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U.N.'s
Ban urges G8 to stick to Africa
aid pledge
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TOKYO(July
2,2008)
- U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Group of Eight rich
nations on Tuesday to stick with a three-year old pledge to raise
African aid levels to $25 billion a year, after a report the leaders
may be about to backtrack.
"I would like to urge and emphasise that leaders of G8 should
implement their commitment which was made at the Gleneagles summit
meeting," Ban said at a news conference in Tokyo, referring to
the G8's 2005 summit meeting in Scotland.
"When it comes to climate change ... and the global food crisis,
these campaigns should be led by the industrialised countries -- they
have the capacity, they have the resources, and I hope the leadership
demonstrates their political will," he said.
Ban's comments come less than a week ahead of the G8 summit in northern
Japan on July 7-9.
They follow a report by the Financial Times newspaper on Sunday that
said a draft communique for the summit failed to cite a specific aid
target to Africa as set at Gleneagles.
At that summit in 2005, G8 nations pledged to raise annual aid levels
by $50 billion by 2010, $25 billion of which was for Africa. This
was reiterated at last year's summit in Germany.
Experts have expressed concerns about the pledge, saying donor countries
may fail to meet their promises, which are not legally binding and
are hard to track in actual spending.
African development, as well as the food crisis and climate change,
will be on the agenda for next week's G8 summit.
Eight other major economies, including China and India, will also
meet on July 9 on the sidelines of the G8 summit to discuss climate
change.
Eager to show leadership ahead of the summit, Japan hosted an African
development conference in May at which it vowed to double development
assistance to Africa over the next five years.
Ban, who will take part in the summit, also called for the G8 nations
to reach an agreement on long-term cuts in emissions of greenhouse
gases at the meeting.
"I hope that at the Hokkaido summit meeting the leaders will
be able to agree on a shared vision, how the future agreement will
look and also commit themselves to expand and build on the existing
agreement," he said.
In Japan, the G8 nations are expected to formalise a goal of halving
the world's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, after agreeing last
year in Germany to seriously consider the target.
But doubts persist about whether and how far the leaders will be able
to go beyond last year's agreement.
Britain's climate envoy said last week that a breakthrough is unlikely
in talks on global warming at the summit.
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in June that the G8 nations
would not be setting a medium-term target for cutting CO2 emissions
by 2020 or 2030, seen as necessary by environmentalists as a way to
achieving the long-term goal.
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