Monday, October 08, 2012

Next G8: Star Cruise

The summit will also include paragliding, water sports, bungee lessons

With passing time, experts now concur that French premier, and (hyper)active G8 member Nicholas Sarkozy has started looking – and behaving – eerily similar to Sylvester Stallone [Go ahead, give it a try; identify sweet Nick in the photograph]. Funnily, this behavioural similarity extends to the whole G8 belt [US, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Canada, Italy, Russia and Ethiopia... er, alright, if you caught us on this, read on, you seem to be interested], with almost every member contributing his Shylockian best to behaving like a spoilt celebrity during every summit, finally achieving nothing. So we did what we do best [no no, not that; Bush does that better] – we analysed the progress report of the past few summits to decipher what exactly has been achieved in terms of contribution to least developed nations!

G8 summit in Birmingham, England, 1998: Protesters for the first time were formally allowed to give a written letter, which requested G8 to work on the heavy debt burden of the third world. Letter accepted, case dismissed! Nothing much was discussed, leave of course the letter. Cologne, Germany, 1999: To prove that they were worried about poverty, an ‘officially’ undisclosed amount was sanctioned. According to World Bank, the ‘sanction’ was so small that it wasn’t enough to even provide five bread loaves per person per year per poor country. Okinawa, Japan, 2000: Aid amount invested in projects: Close to nil; evidently because of billions spent on militarisation of north-east Asia. Genoa, Italy, 2001: Progress on debt cancellation: Nil! Massive protests took the blame, rather than the G8 members.

Kananaskis, Canada, 2002: Among many important issues, NEPAD [New Partnership for Africa’s Development] was also on agenda. $64 billion was requested, but only $6 billion was sanctioned. The reason? Russia requested – and was presumably given – $20 billion for the upkeep of the Russian nuclear stockpiles.

Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.

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