Grappling with global terrorism, the international economy and perhaps even the mess in the Middle East will be on the agenda when leaders of the G8 nations convene next month in Kananaskis, Alta., but Canada says the primary focus will be on constructing a new deal with Africa.
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has made Africa his priority issue and his personal representative to the summit, Robert Fowler, says every effort will be made to ensure that leaders stick to the agenda when they meet at the Rocky Mountain resort on June 26 and 27.
"The ravages of AIDS in Africa, the declining standard of living in Africa, the declining everything else in Africa is not again going to be punted off the table by the latest events in the Middle East or the Caucasus or South Asia or whatever," Mr. Fowler Canada's G8 ambassador, said in an interview.
"That's happened too often to Africa. There are 800 million Africans whose basic lives are deteriorating significantly to the point that their plight, in the main, is truly desperate, and that deserves our attention."
The focus on Africa is new for the G8, but Mr. Fowler says this is a new kind of G8 summit, or at least a return to basics for the annual meeting of the world's seven largest economies plus Russia. The gatherings have lately become little more than a swarm of bureaucrats battling over the punctuation to be used in the final communiqué -- which is usually written before the leaders even arrive at the site.
There will be no final communique after the Kananaskis meeting. "I found that very, very few people had ever read a communique," says Mr. Fowler, Canada's former ambassador to the United Nations.
"Mr. Chrétien said he hadn't read it last year and doesn't intend to read it. They had become enormously turgid, complex documents with all kinds of agendas in them that were not part of anything discussed at the summit.
"They didn't reflect what happened at the meeting. They reflected all kinds of bureaucratic infighting."
Instead, Mr. Chrétien will read a "chair's statement," which Mr. Fowler says will briefly summarize what the leaders actually discussed.
The sheer size of the conference will also be scaled back, as the 400 rooms at the resort are not sufficient to handle the massive bureaucratic delegations accompanying leaders in the past. Last year in Genoa, Italy the U.S. had nearly 800 officials accompanying President George W. Bush. This year, each country will be restricted to 36 on-site officials.
On the first day, the leaders will talk about the global economy and international terrorism and on the second day, Africa and the G8 response to the New African Development Program will be discussed with a delegation of five African leaders and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The program, a document written by African leaders which was approved last summer, is a commitment by African leaders to eliminate poverty and to place the continent on a path of sustainable economic growth through a new commitment to good governance, democracy and human rights.
The G8 is expected to respond by its members supporting debt relief and offering pledges of increased technical and financial assistance to those African states which demonstrate a real and lasting commitment to those ideals.
Mr. Fowler warns that both African and western states have to have realistic expectations about the scope and speed of change that will come as a result of the G8's African Action Plan.
"It is not suddenly going to deliver tens of billions of dollars into (Africa's) hands on June 27. This is about a new partnership, about a changed paradigm, about rewarding success and no longer reinforcing failure, which we've done pretty damned consistently over a long time."
He says it is not primarily about money, though the recent promises of increased aid from the European Union, the U.S. and Canada mean that billions of dollars more will be available to those countries prepared to institute fundamental reform.
"Fundamental change can occur in Africa. It must occur and Nepad is a very strong commitment to it occurring, but it won't occur overnight," Mr. Fowler said.
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