Dave Johnson

With the excitment of Live 8 slowly fading from our memories people are rapidly reverting to their same old selves - and rightly so, thinking about difficult problems like poverty between sets of very rich and famous people who pretend to give two shits can be tough. Everyone just wants to get back to the simple life of shopping at Wal-Mart, driving their cars and demanding such low prices that Northern countries have no choice but to impose unfair trade rules on the poor South. We must maintaing the global apartheid after all.

But there is still a glimmer of hope! The 8 richest nations on earth, the G8 (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia), have recently told the media that they are writing off $40bn in debt that 18 of the poorest countries in the world owe to the 8 richest. Everyone is talking about how great this is - won�t they just have a nice time now. Well maybe not.

Although they no longer owe some $40bn, they will also no longer be benefitting from a similar amount of aid. Of course this is good since it will cut down on paperwork, and therefore jobs. This means that those countries which received the debt relief are hardly better off. And let us not forget that the majority of the problems in these countries were caused by Northern countries who either:
a) colonised those countries to get at natural resources
b) uphold unfair trade rules such that it is cheaper for an African to buy wheat from the United States than it is to buy it from their own backyard
c) support corrupt leaders for various reasons (usually war or natural resources)
d) support them to use their aid or oil money to buy arms from Northern countries
e) spend 25 times more on defence than on aid
f) pave the way for multinationals to have access to those markets
g) etc etc etc

Now that the Live 8 hype is over and the super rich and famous like Chris Martin, Madonna et al have derided us cynics as being �stupid� while relentlessly jet setting all over the world, all the �smart� groupies who attended Live 8 can can get back to their lives forgetting that there is even a place called Africa and the G8 protestors can do the real work � well they are somewhat misguided too as Monbiot points out.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 6th, 2005 at 10:41 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.