Canada and the U.S. jumped the gun on African aid initiatives yesterday, announcing humanitarian assistance programs in advance of next week's G8 summit meeting in Kananaskis, Alta.
International Development Minister Susan Whelan announced the Canadian International Development Agency was sending an additional $34.2 million to alleviate hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, which is experiencing its worst drought since 1992, while U.S. President George W. Bush outlined a new $500-million U.S. AIDS program for 12 countries.
Mr. Bush challenged the other G8 countries -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia -- to follow suit. "Medical science gives us the power to save these young lives," he said in a Rose Garden ceremony.
"Conscience demands we do so."
The new U.S. funds would start with $200 million approved by the U.S. Senate as part of an emergency spending bill. The remaining $300 million would be requested for fiscal year 2004.
Ms. Whelan said Canada announced two years ago it was quadrupling its assistance to deal with the HIV/AIDS scourge that is claiming 5,000 African lives a day and will be contributing $80 million annually by 2004.
The CIDA program announced yesterday will channel Canadian funds through four non-government organizations to provide relief in Angola, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland, where 16 million people are said to be at risk of starvation.
Mr. Bush, repeating a stratagem from earlier this year when he announced a 50-per-cent increase in U.S. assistance on the eve of the UN's conference on sustainable development in Monterrey, Mexico, pre-empted a major G8 summit announcement on a new African partnership, boasting that the American AIDS package was "the first of this scale by any government anywhere."
The fund will treat one million women annually and cut the mother-to-baby transmission by 40 per cent in five years, Mr. Bush said.
The G8 leaders will be announcing a new African Action Plan in response to the New Partnership for Africa's Development proposal prepared last year by five African leaders, which calls for an additional $64 billion U.S. annually.
Canada has already committed $500 million Cdn for a new African assistance project as well as an annual eight-per-cent increase in overall development assistance.
NDP leader Alexa McDonough remained unimpressed with the announcements, saying the Canadian government's true colours on African assistance are revealed by its denial of 58 of 60 international delegates, mostly African, who had planned to attend the People's Summit next week in Calgary.
"The denial of these visas is further proof of the pathetic top-down, paternalistic approach to African development by Canada and by the G8. It is despicable that African civil society, labour groups, NGOs and academics have had virtually no opportunity to shape the new African development plan. The predictable result is a plan that excludes the very communities and countries that are most desperately in need."
Mr. ChrČtien has been emphatic that Africa will be the focal point of the G8 summit even though most of the other countries attending would rather focus on global terrorism and the deepening Middle East conflict.
However, the prime minister reiterated his resolve that Africa will not be shunted aside next week.
"I have decided that Africa is to be the main item of the summit at Kananaskis next week and nothing will deter the meeting from the objective to put Africa back on the map of the world where it should be," he told the House of Commons.
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