Punting in Scotland
The Group of Eight summit in Scotland this week will go down in history as the one marred by the horrific bombings in London. These acts of terrorism will inevitably overshadow the failure of the gathered world leaders to make progress on two other problems threatening global development: climate change and the West's practice of subsidizing its farmers in ways that undercut agriculture in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
The G-8 host, Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, had hoped to use the summit to break the deadlock on these two issues, but he failed. President Bush refused to commit to any targets for reducing greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, that are causing global warming. Bush aides worked to weaken the wording in the official statement on climate change, even in the face of new evidence of global warming from data on polar ice sheets and ocean temperatures.
The United States, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is the only G-8 nation that has refused to agree to the Kyoto Protocol's greenhouse gas reductions. Bush has said Kyoto commitments would ''wreck" the US economy. A 2003 analysis by MIT researchers of the CO{-2} limits required by the McCain-Lieberman bill, which are admittedly less rigorous than Kyoto's, found that they would cost an average US household $20 a year.
US intransigence was especially unfortunate because the meeting included, as guests, representatives of China and India. These two quickly industrializing countries are exempted from CO{-2} reductions by Kyoto, but they must be included in the long-range effort to curb CO{-2} if global warming's unpredictable effects on sea levels, agriculture, and weather are to be avoided. Witnessing the inability of the G-8 leaders to get the United States to commit to carbon reductions cannot have encouraged the Asian leaders to plan their own emission reductions.
On farm export subsidies, resistance to eliminating them and creating a level playing field for farmers in the developing world comes from both the United States and Europe, especially France. Instead of taking action on the issue, the G-8 leaders passed it on to World Trade Organization negotiators. The G-8 leaders' commitment to more than double their aid to Africa by 2010 is welcome, especially if it is matched by anticorruption steps in the recipient nations, but ending crop subsidies would help bring farmers in some of the world's poorest countries into the global economy.
Blair deserves credit for spotlighting global warming and trade subsidies as issues the G-8 should act on. Unfortunately, opponents of change blocked real progress, and it is unlikely the result would have been any better even without the London attacks.
