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July 24, 2000
NAGO, Okinawa (AP) - In an effort to stem a growing backlash against globalization, leaders of the world's major powers pledged at their annual economic summit Sunday to help poor countries reduce their debts and improve their schooling, health care and computer technology. The Group of Eight also urged the World Trade Organization to hold another round of talks this year, despite the violent protests in Seattle last year that prevented it from advancing the cause of free trade. But many of the initiatives in the G-8's final communique featured grand aims with little financial backing, meaning the seven richest industrial nations plus Russia could once again be criticized for addressing many complex issues without taking steps of action. On Saturday, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori announced Japan will spend dlrs 18 billion to help poor countries improve their information technology and to fight diseases such as AIDS and malaria. Mori stressed at his closing news conference Sunday that IT will be "one of the most powerful forces that will shape the the 21st century." But when asked whether Japan was prepared to spend money to help developing nations build the infrastructure needed to to bridge the digital divide, he waffled. "IT is an area that needs to progress in the private sector," he said. "The government really should be complimentary" in its role. U.S. President Bill Clinton, attending his final G-8 meeting said the United States will send dlrs 300 million in surplus farm crops to provide school lunches in the developing world. "We think we can increase by millions and millions (the number of children in school) just by telling these children and their parents we will give them one hot meal," Clinton said, before rushing home to rejoin peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland. In Okinawa, the semitropical island where the last major land battle of World War II was fought, the departing Clinton made a quick detour to shake hands with a crowd of well-wishers waiting in a heavy rain to watch his departure from Kadena Air Base, one of the many U.S. military bases in Okinawa that have drawn complaints from local residents. Clinton was the first leader to leave Nago, and also had to delay his arrival in Japan by a day because of the Middle East peace talks. Despite his abbreviated presence, Clinton, the senior statesman at the summit, was praised effusively by the other leaders in toasts at a dinner held in a rebuilt castle Saturday night. The final G-8 statement put the United States, Britain, Japan, Russia, Italy, Germany, France and Canada on record as supporting universal primary education for all the world's children by 2015. Currently, 100 million children in developing nations are not in school. The leaders vowed to reduce by the year 2010 the number of HIV-infected young people by 25 percent, tuberculosis deaths by 50 percent, the burden of diseases associated with malaria by 50 percent. AIDS will leave 44 million orphans in the next decade. The rich countries said they would set up a task force to "bridge the international information and knowledge divide" between the rich and poor by enlisting help from private companies to spread computers and Internet access to developing countries. The leaders agreed to create a digital opportunity task force, or "dot force," to expand Internet access and make it more affordable in developing nations. A report on this effort is to be presented at next year's G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy. In fact, at what was billed in Okinawa as their first-ever "development summit," the G-8 countries put forth a laundry list of objectives to see the economic benefits from an increasingly interconnected world are shared more widely. The final communique said the world economy is reaching unprecedented levels of prosperity but that it must be shared with the Third World by relieving some of its debts. "The 20th century has achieved unprecedented economic progress. Yet the financial and economic crises of the past few years have presented enormous challenges for the world economy," the G-8 said. "The 21st century must be a century of prosperity for all." The communique said the G-8 must work harder to provide debt relief for the world's many struggling developing economies. "We must for our part promote more responsible lending and borrowing practices to ensure that (poor countries) will not again be burdened by unsupportable debt," the leaders said in the communique. Relieving the debt of the world's poorest countries was a major topic throughout the three-day summit. Although the G-8 members had agreed earlier on measures to reduce and forgive debt, many critics say the program has been too slow and bogged down in bureaucracy. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose government has agreed to restructure dlrs 4 billion owed to it by Russia, said it should be completely integrated into the Group of Seven top industrialized countries. Russia is part of political discussions as part of the G-8, but does not participate in the G-7 summit on financial issues because of the relatively small size of its economy. "We need to be integrated in all (G-8) structures that make decisions that concern Russia, and we would like to become a member of the World Trade Organization, too," said Russian President Vladimir Putin. "The quality and effectivenenss of their decisions depend on that." The Jubilee 2000 Coalition, an international group advocating debt relief for the world's poorest countries, said the G-8 has canceled only dlrs 15 billion of the dlrs 100 billion in debt it had promised to forgive during last year's summit in Cologne, Germany. For that reason, the coalition called the Okinawa meeting "the squandered summit." In New York, a spokesman for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a statement Friday expressing disappointment that the leaders did not address debt relief more aggressively, noting that so far, relief had been extended to only nine of 41 extremely poor nations. But the president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, defended the G-8, saying of Annan: "He expressed his disappointment before we even discussed the problem in Okinawa. I think we've taken the problem seriously and in a responsible way." British Prime Minister Tony Blair answered critics from outside the summit, who have complained that it failed to do enough for poor nations. "For many who work hard in the developing world, progress is often agonizingly slow," Blair said. "But we have made some significant steps." French President Jacques Chirac praised the G-8 for taking steps to promote democracy around the world. But he said its goal is to encourage initiatives to solve economic problems, not to manage them itself. On the Net: U.S. State Department site on the summit: http://www.state.gov/www. Japanese site on the summit: http://www.g8kyushu-okinawa.go.jp. |