This year's G8 summit will have climate change at the top of the agenda as the German presidency corrals the leaders of the world's richest nations into agreeing new protocols to replace Kyoto. But it will also be a chance for Tony Blair to complete his trade aid deal begun two years ago at Gleneagles
Last time we gave them the benefit of the doubt. When the leaders of the rich world met at the G8 summit in St Petersburg in 2006 it was unclear whether they were on track to deliver the promises made to the world's poorest people at the groundbreaking Gleneagles summit in 2005. They had promised to double aid to developing nations to $50 billion (some £25bn) a year - half of that for Africa - and cancel $40bn of their debts. The debt deal had been done but progress on aid was unclear.
Now, 12 months later, on the eve of this year's G8 summit in the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm in Germany, which runs from Wednesday to Friday next week, the picture is clearer. Debt has been a huge success; it has put 20 million more children in school. But aid has been a flop. Aid for the poorest continent, Africa, has grown only 2 per cent since 2004.
Britain and Japan have delivered what they promised. But Germany's aid to Africa has grown only 2 per cent since 2004. France's has actually fallen 1 per cent. And Italy's has been slashed by 30 per cent. Overall aid to Africa has risen by less than half of what would be needed to stay on track to reach the Gleneagles goal to double annual aid by 2010.
This is "a very big potential shortfall", according to the man who negotiated the deal from the British end, Lord Jay of Ewelme, who was then, as Sir Michael Jay, head of the diplomatic service. He was the Prime Minister's personal representative, or sherpa, in the run-up to the Gleneagles summit and is now chairman of the international medical charity Merlin. At the time Germany was one of the sticking blocks in reaching a deal. "People were prepared to accept principles and concepts but they were very reluctant to accept figures," Jay recalls. "There were really tough negotiations to get the $50bn figure into the communiqué." Final agreement was reached between the G8 president, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, on the final morning of the summit. "They met at 8 a.m. It went right to the wire."
Campaigners from the global Make Poverty History movement found whipping up support particularly hard in Germany in 2005. But what a difference two years makes. Africa and climate change are now top of the political agenda in Germany following a massive push by international and German activists. Brad Pitt, Bono, Matt Damon and George Clooney have done cinema ads in German. An Intellectual Live 8 conference has been held with 40 top German intellectuals. Pope Benedict XVI has written to the German Chancellor. Bob Geldof this week edited Bild, Europe's biggest-selling daily newspaper, with the supermodel Claudia Schiffer involved. And an international rock concert is being held in nearby Rostock on the eve of the summit.
They are pushing against an open door. Germany's first female Chancellor and this year's G8 President, Angela Merkel - buoyed by a new optimism thanks to an economy that has finally picked up from the after-effects of German re-unification - has put Africa and climate change once again at the heart of the G8 agenda.
"It's terribly important now that the G8 reconfirm [the Gleneagles pledges] and put more flesh on some of the goals in education and health," says Jay. In particular, rich nations should come up with the cash to fully fund the United Nations Education Fast Track Initiative by matching the £8.5bn the United Kingdom has pledged over the next 10 years. They need to give more specific undertakings to replenish the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria too. And they must make long-term commitments to support African governments' national plans on education and their strategies against Aids too.
Gleneagles has already made the benefits of such action clear. The debt write-off - US$38 billion so far, to 18 African countries - means health care is now free in Zambia, roads are being built for farmers to take produce to market in Ghana, three million more children are in school in Nigeria, and much more. Progress towards the promise to get Aids drugs to all who need them has seen a 10-fold increase in Africans on antiretrovirals, 23 per cent of those needing treatment, which has saved more than 250,000 lives.
It is a measure of how far we have come, as well as how much more there is to do. It is the same story on climate change. There was, Jay recalls, international incredulity when the UK first put climate change on the G8 agenda in 2005. "When I first said to my sherpa colleagues that that the PM wants to focus on climate change they all said: ‘On what? Why does he want to focus on a third order issue like that?' That was only two years ago. The speed at which things have changed is extraordinary."
Top of Angela Merkel's agenda next week is finding a replacement for the Kyoto treaty on climate change that expires in 2012. "Merkel is clearly leading on this issue," says Lord Jay. "She is not just looking for a lowest common denominator but is actually trying to pull others along in the direction she wants them to go, as Blair did at Gleneagles." She has invited China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico not just to the summit but has involved them, for the first time, in the preparatory process too. "There's absolutely no point whatever in having an international agreement on climate change that doesn't include the Americans, the Chinese and the Indians."
Merkel's first summit as president of the G8 will be Tony Blair's last. In the UK some have called for Blair to step down as Prime Minister now that his successor has been elected unopposed. But Michael Jay thinks it is important that Blair is there. "Personalities are hugely important. I've been to four G8 summits and 17 European Councils and I've seen how the personal chemistry really does work. The fact that this is Blair's last G8 influences people. Bush is not going to want to come to Heiligendamm and spoil the party for Blair and Merkel, two leaders to whom for different reasons he's very close."
Indeed Lord Jay feels that personal interaction might even have brought a deal on fairer trade at Gleneagles had Blair not had to leave the summit halfway through to fly to London after the 7/7 terrorist bombings in the capital. "Trade was one of the casualties. They didn't get their act together on trade in a way that they might have done if the PM had been there to bang their heads together."
World trade talks come to their final crunch-point in mid June. What is needed is agreement on cuts in agriculture subsidies and tariffs plus a development package of $4bn aid for trade, 100 per cent market access for poor countries, and more and flexible "Rules of Origin" that recognise the value added to products by poor countries. It is what Blair will push for as his swan song.
No one ever thought all this would be easy, says Lord Jay. It was never going to be all done in one go at one summit. "It was always something that was going to have to be carried forward G8 by G8 by G8. The task is to reduce that Gleneagles shortfall year by year until the target of doubling aid by 2010 has been met."
Climate change and Africa are already on the agenda of the Japanese G8 summit in 2008, and the campaigning there has begun. Bono recently visited the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and gave him a pair of shades. "Africa has now been on the agenda for so many summits", says Michael Jay, "that it would be quite difficult for them to drop it." But the world's poorest people will want to see much greater progress long before that.
