Ahead of the annual meeting of G8 countries set to be open in Japan next week, Africa is calling on the leaders of the industrilized nations to do more to address the global rise in commodity prices and not to backtrack on their promises to Africa.
The summit which opens next week in the Japanese northern city of Hokkaido, brings together the leaders from the United States, Japan, Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Britain and Canada.
"We have to make sure that G8 honor their commitments to Africa. This is what we hope this G8 summit would achieve," Wole Olaleye, Pan Africa Policy Researcher with ActionAid International, tells Xinhua.
After three years, most Africans have yet to see anything of the 25 billion U.S. dollars a year in additional development aid that was promised in 2005 at G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland.
"There is a real threat that G8 leaders will try to backtrack on this, and ActionAid's focus is to ensure that G8 leaders deliver on their commitment to Africa," Olayeye said.
He noted that with the global food crisis affecting the world's poorest people in Africa the hardest, now it was the time for the G8 to hand over the money that they have pledged so that people in Africa can invest in agriculture, and make sure that nobody in today's world dies of hunger.
The forthcoming G8 summit this year will focus on, among other issue, rising food prices, skyrocketing fule prices, development aid an global warming.
"I want to hold the G8 countries to their promises. When you sign a contract, you absolutely must stick to it," said Evans Wafula, a Kenyan civil society activist.
The African Progress Panel, set up in 2005 to monitor the implementation of the 2005 commitments, said in a report last month that G8 aid to Africa will fall 40 billion dollars short of the Gleneagles pledge under current plans.
The G8 finance ministers warned at their meeting earlier this month that soaring oil and food prices pose "a serious challenge to stable growth worldwide" and may worsen poverty and stoke global inflation.
However, some analysts said that it is a high time G8 leaders focus on trade if they hope to uplift the continent from poverty and diseases.
"For Africa, it's about trade and not aid, anymore. There is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric and the reality," Aly-Khan Satchu, a Kenyan stock analyst, told Xinhua.
"In fact, except for the debt forgiveness part which was a big positive step, the G8 is always long on rhetoric and nice words but light on real aid," he said.
The African Progress Panel of prominent figures led by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is warning that the G8 industrialized countries must step up their assistance to Africa or risk breaking their promise to double aid by 2010.
The African Progress Panel said While the industrialized countries have eliminated a considerable amount of African debt, the continent has not done as well on direct aid.
"As ActionAid we want to ensure that the G8 leaders take real action to end the global food crisis. We estimates that rising food prices leave 1.7 billion people hungry or at risk of hunger," says Olaleye.
"These price increases have been driven in part by the G8's greedy appetite for biofuels to power their cars. They are depleting the food security of the poor people in the world."
Olaleye says rich nations should ensure that their production of biofuels does not affect food security, because the corn used to make a tank of ethanol for a car could feed a family for many months.
"Millions more people living in poverty can no longer grow enough food because climate change is wreaking havoc on their farms, and because of decades of under-investment and liberalization of agriculture in the world's poorest countries," he says.
But experts warn food inflation threatens to eat away Africa's progress as poor countries struggle to make ends meet and insisted that the continent needs trade and investment and not aid.
Africa does not need aid, it needs capital and that capital is set to become a deluge, they said.
Olaleye says G8 leaders are backtracking on their commitment to greatly increase funding for HIV/AIDS programs, as they promised at Gleneagles in 2005.
According to him, HIV/AIDS kills over 5,000 people a day in sub-Saharan Africa alone but in 2005, the G8 pledged to provide universal access to AIDS treatment and prevention by 2010.
"G8 funds have made a difference -- the number on treatment has increased dramatically and this is enabling millions more people to keep working, thriving and looking after their families," says Olaleye.
"However, the need remains enormous: three quarters of people who need HIV/Aids treatment are still not receiving it. Almost 90 percent of HIV-positive pregnant women are still unable to get drugs that could prevent the virus being passed on to their child."
"Without releasing the funds to make good on their commitments, how can any of us ever trust another G8 promise?" challenged Olaleye.
Source: Xinhua
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