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The G-8
Summit in Japan earlier this month was a painful
demonstration of the pitiful state of global cooperation.
The world is in a deepening crisis. Food prices are soaring.
Oil prices are at historic highs. The leading economies are
entering a recession. Climate change negotiations are going
around in circles. Aid to the poorest countries is stagnant,
despite years of promised increases.
And yet
in this gathering storm, it was hard to find a single real
accomplishment by the world’s leaders.
The
world needs global solutions for global problems, but the
G-8 leaders clearly cannot provide them. Because virtually
all of the political leaders that went to the summit are
deeply unpopular at home, few offer any global leadership.
They are weak individually, and even weaker when they get
together and display to the world their inability to
mobilize real action.
There
are four deep problems.
The
first is the incoherence of American leadership. While we
are well past the time when the United States alone could
solve any global problems, it does not even try to find
shared global solutions. The will to global cooperation was
weak even in the Clinton administration, but it has
disappeared entirely during the Bush administration.
The
second problem is the lack of global financing. The hunger
crisis can be overcome in poor countries if they get help to
grow more food. The global energy and climate crises can be
overcome if the world invests together to develop new energy
technologies. Diseases such as malaria can be overcome
through globally coordinated investments in disease control.
The oceans, rainforests, and air can be kept safe through
pooled investments in environmental protection.
Global
solutions are not expensive, but they are not free, either.
Global
solutions to poverty, food production, and development of
new clean energy technology will require annual investments
of roughly 350 billion dollars, or one per cent of GNP of
the rich world. This is obviously affordable, and is modest
compared to military spending, but is far above the pittance
that the G-8 actually brings to the table to solve these
urgent challenges.
British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made a valiant effort to get
the rest of Europe to honour the modest aid pledges made at
the G-8 Summit in 2005, but it has been a tough fight, and
one that has not been won.
The
third problem is the disconnection between global scientific
expertise and politicians. Scientists and engineers have
developed many powerful ways to address today’s challenges,
whether growing food, controlling diseases, or protecting
the environment. And these methods have become even more
powerful in recent years with advances in information and
communications technology, which make global solutions
easier to identify and implement than ever before.
The
fourth problem is that the G-8 ignores the very
international institutions - notably the United Nations and
the World Bank - that offer the best hope to implement
global solutions. These institutions are often deprived of
political backing, underfinanced, and then blamed by the G-8
when global problems are not solved. Instead, they should be
given clear authority and responsibilities, and then held
accountable for their performance.
President Bush may be too unaware to recognize that his
historically high 70pc disapproval rating among US voters is
related to the fact that his government turned its back on
the international community - and thereby got trapped in war
and economic crisis. The other G-8 leaders presumably can
see that their own unpopularity at home is strongly related
to high food and energy prices, and an increasingly unstable
global climate and global economy, none of which they can
address on their own.
Starting in January 2009 with the new US president,
politicians should take the best chance for their own
political survival, and of course for their countries’
well-being, by reinvigorating global cooperation. They
should agree to address shared global goals, including the
fight against poverty, hunger, and disease (the Millennium
Development Goals), as well as climate change and
environmental destruction.
To
achieve these goals, the G-8 should set clear timetables for
action, and transparent agreements on how to fund it. The
smartest move would be to agree that each country tax its
CO2 emissions in order to reduce climate change, and then
devote a fixed amount of the proceeds to global problem
solving. With the funding assured, the G-8 would suddenly
move from empty promises to real policies.
Backed
by adequate funding, the world’s political leaders should
turn to the expert scientific community and international
organizations to help implement a truly global effort.
Rather than regarding the UN and its agencies as competitors
or threats to national sovereignty, they should recognize
that working with the UN agencies is in fact the only way to
solve global problems, and therefore is the key to their own
political survival.
These
basic steps - agreeing on global goals, mobilizing the
financing needed to meet them, and identifying the
scientific expertise and organizations needed to implement
solutions - are basic management logic. Some may scoff that
this approach is impossible at the global level, because all
politics are local. Yet today, all politicians depend on
global solutions for their own political survival. That by
itself could make solutions that now seem out of reach
commonplace in the future.
Time is
short, since global problems are mounting rapidly. The world
is passing through the greatest economic crisis in decades.
It is time to say to the G-8 leaders, “Get your act
together, or don’t even bother to meet next year.”
It is
too embarrassing to watch grown men and women gather for
empty photo opportunities.
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