Trade unions: G8 Summit must deliver on jobs

This week’s G8 Summit of World Leaders must deliver leadership to end the global jobs crisis, according to the world’s trade unions. Over 30 million people who lost their jobs due to the crisis are still unemployed. “Worldwide, employment has still not recovered from the 2008 financial fiasco, and too few governments are taking the jobs crisis seriously,” said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow, adding “the G8 and the G20 must lead the way to a surge in employment rather than the narrow and destructive focus on spending cuts which some countries are now following.”

The unions are calling on the G8 governments to meet their development aid promises, especially to Africa where the aid shortfall was a massive $14bn last year. They are also pointing to the backlash against poverty, corruption and incompetent economic strategies which triggered the “Arab Spring” and is likely to spread unless action is taken to generate decent jobs for tens of millions of young people around the world. “The backlash against dictatorships in the Arab countries arose out of the desperation of millions of young people facing a lifetime of unemployment. Many other countries, including democracies, have massive youth unemployment, and much wider social unrest is just around the corner unless governments face up to the task of job creation,” said TUAC General Secretary John Evans.

The trade unions are also insisting on a renewed push to tackle climate change, and for special action to assist Japan’s recovery from the devastating human and economic impact of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

For more information, see statement adopted at the OECD-TUAC meeting in Paris on 23 May 2011.

Oxfam: G8’s summit of shame fails poor people

As the G8 Summit comes to a close, international agency Oxfam criticized the leaders for their failure to deliver on their promises and for trying to divert attention by cobbling together a small initiative for maternal and child health. “No maple leaf is big enough to hide the shame of Canada’s summit of broken promises,” said Mark Fried, spokesperson for Oxfam. “The G8’s failure will leave a sad legacy of kids out of school, denied medicines for the sick, and no food for the hungry.”

With total G8 aid frozen, their five billion dollar commitment to maternal health will likely be taken from vital areas such as education and food, cautioned Oxfam. “This year the headline is maternal health, last year it was food. With overall aid frozen, the G8 are just shuffling the same money around to different pots,” said Fried. “The only promise that counts is the Gleneagles one to increase aid by $50 billion by 2010 and that is the one they have abandoned today.”

At the last G8 Summit, donors pledges $22 billion over three years to support agriculture in developing countries, but Oxfam calculates that at most $6 billion of this is new money and they are double counting it to pay for other initiatives, such as helping poor countries cope with climate change. “There are a billion hungry people in the world but it seems the G8 are out to lunch. Instead of new money for old promises, we got old money, re-pledged, recycled and renamed,” said Fried. “Oxfam asks France, as next year’s G8 host, to offer real accountability and resuscitate the G8’s flagging commitment to the world’s poor.”

As focus now shifts to the G20, Oxfam is encouraged by the place development issues have garnered on the agenda, and called on leaders to give poor countries a seat at the table. “The G20 mustn’t repeat the G8’s mistake of only inviting Africa for the photo ops,” said Fried. Oxfam also urged the G20 to adopt a financial transaction tax to raise the funds necessary to fight poverty and climate change. "After the scandal of the G8's broken promises, the G20 now has the chance to stand up and deliver for the world's poor,” said actor and Oxfam Global Ambassador Bill Nighy in Toronto. "A Robin Hood Tax on banks is a simple but brilliant idea to raise hundreds of billions of dollars to help millions of poor people who have been hit hardest by global economic downturn, hunger and climate change."

G8 in Italy must prove its relevance

Caritas Internationalis and CIDSE say G8 countries meeting in Italy need to roll back years of broken promises if they’re to regain authority on their flagship issue of tackling poverty. Leaders of France, the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and Russia hold a make-or-break meeting 8-10 July in the Italian town of L’Aquila to prove the annual jamboree is not past its sell-by-date.

The summit comes in a critical year for international development. The global economic crisis threatens gains made in reducing poverty over the last ten years. As many as 100 million more people will remain poor or become poor as a result of the crisis. Negotiations on climate change are not making the progress needed to achieve an adequate deal to be signed in Copenhagen in December. Hopes are not high. G8 countries have backtracked on their aid pledges, particularly Italy and France, citing the crisis as an excuse. However, world military spending surged to a new high of $1.4 trillion in 2008 while $8.7 trillion of state financing was found to shore up banks

Caritas Internationalis Secretary-General Lesley Anne Knight said, “If the G8 is to have any credibility left after this summit, it must make up for the broken promises of the past. This means committing to a firm timetable for achieving its previously agreed aid targets. To be cutting aid budgets whilst pouring billions into a bankrupt banking system is like robbing the poor to feed the rich. The G8 has an opportunity this month to show real leadership in the fight against global poverty. If it fails, it will show itself to be irrelevant.”

CIDSE Secretary-General Bernd Nilles said, "G8 countries have so far failed to commit to the necessary cuts in greenhouse gasses to avoid dangerous climate change. They have also failed to commit to providing developing countries with the support they need to enable them to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to pursue sustainable development paths. They’re fiddling while Rome burns.”

