UN urges G8 to stick to Africa aid pledge

G8 Summit begins in Japan tomorrow:

TOKYO - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Group of Eight rich nations 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 emphasize 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 industrialized 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 formalize 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.

-Reuters