What the G8 Said/What Women Demand
While the leaders of the world's richest countries met in Scotland for their annual G8 summit, a group of Maasai women in rural Kenya gathered with staff from MADRE, an international women's human rights organization, to learn about human rights. For these women, the ability to find clean drinking water, feed their children, and send their daughters to school is profoundly affected by decisions of the G8. Yet, they were wholly unrepresented at the G8 summit, which focused on poverty in Africa.
Thanks to centuries of exploitation by G8 countries, sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest place in the world. African governments are forced to rely on aid and loans that the G8 countries grant, mainly through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which the G8 controls. This dependency holds African countries hostage to global trade rules, written and enforced by the G8 through the World Trade Organization (WTO). These trade rules, in turn, ensure huge profits for corporations based in the G8 countries and block economic development in Africa, thereby perpetuating Africa's debt, dependency, and poverty.
The vicious cycle has a human face: that of African women who are primarily responsible for producing food, procuring water, and providing care for the undernourished, underserved majority of the continent, including the six million people who die each year from poverty-related conditions that are overwhelmingly treatable and preventable. Increasingly, African women (like those from MADRE's sister organization in Kenya) understand the connections between their own poverty and the wealth generated by the G8's trade, aid, and debt policies. Indeed, for all of us, grasping the real-life impacts of the G8 is crucial to being able to stand up for alternative policies that meet the needs and ensure the futures of women and families around the world.
Trade: The G8 Double Standard
The G8 has called for completion of the Doha Round of WTO negotiations, which aim to open up poor countries' markets. To achieve this, poor countries will be barred from buffering their industries with subsidies or tariffs, though the G8 countries (which have always used trade barriers) will retain the option for themselves. These protectionist measures, worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, have enabled G8-based agribusiness to undersell and bankrupt millions of small farmers in Africa, most of them women.
MADRE calls for alternative trade rules to support African economic independence and development. Under a fair trade deal, Africa's vast natural resources would be used to benefit the people who live there. Services and resources needed to meet basic needs, including water, electricity, food, education, and healthcare, would be public and affordable. Foreign investors would be held to at least the same environmental and labor standards as in their own countries and a fair share of the jobs and profits generated would be reinvested to meet the basic needs of people within the country. Local producers would be safeguarded from unfair competition with foreign manufacturers. And policies would comply with international human rights standards, including instruments addressing the rights of women, Indigenous Peoples, and small farmers.
Aid: The Poor Need Justice, Not Charity
Prior to the G8 summit, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair urged Bush to contribute to doubling aid to Africa (to $50 billion a year). An additional $25 billion isn't much compared to the $140 billion tax cut that Bush gave to the richest Americans, but the President still refused. Instead, Bush offered up a bogus plan which claimed to double US aid to Africa, but consisted of already-allocated money and money that wouldn't be disbursed until after Bush's term is over.1
People in the US commonly estimate that their government gives 25% of its Gross National Income (GNI) to aid.2 The actual figure is less than one quarter of one percent (.16%). Of that, less than one percent goes to the poorest countries.3 Most goes to strategic countries, like Israel, which gets the same amount of aid (about $3 billion annually) as all of sub-Saharan Africa.4 Moreover, the G8 makes aid conditional on acceptance of policies such as privatization, trade liberalization, and debt servicing that result in poor countries paying rich countries about $200 billion a year roughly four times what that they receive in aid.5
MADRE believes that money aimed at fighting poverty, disease, and environmental degradation should not be conceived of as "aid," but as urgently needed international public investment.6 In any case, the key to economic development is not delivering aid, but guaranteeing human rights. In particular, safeguarding women's economic and reproductive rights facilitates enhanced child health, improved nutrition and food security, lower rates of HIV infection, higher incomes, and, of course, better quality of life for women themselves.
G8 Debt Cancellation: Good Intentions or Good Publicity?
After a decade of mobilization by economic justice advocates, the G8 has finally addressed demands for outright debt cancellation. But in exchange, countries are required to boost private sector development and eliminate impediments to private investment. These conditions, known to generate tremendous profits for G8 corporations and increased poverty and inequality in countries that have implemented them are sure to bring the G8 more money than it writes off. Moreover, the deal is worth only about $1.5 billion a year (about 6 percent) of the $25 billion that Africa needs.7 The IMF announced with great fanfare that it will use its gold reserves to finance debt cancellation (a long-standing demand of the global justice movement), but declined to mention that its gold was plundered from Africa.8
The G8 has exploited poor-country debt to demand vastly reduced public spending on water, healthcare, and education, making basic services unaffordable for poor families. Women's workloads have increased dramatically as they are expected to meet people's needs for these services. And the needs of women themselves have been the first to be sacrificed: women in poor countries have shown drastic drops in school enrollment, food intake, and life expectancy since these policies have taken hold.9
MADRE calls for immediate, 100 percent debt cancellation for all poor countries without conditions. The G8 should formally recognize its culpability for the debt crisis, brought on by massive lending to illegitimate regimes, billions of dollars worth of ill-conceived development projects, and decades of harmful neo-liberal "reforms." MADRE also calls on governments in the Global South to be held accountable to using proceeds from debt cancellation to meet basic needs. National processes, informed by human rights and women's organizations, should determine specific priorities for funds freed up by debt cancellation.
End Notes
1 Emad Mekay, US Groups Prod Bush Over Poverty and Africa, Inter Press Service News Agency, 7 July 2005
2 "Crumbs for Africa," The New York Times, 8 June 2005, late edition, A18.
3Torcuil Crichton, When It Comes to Africa, Bush has More on His Mind than Aid, The Sunday Herald, 12 June 2005, http://www.sundayherald.com/50283.
4Monterrey: US Will Seek Advice On Spending Aid, 21 March 2002, The World Bank Group, http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,date:03-21- 2002~menuPK:34461~pagePK:34392~piPK: 34427~theSitePK:4607,00.html#Story2.
5 Development Funds Moving from Poor Countries to Rich Ones, Annan Says UN News Centre, 30 October 2003, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=8722&Cr=financing&Cr1=development.
6 Salih Booker and William Minter, Aid: Lets Get Real, The Nation, 8 July 2002, http://www.thenation.com/doc. mhtml?i=20020708&s=booker.
7 Jeffrey D. Sachs, Four Easy Pieces, The New York Times, 25 June 2005, A15.
8 John Pilger, The G8 Summit: A Fraud and a Circus, New Statesman, 22 June 2005, http://pilger.carlton.com/ print/133469.
9 Pam Sparr, Mortgaging Women's Lives: Feminist Critiques of Structural Adjustment, (London and Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1994).