The G8 is one of the few moments where leaders of the richest countries will meet in the run up to Copenhagen and should play a crucial role in unlocking stalled talks and securing a deal. The G8 must commit to a minimum of 40% cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, based on 1990 levels. They must provide their fair share of financing for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. Conservative estimates indicate $153bn of additional finance will be needed for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries by 2020.

Read CIDSE - Caritas Internationalis G8 recommendations >>> here.

G8 Agriculture Ministers admit failure on hunger

Agriculture Ministers have admitted that they will probably fail to deliver on promises to halve world hunger by 2015. The final communiqué from the G8 Agriculture Ministers meeting in Northern Italy says the world is “very far from reaching” the United Nations goal of halving the number of people facing chronic hunger by 2015. This is the closest Ministers have come to admitting they will not deliver on the Millennium Development Goal – one of the eight international development goals that 192 United Nations member states agreed to achieve by the year 2015. "G8 Ministers have made an extraordinary admission of collective failure. This would be a sack-able offence in any other arena," said Chris Leather, Oxfam International’s Senior Food Advisor. “The G8 has failed the world’s one billion hungry people.”

An extra 150 million people have become chronically hungry in the last year as a consequence of high food prices, making the world total near to one billion people. Without urgent action the number will increase rapidly due to the global economic crisis and in the face of climate change. The United Nations Food and Agriculture agency (FAO) has called on world leaders to take action in order to eradicate world hunger by 2025. However setting a new goal will achieve little if rich countries fail to deliver on their promises.

It now falls to G8 Development Ministers, who are meeting at the end of April, to come up with concrete proposals to tackle the food crisis. These proposals must be agreed by Heads of State when they meet in July. “When leaders of the world’s richest countries meet in July they must put an end to the grandstanding and take concrete action to end hunger," said Leather. Oxfam is calling for G8 leaders to commit to a legally binding international convention that aims to eradicate hunger. There is currently no way of holding governments to account for their failure to deliver on promises to tackle hunger. A legally binding commitment would enable civil society to hold governments to account for their failure to prevent people dying from hunger in a world where we have the means to prevent it.

The meeting of the G8 and G5 agriculture ministers in Cison di Valmarino, near Treviso in the Veneto region of northeast Italy, was the first of its kind. The ministers were asked to come up with concrete proposals to address food security in a declaration by the G8 Summit in Japan in 2008. But the meeting has not produced a single concrete proposal to fight hunger, not to speak about new financial commitments.

After G8 leaders failed at summit: Pressure piled on UN now

The 2008 G8 Summit in Japan failed to tackle the grievous problems facing the world that are hitting poor people first and hardest, said international agency Oxfam at the summit's end. Leadership must now be shown at key UN meetings on poverty in September and on climate in December. Oxfam International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs said "never was more urgent action needed by the G8 than this week in Japan. Accelerated climate change, runaway food prices and growing poverty are depriving millions of people of their livelihoods and, in many cases, their very lives. Several governments championed steps to tackle the crucial issues sitting on the G8 agenda, but in the end this summit did not deliver the breakthroughs that are so urgently needed. The consensus reached was shallow at best, especially on climate.”


* On climate change, the G8 endorsed among other things a commitment to halve global carbon emissions by 2050 - but with no agreed baseline year or mid-term targets - and a $6bn pledge to the World Bank for climate investment funds that will come out of existing aid budgets.
* On the food crisis, the G8 promised to reverse the decline in aid to agriculture - but without any numbers - and to support the UN's plans to tackle the crisis. It also pledged to ensure that biofuels would be produced in a way that would be compatible with food security and to accelerate the development of second-generation biofuels.
* On Africa and development aid, the G8 reaffirmed previous promised to provide $50bn in new assistance, half to Africa, by 2010 - although it offered no details on who would do what to reverse the decline in aid since 2006. It also repeated the promise it made 12 months ago to spend $60bn for health.

Oxfam International chief policy adviser at the G8, Max Lawson, said: "The G8 leaders' clumsy attempt to backtrack on their aid promises has backfired. With two years to go to the 2010 deadline, G8 leaders now have to deliver the $50bn in new assistance they pledged at Gleneagles. The world takes these promises seriously even if the G8 leaders do not." On current trends, Oxfam said the G8 will fall $30bn short of the 2010 promise, which could cost as many as five million lives, most of them among the 30,000 children who die each day from causes related to extreme poverty. "The G8 failed to rise to the challenge of a world in crisis, a world that is demanding serious action. We must see renewed leadership in September at the UN Emergency Summit on Poverty and in December in Poland at the vital UN climate talks," Hobbs said.

Geldof: G8 relevance at risk

Union leaders: G8 have abdicated economic leadership at Summit

Trade union leaders from the G8 countries and global labour organisations called on the G8 to address the worsening jobs situation and climate change when they met with the Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda in May. Yet at a time when working people were looking for leadership the conclusions of the economic discussion at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit fall short of even the limited expectations that many commentators had.

