President George Bush has dug in his heels ahead of Tony Blairs visit to Washington Monday, when the prime minister will attempt to convince the US to accept a new action plan on Africa that would require a doubling of American aid, reports the World Bank press review Friday.
Speaking to reporters at a meeting with the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, Bush made it clear he would not drop his opposition to a British plan to create an International Financing Facility (IFF) for Africa to mobilize more foreign aid. The US also opposes a British suggestion that some of the International Monetary Funds gold reserves should be sold to help pay off African IMF obligations.
The President signaled on Wednesday that he believed the leadership of the G8 group of industrialized countries was already moving in the right direction on African aid, and the policy did not need overhauling at July’s Gleneagles summit.
US officials say African aid has already tripled under Bush, and that his Millennium Challenge Account will increase the level of US foreign aid, now one of the G8s lowest at 0,16 percent of GDP.
The news comes as The International Herald Tribune reports that in a rare break with the United States, Japan reaffirmed Thursday that it would join Britain in increasing its aid to Africa.
The Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has promised “that Japan will double assistance to Africa in three years time,” Hatsuhisa Takashima, a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said here Thursday.
But on Thursday, Japanese Foreign Ministry officials said the government had not been decided if Japan would double its overall aid to Africa, currently about 800 million US dollar, or only its aid to sub-Sahara Africa, about 530 million dollar.
The Wall Street Journal Europe meanwhile writes that Prime Minister Tony Blair wants from the G-8 summit a package of measures to help Africa that range from money to measures to fight corruption and force transparency on transactions between African governments and Western resource companies.
He would like to double international development aid to (Africa) to 50 billion US dollar (300 milliarder DKR) a year, eliminate debt interest payments by the poorest countries, and agree on a schedule to eliminate subsidies that rich countries pay to their exporters.
On climate change, Blair wants to set out a new framework to tackle the problem that moves beyond the fractious Kyoto agreement on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Here the US is the primary obstacle – and the only G-8 country outside the Kyoto process.
The New York Times writes in Fridays editorial that a real solution to debt relief has been postponed because the wealthy countries can not agree on how to finance it. But Britain offered a good answer: have the IMF sell about 12 billion US dollar of its gold reserves, which have a total market value of about 43 billion dollar.
That would cover debt owed the fund, which accounts for 30 percent of the interest payments owed over the next 5 to 10 years by the affected countries. The fund could sell more gold to cancel debts owed the World Bank and other banks. This is the simplest and least painful solution, notes the daily.
It would not require new contributions or hurt lending to middle-income countries, and it is the only one that has any hope of support from rich countries. But the United States has veto power over gold decisions in the monetary fund, so this idea needs approval from Congress – and the mining industry has blocked a vote.
US President Bush should spend the political capital to push this good idea through the Republican-controlled Congress before the July summit, the influential US daily argues.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
