WASHINGTON, June 8: British Prime Minister Tony Blair failed to convince President George Bush to double US aid to Africa, but he did succeed in getting a pledge to ultimately cancel the debt of all African nations. Mr Bush also pledged new $674 million in US aid, in addition to nearly $1.4 billion pledged by the US this year.
Encouraged by this gesture, Mr Blair on Wednesday pledged to continue to lobby the world’s eight leading industrial nations who meet in Scotland next month to double their aid to help fight poverty in Africa.
Mr Blair’s meeting with President Bush at the White House on Tuesday did not lead to firm promises on either canceling Third World debt or reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as the British prime minister had expected.
A United Nations Development Programme report, released on Wednesday, showed that the global community was falling short of its commitments to reduce world poverty by the year 2015.
The study revealed that on current trends, there will be 5 million deaths in Africa among children under the age of five, compared with 2 million if goals set in 2000 had been achieved. It also says that 115 million children will be deprived of an education and 219 million extra people living below the poverty line.
At a joint news conference on Tuesday afternoon, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair predicted that the leading industrial nations would eventually agree to forgive African nations’ debt to aid in their recovery.
“Our countries are developing a proposal for the G-8 that will eliminate 100 percent of that debt,” said Mr Bush, brushing aside questions about why the US was not willing to meet the British goal for an immediate doubling of aid to Africa.
US aid to Africa has tripled during his tenure, noted Mr. Bush, who also has pledged $15 billion for a five-year campaign against AIDS in Africa.
While the US ranks as the biggest donor nation in sheer dollars, contributing about one-quarter of all official aid worldwide, it remains outranked by many other nations in the amount devoted to aid as a percentage of its economy.
Mr Blair, standing alongside Mr Bush in the East Room after a private meeting in the White House and before a working dinner, attempted to display a united front on aid for Africa.
“I think there is a real desire to make sure that we cancel the debt, and cancel the debt in such a way that it doesn’t inhibit or disadvantage the international institutions,” such as the World Bank, that lent the money, Mr Blair said.
Their appearance together was the first since a recent disclosure of the minutes of a high-level British government meeting in July 2002—about eight months before the invasion of Iraq—in which a British official returning from talks in Washington reported that military action “was now seen as inevitable,” that Mr Bush “wanted to remove Saddam [Hussein] through military action” and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The so-called Downing Street Memo caused political tremors on the eve of Mr Blair’s re-election in May but has had little impact on the Bush administration, which flatly denies the contention that it doctored prewar intelligence about Iraq to support the March 2003 invasion.
