10 June 2007

Geldof and Bono blast G8 for betraying Africa

telegraph.co.uk
Geldof and Bono blast G8 for betraying Africa
By David Blair in Kühlungsborn
Last Updated: 12:56am BST 10/06/2007


The G8 summit ended yesterday with world leaders pledging to spend £30 billion on fighting Aids, malaria and tuberculosis and stressing their determination to help Africa.

Bob Geldof; the G8 summit ended with world leaders pledging to spend £30 billion on Africa, but anti-poverty campaigners denounced this as a 'betrayal'
Geldof: £30bn pledge is a 'total farce'

But anti-poverty campaigners denounced this as a "betrayal" and said the headline figure was "misleading".

Earlier announcements from President George W Bush account for half of the £30 billion and there is no sign that any new money arose from the summit in Germany.

The G8 has also "watered down" a pledge brokered by Tony Blair at the Gleneagles summit in 2005 to fund "universal access" to anti-Aids drugs, critics said.

As the G8 leaders left the Baltic town of Heiligendamm, Bob Geldof, the anti-poverty campaigner and rock star, called them "creeps" and denounced their work as a "total farce".

"The richest countries in the world, trillions of dollars swirling around that table, smiling in that stupid tent chair with the candy stripes. Do me a favour: get serious. This wasn't serious, this was a farce, a total farce," he said.

Bono, Geldof's fellow rock star and campaigner, accused the leaders of deliberate "obfuscation" and said the summit's final declaration masked their failure to reach a consensus on helping Africa.

The pair singled out the Canadian and Italian prime ministers, Stephen Harper and Romano Prodi, for blocking pledges for more aid.

But Mr Blair described the agreement on Africa as "progress".

The Gleneagles pledge to increase aid by £25 billion by 2010 - with half going to Africa -has been reaffirmed and Britain and America are on course to meet their side of this bargain.

Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, who chaired the summit, said that everything realistically possible had been achieved.

No comments:

Blog Archive

My Labels