L’AQUILA, ITALY — In a meeting this morning with the leaders of Egypt, Algeria, Senegal, Nigeria, Libya and Ethiopia, President Obama spoke about his personal connections to both Africa and poverty, and according to a top White House aide, “you could have heard a pin drop.”
After describing a food security initiative that the president and other G-8 leaders have been working on, the president talked about development and the importance of governance.
“He shared a personal story,” said deputy National Security Adviser Michael Froman. “Everyone knows that his father was from Kenya, that he still has relatives living in poverty, and that while he’s President of the United States he feels poverty in a very personal way because of this of his family situation.”
Froman recounted that the president shared that when his father, Barack Obama Sr., came to the United States from Kenya, Kenya’s GDP was higher than Korea’s.
“Obviously much has happened since then and he wanted to make it clear that the problems that Africans face weren’t just a product of colonialism or past history,” Froman said, “that this partnership — whether it’s over food security or other development ideas — require local governments to take responsibility seriously. This wasn’t a time to make excuses. And that it was important to join together in a clear-eyed way.”
As the president put it, Froman went on, “his cousin in Kenya cant find a job without paying a bribe, and that’s not the fault of the G-8. And when companies can’t operate without paying, in some parts of Africa, without paying the 25 percent fee off the top in bribes, that’s not colonialism.”
The president said, Froman said, recounting from his contemporaneous notes, “that it is important to think about people on the ground who are focused not about who’s at fault on how to survive in Africa’s situation but are focused on how to survive and succeed and provide for their families and in that context he emphasized the importance of transparency, openness, and efficiency.”
It’s important, the president told the African leaders, that development programs are implemented so they “reach people who really need them, that the assistance actually gets to the farmers and the farmers benefit from this. That was the point he made. You could have heard a pin drop in the room. Several following speakers noting that they thought it was a very moving remark and thanked him for sharing his personal story with them. And I think it helped define the seriousness of the discussion and the importance of the subject.”
In a press conference following the meeting, President Obama acknowledged the remarks. “The point I was making was that my father traveled to the United States a mere 50 years ago yet now I have family members who live in villages, they themselves are not going hungry but they live in villages where hunger is real. And so this is something that I understand in very personal terms. And if you talk to people on the ground in Africa, certainly in Kenya, they will say that part of the issue here is the institutions aren’t working for ordinary people and so governance is a vital concern that has to be addressed.”
By bringing up the example of South Korea, the president said, he was trying to make the point that “the South Korean government working with the private sector and civil society was able to create a set of institutions that provided transparency and accountability and efficiency that allowed for extraordinary economic progress. And that there was no reason why many African countries could not do the same.”
G8 pledges $20 billion in farm aid to poor nations
L’AQUILA, Italy (Reuters) –
G8 leaders pledged $20 billion in farm aid in Italy on Friday to help poor nations feed themselves, surpassing expectations on the final day of a summit that has yielded little progress on climate change and trade.
With Barack Obama traveling on to Ghana for his first visit to Africa as president, the United States used the L’Aquila summit to push for a shift toward farm investment from food aid and will make $3.5 billion available to the 3-year program.
“There is no reason Africa should not be self-sufficient when it comes to food,” said Obama, recalling that his relatives in Kenya live “in villages where hunger is real,” though they themselves are not going hungry.
Obama said Africa had enough arable land but lacked seeds, irrigation and mechanisms for farmers to get a fair price for their produce — issues that the Group of Eight richest nations, emerging powers and African countries promised to tackle.
But Africa told the wealthy powers they must honor their commitments, old and new — mindful that some in the G8 had fallen well short of their 2005 promise to hike annual aid by $50 billion by 2010, half of which was meant for Africa.
South African President Jacob Zuma said the new funding will “go a long way” to helping Africa, adding: “We can’t say it’s enough, but at least it begins to do very concrete things.”
LIVE UP TO PROMISES
Nigerian Agriculture Minister Abba Ruma said the new pledge was “very commendable in view of the current global recession.”
But he cautioned that it must be “disbursed expeditiously. It is only then we will know that the G8 is living up to its commitment and not just making a pledge and going to sleep.”
The United Nations says the number of malnourished people has risen in the past two years and is expected to top 1.02 billion this year, reversing decades of declines. The global recession is expected to make 103 million more go hungry.
Aid bodies like the World Food Program said a last-minute surge of generosity at the summit in L’Aquila resulting in the $20 billion pledge was “greeted with great happiness.”
That amount over three years may compare unfavorably with the $13.4 billion the G8 says it has already disbursed between January 2008 and July 2009, but aid groups said the new funding pledged in Italy was more clearly focused.
Japan and the European Union were also championing a code of conduct for responsible investment in the face of growing farmland acquisition or “land grabs” in emerging nations.
G14 THE WAY AHEAD
The L’Aquila summit has produced chequered results on other issues, making only limited progress in crucial climate talks following the refusal by major developing nations to sign up to the goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The 17 biggest emitters in the Major Economies Forum chaired by Obama failed to get emerging powers like China and India to accept these targets, though they did agree temperature rises should be limited to 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).
But Obama, also suffering a delay to his own global warming bill in the U.S. Congress, said the talks had created momentum for a new U.N. climate change pact in Copenhagen in December.
G8 leaders said the global financial crisis still posed serious risks to the world economy. Further stimulus packages for growth might still be required and it was dangerous to implement “exit strategies” from emergency measures too early.
“Reaching the bottom of the slump is not when you start with exit strategies,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
She dismissed a Chinese proposal at the summit for debate on an alternative global reserve currency to the dollar in the long term as something not of “practical relevance”.
There also appeared to be growing consensus at the summit that the G8 itself, long criticized as an elite club, no longer reflected the shifting patterns of global economic power.
Under Italy’s presidency, the G8 (United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Russia and Canada) expanded to a “G14” with major emerging powers on the second day, and added about 15 more, including nine Africans, on the final day.
“As far as I am concerned the G14 is the format that in the future will have the best possibility to take the most important decisions on the world economy, and not just that,” said Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — a position backed by France.
Obama also pointed to the demise of the G8, saying tackling global challenges “in the absence of major powers like China, India and Brazil seems to be wrongheaded”.
(Additional reporting by Felix Onuah; writing by Janet McBride and Stephen Brown; editing by Ralph Boulton and Crispian Balmer)