The outcome on climate change and aid commitments have been criticised by civil society organisations and some developing country leaders. Unions share these concerns. In particular the absence of a baseline year for greenhouse gas reductions' targets can only serve to confuse the negotiations on climate change. But also disturbing is the failure of the leaders to address the weakness of the global economy and the likely rise in unemployment that is now being forecast over the year ahead. Whereas the 2007 Heiligendamm summit took the building of the social dimension to the global economy forward, this summit barely addresses the issue. Instead the agenda looks like a business agenda of more rights and compensation for foreign investors and the usual warnings on protectionism.

John Evans, General Secretary of the Trade Union Advisory Council at OECD (TUAC) said "the G8 say in their statement that they wish to enhance cooperation with all stakeholders including trade unions - and yet they have ignored much of what we have called for: coordinated measures to support and rebalance growth, action to create "green jobs" and decent work as well as encouraging workplace agreements between unions and management as part of the action to combat climate change."

The only positive notes in the view of the unions are the moves forward on health and developing the health workforce and in particular the decision to establish a mechanism for monitoring meeting commitments to universal access to HIV/AIDS prevention treatment and care by 2010. The decision to set up a group to report on the food crisis and calls for stepping up anti-corruption measures, international tax enforcement and education are also needed commitments that will be followed closely by the unions.

For further information: See Trade Union Statement to G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit - July 2008: Responding to the global crises: the role of G8 leadership

G8 outreach to Africa

New DATA Report: Good results in Africa but G8 falls behind

The DATA Report 2008, released today by ONE, the global anti-poverty organization, shows the G8 are falling further behind on the commitment they made in 2005 to contribute an additional $22bn in assistance to Africa by 2010. According to The DATA Report 2008, the G8 are halfway to the 2010 deadline, but so far have only delivered $3bn, or 14%, of the $22bn commitment. If the G8 continue at their current pace, they will collectively fall far short of where they pledged to be by 2010. While the pace of delivery is deeply concerning, the good news is that the assistance that has been delivered is making a real, measurable difference on the ground in lives saved and futures brightened.

Because of recent increases in development assistance:
* 2.1 million Africans are on life-saving AIDS medication, up from only 50,000 in 2002,
* 26 million children were immunized and against a group of life-threatening diseases between 2001 and 2006,
* 29 million African children were able to enter school for the first time as a direct result of debt relief and increased assistance between 1999 and 2005,
* By 2007, 59 million bed nets had been distributed by the Global Fund alone, helping to dramatically reduce malaria rates in countries such as Tanzania, Rwanda and Ethiopia.

These statistics make clear that there are no more excuses for not delivering quickly on what the G8 promised. The DATA Report lays out a clear roadmap for how the G8 can get on track to meet their 2010 goals by scaling up measures that have been proven to work. The report has been released today at a press conference in Paris led by Bono; Bob Geldof; Michel Kazatchkine, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS; TB and Malaria, singer and activist Angelique Kidjo; Arunma Oteh, Vice President, Corporate Services of the African Development Bank and French tennis star Yannick Noah.

According to the 2008 DATA Report, while the G8 as a whole are off track, some countries are doing better than others and, equally important, some made more substantial promises than others. The European members of the G8 – France, Germany, Italy and the UK – made the biggest promises to Africa as a percentage of their national wealth and together are responsible for 75% of the $22bn committed. While the scope of their commitments should be applauded, they are off track to meet them. Writing in his foreword, Archbishop Tutu says: "I am deeply worried that France, Germany and Italy are not going to keep the promises they made to Africa in 2005, because then all of Europe will be behind. President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Berlusconi need to hear more from their citizens on this subject if they are to make the right decisions, both for Europe and Africa."

New health initiative to bolster G8 promises

When Gordon Brown, UK prime minister, will announce details of the new International Health Partnership initiative later this week, he will have the backing of relevant non-governmental organisations. The programme has already presented during Angela Merkel’s, visit to London on 22 August. The plans for an International Health Partnership are part of a global campaign on health and are designed to co-ordinate international funding for health systems in poor countries. It will bring together major donor countries together with international agencies like the World Bank and World Health Organisation (WHO).



In a joint statement with German Chancellor Angela Merkel following bilateral talks in Downing Street, Gordon Brown said that addressing healthcare and aid provision was now a "development emergency". The new Partnership, which will launch formally on 5 September, will drive forward work on Millennium Development Goals involving the reduction of child and maternal mortality and the tackling of specific diseases such as HIV/AIDS (see video).

Alison Woodhead, head of Oxfam's international campaign for health and education, said on 22 August, "This is a great initiative that deserves widespread international support. Brown and Merkel should be congratulated for following through on their G8 promises to improve health care. The challenge for them now is to make sure other countries get on board to ensure maximum impact. There are women, men and children in developing countries who are dying because they don't have access to healthcare or any doctors or nurses to attend to them. This Partnership could literally save lives, by coordinating investment in healthcare that is free, public, and well staffed."