20 July 2005
The Prime Minister sent the following email to subcribers for G8 updates. It reflects on the summit’s achievements.
Read the Prime Minister’s email:
Dear subscriber,
Thank you for subscribing to our email updates on the G8. As you will know, I recently chaired the annual summit of all G8 leaders in Gleneagles, Scotland.
The Summit was of course overshadowed by the appalling terrorist attacks in London. However, all of the leaders who attended the Summit, from the G8 countries, Africa, China, India, Brazil and Mexico, were determined that this must not disrupt the important work of the Summit, on climate change and Africa.
I would like to explain what I was trying to achieve at Gleneagles and what we actually achieved.
On climate change, our objective was never to get the US to sign up to the Kyoto protocol, nor to negotiate the international treaty which must be negotiated for 2012, when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires. Rather, our aim was to build a broader international consensus, which included both the US and major emerging economy countries, like China and India, and which prepares the ground for agreeing future frameworks which will drive the radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that we need to make.
We did not resolve every issue at Gleneagles. But I believe we made a very significant step forward. The G8 statement on climate change establishes a consensus among all of these countries that climate change is real, that it must be tackled urgently, that emissions must be halted and reduced, and that this must be done in a way which is compatible with the development and growth that is required to reduce poverty and increase wealth for all. This can only be achieved by taking measures to encourage markets and customers for cleaner and more efficient energy technologies, and by ensuring these technologies are available to all countries. We agreed the Gleneagles Plan of Action which sets out a range of practical measures to make this happen.
Crucially, we also agreed on a way to take this forward. We all agreed to continue the productive dialogue between the G8 and other major energy using countries, both to implement and build on the Plan of Action, and to explore the best ways to grow our economies in a more sustainable way. We agreed that this is an issue which should stay on the agenda of G8 leaders: energy will be a major priority of the Russian G8 Presidency next year, and Japan has agreed that a report on the dialogue will be discussed at its G8 Summit in 2008.
The first meeting of the new dialogue will take place in the UK on 1 November. I believe that this will help to create the conditions for successful UN negotiations, at Montreal later this year and beyond. I also see the UK’s EU Presidency, which has just begun, as an opportunity to make further progress on this issue.
On Africa, we wanted to agree a detailed and comprehensive plan, which addressed the multiple causes of poverty together and effectively. One year ago I established the Commission for Africa to bring together experienced people from various G8, developing and African countries, and from politics, business and civil society, to pull together as much evidence as possible of what was working and what wasn’t working in Africa in order to draw up such a plan. The Commission published its report - Our Common Interest - of detailed recommendations, in February this year.
At Gleneagles, the G8 agreed with African leaders a comprehensive plan which undertakes to implement over 50 of those detailed recommendations of the Commission for Africa. Some of the highlights of this include:
- support Africa’s Stand-By Peacekeeping Force
- measures to improve governance and tackle corruption, in Africa and by our own companies and citizens
- as close as possible to universal access to AIDS treatment by 2010
- action to reduce deaths from malaria and TB
- funding to eliminate polio this year
- support for developing countries to provide free primary education and basic healthcare
- a set of measures to encourage business, invest in the necessary infrastructure and to improve the investment climate, to help Africa create wealth and better jobs.
We agreed to back this plan with a huge scale-up in resources. We agreed to more than double aid to Africa by 2010, increasing it by $25bn a year as recommended by the Commission for Africa. We agreed that this would be just part of an overall increase in aid for all developing countries of $50bn a year by 2010. Aid should rise to nearly $100bn a year in 2006 and to nearly $130bn in 2010. Could there have been more? Could it be quicker? Maybe. But many of the African members of our Commission argued that Africa could not absorb it more quickly and that if it was doubled overnight it could not be used properly.
We also endorsed the very recent agreement achieved by Gordon Brown to cancel 100% of the remaining debt which heavily indebted poor countries owe to the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank. Could we go further? Yes. The UK has. And I am sure that the agreement we have helped to secure to cancel around $17bn of Nigeria’s debts will be the start of a process to extend debt relief to all countries which need it.
We agreed that trade (pdf 21kbs) would be a major driver of the economic growth which all countries, but especially the poorest developing countries, need.
I wish we could have gone further in agreeing specific measures to increase access for poor countries to our markets and to eliminate the agriculture and export subsidies which unfairly count against them. There was a determination among most leaders to address these issues. However, there was a consensus that this was best done in the World Trade Organisation talks where all countries are represented. I am confident on the basis of our talks that the WTO meeting in Hong Kong at the end of 2005 will agree to end export subsidies by 2010.
In addition, we agreed a package of measures to ensure that developing countries are able to make the most of their opportunities to trade, through increased investment in skills, jobs, capacity and infrastructure.
We agreed that poor countries must be able to decide their own economic and trade policies, and that aid and debt relief should not come with inappropriate economic conditions attached. The only condition will be that the money is used effectively to reduce poverty in Africa. We agreed poor countries should not have to open up their markets to developed countries until their industries are ready to benefit from this.
Altogether, I believe this represents the biggest step forward for developing countries, especially in Africa, that any G8 Summit has ever agreed. Of course, it still has to be implemented and we agreed to strengthen our joint monitoring mechanism with Africa to ensure it is. And of course, there is still further to go, including this year at the UN Millennium Review Summit in September and at the World Trade talks in December. But this could, just could, be the beginning of the end of extreme poverty in our world.
My chair’s summary describes all of the discussions we had at Gleneagles. You can also see all of the other statements which we agreed at Gleneagles on the website, on the Sudan, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the Middle East Peace Process, the Broader Middle East and North Africa, Iraq, Counter-Terrorism, the Secure and Facilitated International Travel Initiative, Non-Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the Global Economy and Oil, and Intellectual Property Right piracy and counterfeiting.
Yours
Tony Blair
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