Geldof: trade progress ‘unseemingly ugly’
Bob Geldof has delivered his assessment of progress made in tackling poverty in Africa nearly one year on from the G8 summit in Gleneagles.
The anti-poverty campaigner said it was a case of the “good, the ok and the ugly”, as he detailed the findings of a report by campaign group Data, which he founded with fellow musician Bono.
“The ‘good’ in topline would be the debt piece. The ‘ok’ is aid. And the unseemingly ugly is the trade piece,” he told a press conference in London.
Members of the World Trade Organisation are currently meeting in Geneva to try and thrash out an agreement on reducing agricultural subsidies and industrial tariffs.
The failure to make progress on world trade was a theme picked up by Conservative leader David Cameron in a speech earlier today, when he criticised the “short-sighted protectionism by rich countries”.
Mr Cameron urged other countries to follow Britain’s lead in stepping up to the challenges presented by global poverty.
He said: “The spirit of Gleneagles 2005 was not meant to be British pushing and cajoling other developed nations into line.”
Data’s report, Mr Geldof said, was a report card on the progress made since Gleneagles.
He stressed that it was an empirical, independent report and added: “if the thing had been a disaster, believe you me I would be sitting here telling you it had been a disaster.”
He said the report should be as useful for the development world as the Amnesty report was for human rights. “It should be a weapon and a tool,” he said – a weapon for anti-poverty campaigners and a tool for government to chart their progress.
On the Africa Progress Panel, which the prime minister announced earlier this week and on which Mr Geldof will sit, he expressed the hope that it would have “a serious political logic”.
He also declared Live8 a success, insisting it had led to more people being fed, more children in school and more people being treated for their diseases.
Mr Geldof is an adviser on David Cameron’s globalisation and global poverty policy group, and today the Tory leader said he was “passionately committed” to an “ambitious policy programme on international development”.
Addressing an audience in Oxford he praised Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for their “personal commitment” to raising the significance of the fight against global poverty.
And he said a Conservative government would build on this by pressing for further progress on trade, abolishing “killer tariffs” such as levies on imports of anti-malarial bednets and vital medicines.
Developing nations “need economic empowerment, to remove the shackles that lock poverty in; and economic liberalism, to remove the barriers that hold prosperity back,” he said.
