Phil Stewart and Daniel Flynn, Reuters 10 Jul 09;
L'AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) - G8 leaders pledged $20 billion in aid on Friday to help poor nations feed themselves, surpassing expectations of a summit that made little ground on climate change and may spell the end of the G8 itself.
U.S. President Barack Obama and the summit's Italian host Silvio Berlusconi reflected growing consensus that the Group of Eight industrial powers, long criticized as an elite club, does not reflect the shifting patterns of global economic power.
Tackling global challenges "in the absence of major powers like China, India and Brazil seems to be wrongheaded," Obama said, adding that he looked forward to "fewer summit meetings."
Begun in 1975 with six members, the G8 now groups the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Russia and Canada. The Italians made it a "G14" with emerging powers on the second day, then added 15 more on the third.
That enabled Obama, traveling to Ghana on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa as president, to use the summit to push for a shift toward agricultural investment from food aid. Washington will make $3.5 billion available to the 3-year program.
"There is no reason Africa should not be self-sufficient when it comes to food," said Obama, recalling that his relatives in Kenya live "in villages where hunger is real," though they themselves are not going hungry.
KEEP WORD ON AFRICA
Obama said Africa had enough arable land but lacked seeds, irrigation and mechanisms for farmers to get a fair price for their produce -- issues that the summit promised to tackle.
Africa told the wealthy powers they must honor their commitments, old and new -- mindful that some in the G8 had fallen well short of their 2005 promise to increase annual aid by $50 billion by 2010, half of which was meant for Africa.
South African President Jacob Zuma said the new funding will "go a long way" to helping Africa, adding: "We can't say it's enough, but at least it begins to do very concrete things."
Nigerian Agriculture Minister Abba Ruma said the new pledge was "very commendable in view of the current global recession."
But he cautioned that it must be "disbursed expeditiously. It is only then we will know that the G8 is living up to its commitment and not just making a pledge and going to sleep."
The United Nations says the number of malnourished people has risen in the past two years and is expected to top 1.02 billion this year, reversing decades of declines. The global recession is expected to make 103 million more go hungry.
Aid bodies like the World Food Program said a last-minute surge of generosity at the summit in L'Aquila resulting in the $20 billion pledge was "greeted with great happiness."
That amount over three years may compare unfavorably with the $13.4 billion the G8 says it disbursed between January 2008 and July 2009, but aid groups said the new pledge in Italy was more clearly focused.
Japan and the European Union were also championing a code of conduct for responsible investment after growing farmland acquisition or "land grabs" in emerging nations.
G14 THE WAY AHEAD
The summit was held in the central Italian town of L'Aquila, devastated by an earthquake in April which killed some 300 people. That may explain why the usual anti-G8 protests were on an unusually small scale and without the violence that marred Italy's last G8 summit, held in Genoa in 2001.
But environmentalists were disappointed that the G8 failed to get major developing nations China and India to sign up to the goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The 17 biggest emitters in the Major Economies Forum chaired by Obama could only get China and India to agree temperature rises should be limited to 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).
But Obama, also suffering a delay to his own global warming bill in the U.S. Congress, said the talks had created momentum for a new U.N. climate change pact in Copenhagen in December.
G8 leaders said the global financial crisis still posed serious risks to the economy. Further stimulus packages for growth might still be required and it was dangerous to implement "exit strategies" from emergency measures too early, they said.
"Reaching the bottom of the slump is not when you start with exit strategies," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
(Additional reporting by Felix Onuah; writing by Janet McBride and Stephen Brown; editing by Elizabeth Piper and Crispian Balmer)
FAO welcomes G8 Food Security Initiative
“Encouraging shift of policy” – Diouf
FAO 10 Jul 09;
10 July 2009, L’Aquila - FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf today welcomed the G8’s $20 billion Food Security Initiative as an encouraging policy shift in favour of the poor and hungry.
Addressing the G8, Diouf said “The L’Aquila Joint Statement on Global Food Security ... signals a welcome and encouraging shift of policy in favour of helping the poor and hungry to produce their own food.”
This is what FAO had been preaching for years without success, Diouf noted. The G8 meeting agreed to mobilize $20 billion over three years for a comprehensive strategy focussing on sustainable agricultural development.
Diouf expressed confidence that the G8 Heads of State and Government would effectively translate that pledge into concrete action.
“I am convinced that you will ‘walk the talk’ not only for natural ethical considerations but also for sound economic reasons and, last but not least, to ensure Peace and Security in the world”.
Looming famine
He urged the international donor community “as soon as possible” to devote 17 percent of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to agriculture, recalling that this was the level of investment which saved Asia and Latin America from looming famine in the 1970’s.
A similar level of resources is needed now to feed the more than one billion people suffering hunger and to ensure that the world’s population, set to grow to more than nine billion in 2050, will have enough to eat then.
World Food Summit
Diouf underlined that a new World Food Summit of Heads of State and Government – the third after previous meetings in 1996 and 2002 – is to be held at FAO Headquarters in Rome from 16-18 November with a view to securing a broad consensus on the eradication of hunger, on improved governance of the international agricultural system and on policies and programmes to ensure world food security.
“I am convinced that your Excellencies will personally participate in this gathering of leaders of [FAO’s] 192 member nations to ensure the most fundamental of human rights, ‘the right to food,’” Diouf said.
Quoting Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, he declared, “Everything can wait, but agriculture cannot wait”.
