Foreign policy wonk

Update on the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005...
Make it work, people.

Come on, People (or are you vampires?)
Specifically, policy-makers..yeah, you.

In 2005, G8 leaders pledged to double aid and provide an additional $50 billion a year by 2010. But going by the latest figures, aid campaigners say, the donors will be way off target. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently confirmed that financial assistance to the world's poorest countries fell by 8.4 percent in real terms in 2007. This, the organization says, means aid has fallen for the second year in a row. Oxfam's Lawson says the $50 billion the G8 promised in aid could be missed by as much as $30 billion and this could cost lives.

The World Health Organization has made clear costings of what it would cost to cut the numbers of children dying; the number of mothers dying in child birth; and to get people with HIV access to medicines to keep them alive. They calculate that the missing money could save at least five million lives. That's 6k a head, so they don't die.

The French and the Germans in particular are refusing to honor their committments. It is worried that there is not enough domestic pressure for their country's aid committments. Max Lawson, a policy officer at Oxfam, describes the reneging of countries on promises they made to increase aid at the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005 as a scandal. "Everyone is worried about their economies, rich countries are facing the credit crunch, but that's just an excuse; there can be no excuse for the richest nations in the world not delivering on these promises."

Donor countries calculate debt relief into their aid assessment tabulations, which Elvira Groll says donor countries used to highly inflate aid figures. "Although we (Action Aid) do consider debt relief to be very important to free resources in developing countries, it's not genuine aid which helps the poorest; it's a lack of a debit and not a credit... so Action aid has repeatedly called on donor countries to stop counting debt relief as aid, and including that in their aid statistics," said Groll.

The Group of Eight (G8), also known as Group of Seven and Russia, is an international forum for the governments of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The European Union is also represented in their annual meetings.