has only delivered a quarter of that amount. This year activists are calling on the leaders of the eight richest countries to build on their previous commitments and partner with developing countries to urgently tackle hunger.
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the G8 countries are the most industrialized or wealthiest countries in the world and comprised mostly of Europe, United States, Canada, Australia and a number of major European economies. And they have been convening for a number of years around a variety of strategic issues of the sort that you just mentioned. And as you indicated, for organizations like Save the Children and Oxfam, top of mind is the global food crisis, which started in 2009 and which is a centerpiece of the events this morning. The President will be making a major speech to launch the summit this morning at 10:00.
President Obama, in Italy, in the L’Aquila summit of 2009, exercised bold leadership in calling upon the G8 at that particular time to actually confront the major challenge of the global food crisis. And I think it’s important for your listeners and viewers to remember that, at that particular time, food prices had spiked some 300 percent in various countries around the world. There were riots in 38 countries. There was real questions about whether certain governments were going to survive that political instability. There was a recognition that food stocks were exhausted, and there was a real need to invest in agriculture. And the President stepped forward and really said we need a bold commitment from the G8 to really move an agenda forward. He put money on the table. Others committed up to $22 billion, with the idea there would be $7 billion spent over the next three years.
I think the question now really for this summit is, will that commitment at those levels of funding continue for the next three years to 2015, or will there be—in the face of all the fiscal crisis around the world, will the ambition be lower than that? And I guess our concern is really, will the ambition going into this summit be commensurate with the scale of the problem, which hasn’t gone away, and in some ways, you could say, is worsening with the emergence of a major food crisis in West Africa in the Sahelian region.
We feel it’s important to educate people about the role that the G8 plays. They actually formed in 1975 as the G6, following a 1974 United Nations declaration calling for a new international economic path that created avenues for countries to regulate multinational corporations within their borders, allowed them to determine their economic situation without undue influence, military influence, or other pressure on them from outside countries. And in response to that, these wealthy nations wanted to circumvent these calls for a more inclusive and democratic economic process and have really dominated the economic policies of the world. We want people to know that there are other solutions that are actual true solutions to the crises that we are facing, but those solutions are not being talked about by the G8 leaders.
we have to address the underlying issue of wealth inequality that’s driving so many of our health issues. When people don’t have a job with a living wage, when they aren’t treated with respect in their jobs, when they don’t have education, a home to live in, access to healthy food and clean water, all of these things are connected, and all of us who advocate on these different issues of single-issue advocacy are not able to confront the concentrated wealth that controls our political process and that corporate media message. And so, if we want to create a healthy population, we have to address all these issues. And if we want to be able to address any of them, we need to work together effectively to create a mass movement that calls for real change and put forth real solutions to the problems that we’re facing.
in Europe, the economic crises, the austerity measures that are being imposed on a number of countries.
the most direct implication for the developing countries is—are the members of the G8—are they going—do they see investment in foreign aid to address some of these major crises happening in Africa, Asia and Latin America around the food issue and so forth? Are they going to—do they have the money now, or do they have the political will to provide the money to meet the commitments that they have? As we can see, going into the summit, the events in Greece, I think, have heightened concerns about the stability of the European economy. And I think, in some ways, that becomes more of a centerpiece of what people want to talk about, but they tend to forget the fact that the larger conversation at the last summit, or in the summit in L’Aquila, Italy, was, we’ve got to deal with this food crisis. It’s the issue that is of worldwide importance. We have a broken global food system, and the security of entire nations depend on this.
So I think the real issue here is, is there going to be the political will to bring the resources and fulfill the promises of L’Aquila in 2009, continue that for a 10-year period, so we can address the major structural issues that were discovered in 2009 with adequate resources, political will and appropriate policy responses? And I think, to the point that Dr. Flowers was making, this is all a part of a package of an economic model that is, I think, privileging growth, which is important in the generation of jobs, and the importance of a private sector role, but at the same time we need to—it needs to be inclusive growth that reaches out to small farmers, women, and prioritizes issues of health, food security and environment.
the food aid of the United States represents about half of all the food aid in the world, but there are all of these strings attached that actually raise the cost of this aid. For instance, all U.S. aid must be purchased from the United States, and also it must be carried on U.S. ships, which obviously raises the overall cost of that aid.
Oxfam has been advocating for probably the last six or seven years for reform of our food aid system. Basically it’s a very inefficient system. It’s dominated by an iron triangle of the Farm Bureau, shippers, millers and not-for-profit organizations that receive monetized food aid through that system. It’s been around for quite a number of years. But as you say, a lot of the money, probably some 50 percent at a minimum, is going to the shippers and to the farmers of the United States. So, for the American taxpayer, we’re getting a lot less food to the people that need it than we would if we actually bought that food locally. So, the reform agenda that Oxfam and others have been pushing really promotes the idea that the U.S. government leadership or the head of USAID be given the flexibility to be buying a lot more of that food locally, spending the taxpayers’ dollar more wisely. And one would think, in the time of fiscal austerity, this would be something that would be top of mind, but there’s a lot of special interests in Washington who want to keep the status quo, sustain this inefficient system, and in effect not deliver real value for the taxpayer.
– source democracynow.org