Quote:
Bush Deflates Blair's Africa Plan
By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, June 9, 2005; 8:00 AM
The international online media is panning President Bush's and Prime Minister Tony Blair's press conference in Washington on Tuesday.
Commentators in Africa and the West say the combination of limited U.S. financial support to Africa and U.S. trade barriers to African agriculture undermines Blair's campaign to massively increase the wealthy world's assistance to the poorest continent.
Although Blair hopes to focus world attention on Africa in time for next month's G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, South Africa's Business Day says an opportunity has been lost:
"Only one crucial element is missing -- the wholehearted support of the US government. Unless President George Bush joins this effort in the five weeks before the summit in Scotland, Africa's hopes will be disappointed and the US's image in the eyes of a world that once looked to it for enlightened leadership will be further diminished."
"This really should be a no-brainer," said the Business Day editors. "At a time when the image of the US abroad is at rock bottom, Bush could go a long way toward re-establishing the world's richest country as the moral leader it was last century. He can do that by supporting his most reliable international ally in this crucial effort and taking to heart the world's poorest and most wretched place."
The Toronto Globe and Mail said Blair had to settle for "extravagantly wrapped morsels of food aid" and "vague promises of more to come from U.S. President George W. Bush."
Bush did endorse the idea of canceling debts for some African nations, saying "developing countries that are on the path to reform should not be burdened by mountains of debt."
News24 in South Africa saw " progress" in the Bush-Blair talks about debt cancellation. But the site also carried a news item on a South African bishop's call for " trade justice" for Africa at a conference in Washington. Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane said "developing countries spend $300 million to protect [African] trade through subsidies and tariffs" which hurt poor African farmers the most.
"If Africa increased its share of world exports by even 1 percent his would generate $70 billion. This is approximately five times what the continent receives in aid," Ndungane said.
The British newsweekly The Economist also called for "curbing the agricultural subsidies and health-and-safety regulations that keep African products out of rich-country markets. The current structure of agricultural protections not only hurts poor African farmers, but also, by levying disproportionate tariffs on many processed goods such as ground coffee, helps keep poor countries selling low on the value chain."
Andrew Rugasira, president of a Ugandan coffee company, wrote in The Guardian: "I only want the same opportunities that British entrepreneurs coming to Africa have access to. We went to the same schools and universities, and in the global community we are all looking for the same things: markets and equal opportunities to exploit them."
But Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, says the world's focus on African development is too narrow.
"The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty," Maathai wrote in the East African newsweekly. "While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter."
"If we do not acknowledge that the environment is central to sustainable development and ending poverty, we run the risk of . . . degrading the resource base on which future development depends," she said.
Another commentator in the East African questioned Western aid priorities.
Paul Redfern reported that the brain drain of health professionals from Africa to the West continues. "For some African countries, notably Ghana and Malawi, it is now believed that there are more Ghanaian and Malawian doctors in the UK than there are in their own countries," he writes. Redfern also cites a recent report of British aid agencies Action Aid and Oxfam which concluded that "a huge proportion of current Western aid spending [in Africa] was being wasted or effectively recycled back to the donor country."
In London, the editors of The Independent said, "One could only imagine what anyone in Africa must have made of the performance of the two leaders, standing beneath the White House's vast crystal chandeliers."
One doesn't have to imagine. Africans were not overly impressed.
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REF:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...060900463.html
Note that original article includes links to several references.
So, what I can't understand is why Bush would not support Blair and Brown's initiative to abolish African debt. What has the US to lose? Virtually nothing. What has it to gain? The thanks of millions of Africans and African leaders, much international kudos, international public opinion... to list just a few.
I'm Bush is a religious man; and a man who believes he is
"righteous". So why can't he agree to this simple step that would hardly damage the US economy, but would make a world of difference to hundreds of millions of people?
Mr Mephisto