Leaders Pressed to Boost Africa Aid

The world will never be able to give Africa as much help as it needs, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Thursday, but if current promises to double aid to the continent are kept, he declared, it will make a massive difference.

Irish rocker-turned-activist Bob Geldof joined Blair at a news conference here to turn the spotlight back on development in the world’s poorest nations, the planned focus of this week’s United Nations summit. But terrorism and U.N. reform have pushed the subject to the side, prompting Geldof to award the meeting just 4 points out of 10.

He chastised one of the largest meetings of world leaders for not making enough new pledges on debt, trade and aid to developing nations. “I find it very disappointing,” said Geldof, who had promoted the Live 8 series of concerts in July to raise money and awareness of poverty.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso also appeared at the session, saying that pledges to double African aid by 2010 made in July at the Group of 8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, could still fall apart. The Nigerian leader urged donor countries to follow through, saying, “I believe the name of the game is push and push and push.”

The summit had a bit of positive news for development proponents. President Bush surprised diplomats Wednesday by publicly embracing the eight Millennium Development Goals, which the U.S. had agreed to in 2000 but had recently sought to keep out of the U.N. summit’s final accord. After forging an understanding with other nations that the pledge to increase foreign aid did not commit Washington to give a specific percentage of national income, the U.S. let the goals be included.

Bush also vowed to lift trade tariffs and agricultural subsidies that price poor countries out of the market -- but only if other nations did the same.

“We need the U.S. to be a leader on this. If the spending on development is there, the U.N. will not be called on so often as a fire brigade,” said Jan Egeland, U.N. humanitarian chief.

A new U.N. Development Program report shows that the goal of improving living standards -- cutting the poverty rate in half by 2015 -- may be met. Lagging behind, however, are the remaining seven targets: enrolling every child in primary school, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, stemming epidemics of malaria and AIDS, protecting the environment and reducing debt and tariffs.

Donors frequently fail to deliver their full pledges, the report says, and if present trends continue, most poor countries will miss almost all the goals, some by “epic margins.” The poorest 19 countries have actually slipped backward in the last 15 years, it says.

Blair warned that the next World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong was just 100 days away, and that little action had been taken to implement the Gleneagles pledges to cancel some African countries’ trade debt and double aid to the continent to $50 billion by 2010.

“Everyone around the world has tried to call each other’s bluff on trade,” he said. “If we have a failure ... it will echo around the world, and I am not prepared to have that. Not without the most monumental struggle.”