Mobeen Akhter, Political correspondent
The 2008 G8 summit closed on Wednesday, July 9 in Japan with hollow pledges on the food and oil crises and its leaders passing on ‘tough’ decisions (again) on climate change, Africa and Zimbabwe to the United Nations. Many in the media slavishly follow and report on the G-8 summit, despite the fact that usually little if anything of substance is accomplished.
This year’s summit was no different and was a reminder to us all, how irrelevant the interests of individual states always comes ahead of what the world needs. The G-8 is an international forum for the governments of the world’s major industrialized democracies including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The concept of a forum emerged following the 1973 oil crisis and subsequent global recession. The forum itself is informal and therefore lacks an administrative structure like those for international organizations, such as the United Nations. The annual summit meetings bring together ministers responsible for various portfolios to discuss issues of mutual or global concern. The range of topics include health, law enforcement, labour, economic and social development, energy, environment, foreign affairs, justice and interior, terrorism and trade.
What made this year’s G8 summit in Japan most critical was the fact that it was convened in the midst of the global crisis from spiralling inflation caused by the sudden upsurge in oil and food prices resulting in the rise in most commodity prices around the world. This has upset most economies around the world, pushing developed countries towards recessionary trends and developing countries to the very margins of human survival.
US President Gorge W. Bush remains convinced that the rise of consumptions levels in China and India had something to do with the rise of greenhouse gas emission and is also the reason for this recent rise in prices of oil and food. While the G8 Statement on Climate Change, pledged to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, this actually presents an improvement compared to last G8 summit that had simply agreed to “consider seriously” such long-term cuts yet, it has been denounced by non-G8 countries as well as environmentalists NGOs as “regression” and a pathetic and toothless outcome.
According to World Wildlife Fund, the G8 countries alone account for over 62% of the carbon dioxide accumulation in the Earth’s atmosphere. Despite this, the G8 Statement on Climate Change barely endorses what leaders of nearly 200 countries had signed up in the original UN Climate Change Convention during the 1992 Earth Summit. Other countries have been urging G8 to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by more than 80% by 2050.
Amongst other new initiatives, the G8 launched a World Energy Forum to deal with rising oil prices and also other challenges flowing from the crisis of energy security. These included (for Britain and the US) working with the Iraqi Government to build capacity in the oil sector there, and discussing with the Gulf States and others how sovereign wealth funds and oil revenues can be recycled into wider energy investments.
But it failed to address the fact that the United States, Canada, Russia, and Britain (all members of the G-8) produce 29% of the world’s oil. But the G-8 plus China consume two thirds of the world’s oil output. It seems too convenient to look outside their own borders for solutions. Instead, of looking at their own countries and urging conservation and giving business incentives to come up with cleaner fuel supplies and cars. Then there is the issue as some analysts highlighted if you were having a serious discussion about oil prices, wouldn’t it make sense to have Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer at the centre of the table?
The summit also pledged to ensure biofuel policies are compatible with food security and called countries with sufficient food stocks to release reserves to others struggling to cope with rising costs. However looking at the facts on the ground the G-8 countries produce 41% of the world’s wheat, 58% if you add in China, and consume the most of it. The G-8 produces 48% of the world’s corn, or 68 % if China is included.
It failed to focus on issues of subsidies on grain and oil seed biofuels which has been tempting farmers to clear forests to grow ethanol and palm oil plants and to convert food into fuel.
Economist Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics commented “You might think that the right places to start addressing global food shortages would be in the United States and Euroland – the world’s biggest producers of corn and wheat respectively – where farmers are offered subsidies not to plant crops. However, the U.S. and Euroland hold on to their agricultural support programs tenaciously. The Heads are unlikely even to consider tinkering with these entrenched systems concludes.” He continued “according to a confidential World Bank report, biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75%. The report argues that the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices.”
This years G8 summit once again remained irrelevant as ever and achieved only the bare minimum and a superficial consensus. Much of the problems facing the world today have been as a result of the policies initiated by member states of the G8 who are all vying for solutions that will benefit them individually.