Standing beside George W. Bush at the White House one day this month, Jean Chrétien had terrorism, security and Iraq on his mind. The Canadian reporters who were there expected Chrétien to comment on the softwood lumber dispute. To their surprise, he began to talk about Western countries' partnership with Africa.

Partnership with Africa?

"This partnership is strong and with your co-operation," he said, turning to Bush, "it's developing very well. Next month, I will be traveling to Africa visiting five or six countries ... to reward good governance, human rights and to make sure they have real democracies and so on."

Mention of reward was, so to speak, the carrot. The prime minister followed up with the stick: "Those who do not do that will not be rewarded because they will not meet what the world wants."

In his oblique fashion, Chrétien was talking about NEPAD - the New Partnership for Africa's Development, a long and detailed proposal created last year by several African governments. In the Western media, NEPAD has largely been ignored - except, occasionally, in the old context of whether foreign aid makes any difference. The truth is NEPAD goes far beyond a request for Western money. And this is partly Chrétien's doing.

At the Kananaskis summit in June, Chrétien will ask the leaders of the other G8 nations to embrace many of the ideas and principles of NEPAD. Bush's consent is vital.

As the world wearily knows, Africa is afflicted by a host of troubles, ranging from debt to AIDS, corruption to civil wars. Chrétien has insisted Africa be front and centre at the summit. Yet in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, all this tropical squalor might seem a world away from the affluence of Canada and the other G8 countries in the post-Sept. 11 world.

It takes a Tetteh Hormeku to point out the links.

Hormeku, a Ghanaian lawyer, works as head of African programs for the Third World Network. He was in Ottawa recently to address the Africa-Canada Forum, a coalition of NGOs for whom the poorest continent is a prime concern, and to meet Ambassador Robert Fowler, Chrétien's pointman on Africa during the preparations for the G8 summit.

Couched in the abstract language of policy-makers, the condition of many African countries is enough to make anyone's eyes glaze over. "Structural adjustment," "globalization," "unsustainable development," "environmental degradation." So many big words, so little feeling.

Hormeku is smart enough to know that if he were to make abstractions come alive, he needed to tell a story. His own story: the story of the place he came from. This tale has nothing to do with tribal conflict, disease or corrupt government. Perhaps it is all the more powerful as a result.

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"I was born in 1959," he said, "two years after Ghana became independent, and I grew up in a village called Old Ningo. It's a farming and fishing community on the coast. July and August is always festival time - two weeks of feasting and dancing and celebrating. People put away money for the festival and they wear good clothes for it. The festival is the highlight of everybody's year.

"The fishermen go out in their dugout canoes and bring the fish to land, but they don't know what to do with it after. It's the women who go and buy the fish for smoking. Or the fish might get sent inland or to Accra, the capital city. When I was young, the state fishing corporation would process the fish and sell to local women.

"One day, the fishing harvest is not very good. Then, it is worse and worse again. And now, the whole coast has been outfished. Big trawlers from Europe and Japan are fishing everything out of the sea. From Senegal all the way to Nigeria, there is a crisis in the communities along the coast. Everywhere the men go, there is nothing.

"The young people still go off. But now they don't come back. Some of them go as far away as Angola. The village is being changed because of things that are happening outside it, things the people cannot control.

"So the fishing is not sustainable in the way it used to be. But neither is the farming.

"The women are the farmers. But now, when they take their tomatoes to market in Accra, they are competing against cheap tomatoes from Europe. When they take their vegetable oil, they compete against American sunflower oil, which is subsidized by export programs. When they take their corn, they compete against cheap barley, which is also supported by export assistance in the United States.

"America does not send its state-supported food to hungry areas. This food is going to what they call 'higher earning markets,' to destroy local production. I have many sisters, and I see this all the time.

"So life is more unpredictable now. It's not very happy for me to go back to Old Ningo, even though my grandmother is still there. The economic activity needed to maintain a healthy community is not there. People are living in poverty, and they have the expectation that I can help them."

In Canada and other rich nations, we often talk about Ghana as a "developing" country - a fine phrase. But is the decline of Old Ningo what development means on the ground? Hormeku's eyes flashed at the word.

"Over the past 20 years," he said, "development has come to be defined as a process of efficient and cheap delivery of goods and services to people who can afford it. This is true in Ghana, but not only in Ghana. So the state fishing company has been privatized and now it is in foreign hands. People have to pay for their medical care now. When I was in school, education was free. Now, you have to buy this and buy that.

"But with all this, you can't have development. Because the majority of people can't afford to pay for it."

Hormeku always loved the July-August festival in his home village on the coast. It used to be a time of joy. He doesn't plan to go back this year.

"The last time I went," he said, "the men were sitting down, doing funeral rites for the dead. There was no more celebration - it was not a festival time any more.

"The men were sitting and talking about poverty."

- Mark Abley's E-mail address is mabley@thegazette.southam.ca

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Facts about Africa and development