The sick priorities of the G8

This afternoon the G8 leaders announced their communiqué on climate change – but healthcare funding is still proving to be a sticking point. Walter Otis Tapfumaneyi of the Panos Global AIDS Programme is not surprised.

It never rains but it pours for Africa, and the light at the end of the tunnel always seems to get dimmer because the world’s richest countries insist on making the tunnel even longer.

As if slavery and colonialism were not enough, Africa today is still being looted in the name of unfair trade, brain drain, conflict and corruption. And it even has to pay for crimes it has not committed.

Take climate change, for example, which today the G8 made a series of announcements about. The G8 countries represent 13 per cent of the world’s population but emit 40 per cent of its greenhouse gases.

Africa has hardly contributed to global warming but, according to this year’s IPCC report, Africa is the continent most vulnerable to climate change.

By 2020, yields from rain-fed agriculture in some countries could decrease by as much as 50 per cent, exacerbating malnutrition and food insecurity, while a three degree temperature increase could leave up to 1.8 billion more people facing uncertainty over their water sources.

Climate change, however, isn’t grabbing the headlines because of its potential to harm people in Africa, but because it also affects rich countries. HIV and AIDS, on the other hand, are slipping down the agenda. The number one enemy of the African continent is barely of any concern to the G8 countries, it seems.

Not only has the promised aid money to fight the pandemic not yet materialised, but there is a real danger that the little that has been pledged will be reduced even further by the end of the G8 summit in Helligendamm.

The situation is made even more depressing by the fact that many of the influential civil society representatives I’ve spoken to at this G8 appear to have lost interest in HIV and AIDS.

At the launch of the Alternative G8 Summit earlier this week, funding for HIV and AIDS wasn’t even mentioned. And when it did feature on the schedule, it was often lumped together with other sessions.

Who then will be responsible for putting more pressure on the G8 nations when their own taxpayers don’t see HIV and AIDS in Africa as a priority? And why is HIV and AIDS no longer a priority to them?

Because of good health systems, where most people have access to treatment and good nutrition, the pandemic has long been brought under control in much of the Western world.

Africa’s problems, it seems, will not command the sympathy of the world’s powerful unless their own comfort is also threatened.

Comments

[Damas Ogwe]

I concur with Walter Otis Tapfumaneyi, that it never rains in Africa but rather it pours. Indeed, we have changed the English saying that it rains "cats and dogs" and we now say it is raining "elephants and buffalos"

Africa is the chief victim of global warming though our contribution to this cause could account for as little as under 5 per cent (I stand to be corrected on this figure).

The G8 must feel responsible for most of the effects of climate change and are probably feeling that they need to do something.

But are they doing enough? Or are they just engaging in empty talk shop?

G8 countries account for just over ten per cent of world population, thus I wish to state here that they are not the world and they should not think of themselves as the world.

If they want to consider themselves as the world, then they have to feel for the world and especially the LDCs. They have to address issues requiring both short term and long term interventions. At present, the key issues in Africa revolve around poverty, healthcare and HIV/AIDS among others.

i am not in any way saying that the environment is not important. My family's rural shamba(swahili for farm) is not as productive as it was when in the seventies. And even then I am told it was more productive in the 1940s to 1960s.

In "those days" (and listen carefully when the older guys speak of those days), it was as easy as ABC to predict the rains and thus one could easily plan for the timing of the planting season.

In Kenya we no well defined rainy seasons. We would usually talk of the long rains (traditionally from mis-March to july) and the long rains from around September to end November. There is a new season which cannot be defined some where in between December to around February. Experts point to the global warming to which Kenya's contribution may be less than one percent.

Are the G8 doing enough? They cannot do this alone since they are not the world. The entire world must be in this too.

Damas Ogwe
Project Oficer
Ugunja Community Resource Centre
P. O. Box 330 - 40606 Ugunja, Kenya
Cell: +254 721 605082, +254 722 423836
Land Line: + 254 57 34131
e-mail: [email protected]
website: www.ugunja.org

[resume writing]

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[ugg]

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[paulsmith]

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[Paul Smith]

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