Prime Minister Jean Chrétien will invite United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and several African leaders to the G8 summit this year, but critics say the price of hosting the Kananaskis meeting is making a mockery of the amount of money committed to African development.
Mr. Chrétien is making Africa the centrepiece of the June 26-27 summit and is expected to formally invite about a half-dozen African leaders to the summit next week. Among those most likely to attend are the leading authors of the New Partnership for Africa's Development, which is the framework document committing African states to good governance and respect for human rights in exchange for western assistance.
South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade have been the most enthusiastic supporters of the framework and they are likely to be joined by Mozambique's Joaquim Chissano and Cote d'Ivoire's Laurent Gbagbo, who recently served as moderators at an all-Africa conference discussing the new road map to continental development.
Mr. Chrétien has committed $500 million to a new African development fund, but Canadian Alliance foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day says the budget for hosting the 36-hour Kananaskis summit, which is reportedly in the area of $300 million, "is starting to approach the size of the African package the prime minister is promising."
Ambassador Robert Fowler, Mr. Chrétien's personal representative to Africa and to the G8 summit, told the Commons' foreign affairs committee yesterday that he did not know how much the meeting would ultimately cost, but admitted it would be expensive.
NDP MP Svend Robinson repeatedly demanded to know how much the conference was going to cost, but Mr. Fowler said the final pricetag would not be known until after the meetings.
However, he said, he did not know of a better way of addressing complicated global problems than bringing world leaders together for face-to-face meetings.
Mr. Fowler suggested instead of focusing on the summit's cost, it would be better to focus on other numbers, such as the 700 people a day who die of AIDS in Africa or the 400 million people with no access to clean water or the continent's rapidly falling life expectancy rate, which is now 16 years lower than any other part of the world.
Mr. Fowler said the $500 million promised by Mr. Chrétien in the last budget is only part of the renewed commitment to Africa by Canada and the other G8 countries.
He noted the United States promised at the Monterrey development summit earlier this month to increase its overseas assistance by 50 per cent to $15 billion annually, that the European Union has said it will increase its percentage of gross domestic product to development assistance from 0.33 to 0.39 per cent and that Canada has committed to an eight-per-cent annual increase in development assistance.
The bulk of that money, he said, will go to those African countries that prove they are willing and capable of adhering to the African plans' values of good governance and protection of human rights.
Mr. Fowler played down the notion that pouring money into Africa was part of a counter-terrorism program, which is one of the other major agenda topics at Kananaskis.
"We need to be careful about drawing causal connections between being poor or being marginalized and becoming a terrorist," Mr. Fowler said.
"Look at the middle-class background of many of the al-Qaeda terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, or indeed that of Osama bin Laden himself, who comes from a wealthy Saudi family. Consider the fact that many rich countries have homegrown terrorist groups.
"Providing assistance and building a new partnership with Africa will help to lift significant numbers of marginalized and desperate people out of poverty and give them a sense of hope. I don't think we need a counter-terrorism argument to justify these actions," he said.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. NoNonsense English offers this material non-commercially for research and educational purposes. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, i.e. the media service or newspaper which first published the article online and which is indicated at the top of the article unless otherwise specified.