G8 summit and world poverty

Now call me cynical but Tony Blair's championing of the issues of world poverty and climate change seem to me like the posturings of a man trying to create a legacy for himself as a caring leader wanting to change the world for better, well aware of the fact that he'll more likely be remembered as the Prime Minister that sooked up to George W Bush and helped start an illegal war in Iraq to pursue strategic control of oil resources.

So i can't say i'm optimistic that when the dust has settled on this forthcoming G8 summit in Gleneagles that we will be any closer to seeing real political moves to solving poverty in Africa(and elsewhere) or seeing real moves to take climate control seriously. I think the dropping of debt has been an issue that has managed to remain in the public eye since Jubilee 2000 campaign and it's my opinion that we wouldn't be seeing any moves to drop significant amounts of debt if that wasn't the case. Which is at least encouraging to know that people if they are passionate enough can just maybe make a difference in this corporate controlled world. I suspect there will be large amount of debt dropped, a grand gesture to say, 'look we are listening and see the need to do something,' but i can't see there being real political will to solve these problems.

The tragedy of this, assuming i'm right, is that something can be done and it is not just me saying that. Indeed according to the economist Jeffrey Sachs it's something that we can solve in a relatively short timescale. Beyond his book The End of Poverty-How we can make it happen in our lifetime he states in the Independent that the 20,000 people who die every day from poverty needn't. He also mentions some practical examples. He had been to a village called Nthandire in Malawi, he describes it as "the perfect storm" as it has been hit by all the tornadoes that cause poverty. A small village dependent on maize production for subsistence and when he visited there were no young men visible. Upon asking if they were out in the fields he got the answer that, no they wern't, as they were all dead from Aids. A drug which costs 60p per day to produce could have kept them alive to work and look after their families. As it was he met grandmothers looking after 15 orphaned children. It's generally assumed that this is the fault of corrupt and/or incompetent governments. Malawi however came up with a well conceived strategy for treating its population. They had structures for drug delivery, patient counselling, community outreach and generally everything you could need. They used these plans and appealed to the international communit for the means to treat 300,000 people infected with anti-Aids drugs. The response from the international community was that the plans were to ambitious and told the malawi government to cut them, which they did to 100,000, but that was still to ambitious until eventually they negociated down to 25,000 people to be helped. So rather than a failing African government what we had was failing to support a good African government iniative.

The same village was also afflicted by malaria, a disease which kills 3 million africans a year and is again largely preventable. However for people and governments in the poverty trap they just do not have the means. Sachs has calculated that for £15bn we could end these problems and to put that figure in context that is 1/30th of what the US spends on their military. After that Africa will be in a far better position to trade its way out of the poverty trap for good. Well provided the trade isn't the sort of dodgy WTO enforced restructuring of economies that have only increased the level of debt in the first place.

To tie this up, the example of the Malawi village Nthandire has also been hit by environmental stresses. Climate change to be blunt. The rains have failed. Neither is it only in Malawi where the rains have become erratic, in Northern Ethiopia there used to be a short rain season to grow crops during March and April, these have now gone completely. Over the last 25 years the level of rainfall has lessened greatly all over sub saharan Africa, while the nearby Indian Oceon's surface temprature has increased. Global Warming is tied in with poverty and if we tackle both properly we stand a better chance of success than piecemeal fudged solutions. So fingers crossed i'm wrong about Tony Blairs motivations and this G8 summit is the start of tackling world poverty and climate change.