Efforts by the Group of Eight to enter a closer dialogue with new economic powers such as China and India are being undermined by the rich nations’ unwillingness to listen fully to the emerging nations’ concerns, according to one of their representatives.
A year ago the G8 launched what it planned as an “equal and enduring partnership” with five emerging economies, but in reality – in spite of some progress – the “developed countries have basically set the agenda”, Lourdes Aranda, Mexico’s deputy foreign minister and co-ordinator on the G8 for the five countries, believes.
She also complained in a Financial Times interview that the leaders of the five nations – India, China, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa – would have “not enough time” at next week’s G8 summit in Japan to give their views on concerns such as spiralling food and energy prices.
“We are very interested in talking about how to tackle rising food costs,” she said, noting that the G5 – as the group has named itself – could play a stabilising role, especially as it includes several of the world’s largest countries, each with huge poor populations.
Diplomats said Japan, this year’s G8 host, has been reluctant to pursue the dialogue with the G5 – formalised at the Heiligendamm summit last year in Germany – for fear of too openly acknowledging the power of China. As a result the dialogue at the July 7-9 summit has been shortened and watered down by inviting other non-G8 countries such as Indonesia, South Korea and Australia.
“We hope there will be a more thorough discussion at the next summit (in Italy in 2009),” Ms Aranda said.
She said the G5 would also like to focus more on issues such as technology transfer from developed to developing countries – for instance regarding climate change – and on efforts to improve healthcare systems in poor countries.
In spite of these immediate concerns, she said the “Heiligendamm process”, as the dialogue is called, has been successful as a “confidence- building measure”. This was useful as a supplement to formal negotiations with G8 countries in multilateral bodies such as the United Nations or World Trade Organisation, she said.
The dialogue had also brought the G5 themselves closer together, triggering greater policy co-ordination not only regarding the G8 but also within other international bodies, she added.
Bernd Pfaffenbach, Germany’s deputy economics minister and the G8’s co-ordinator for the G5 dialogue, said four Heiligendamm process working groups had met several times since last year’s summit. These were “not for formal negotiations, but for topic-driven political dialogue”, he said.
The working groups are on innovation and intellectual property rights; energy efficiency and climate change; development aid; and reducing barriers to cross-border investments. Each has a co-chair from the G8 and G5. “The dialogue is based on an equal footing [between the two groups],” Mr Pfaffenbach told the FT.
A G8 diplomat said that Ms Aranda’s criticism was not surprising, given that the scope of the four working groups had been defined largely by the G8. However, the dialogue was only one year old, and at the beginning the G5 countries were “very sceptical about the point of the exercise. They have moved forward significantly since then,” the diplomat added.
Mr Pfaffenbach said the Heiligendamm process was a way of stressing the “common responsibility” of G8 and emerging economies for issues linked to globalisation and climate change, without raising the thorny issue of expanding the G8 – an issue on which the rich nations’ group was often divided.
Brazil calls for action on emissions
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has called on countries in the developing world to become more involved in the fight against global warming by setting targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, writes John Rumsey in São Paulo. Before the G8 summit that he is attending in Tokyo, the Brazilian president said that the world should be able to slash emissions by 60-80 per cent by 2050.
Brazil is a leader in biofuel production and 80-90 per cent of the country’s new vehicles can switch between petrol and ethanol. However, the fuels have sparked controversy because of their alleged link to food price inflation. Mr Lula has sought to highlight the efficiency gap between Brazilian sugar cane-based fuel and the less efficient corn-based ethanol, that is prevalent in the US.
Brazil recently won support from one of the key foes of biofuels, Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan president. Mr Chávez praised Brazil’s sugar cane-based industry but maintained his opposition to the US corn-based ethanol programme.
