CALGARY: Aid agencies furiously criticized the world’s richest countries, describing the G8’s much-vaunted rescue plan for Africa as a squandered opportunity and “recycled peanuts.”

Tony Blair hailed the action plan from the west’s leading industrial nations as a “real significant step forward,” but the blueprint was strongly criticized for failing to provide the Marshall plan for Africa the British prime minister promised at last year’s summit in Genoa.

African leaders invited to the G8 gathering in Kananaskis, Canada, expressed deep disappointment that the plan did nothing to open western markets, cancel debts of the poorest countries or provide the financial aid needed to meet the UN’s targets for tackling global poverty by 2015.

G8 sources claimed progress had been made on peacekeeping, resolving conflicts and eradicating polio. Half the $12 billion a year already pledged by rich countries for aid budgets will be committed to Africa, while the fund to pay off the debts of the most impoverished states will be increased by $1 billion.

But the outcome was a blow for Blair, who had been pressing the G8 to come up with a more ambitious set of proposals, but was thwarted by the US and Japan.

He said that the $6 billion a year was a “significant uplift in aid,” although Africa would have to make good on its side of the bargain by rooting out corruption.

The World Bank estimates between $40 billion and $60 billion a year is needed to get Africa on target to meet UN development goals.

Aid agencies though, were scathing about the plan, attacking it for its lack of new money and comparing it unfavourably with the generosity of the US in the original Marshall plan, which provided one per cent of US GDP for five years to rebuild Europe after the second world war.

Oxfam said the summit had “failed to deliver the much-hyped breakthrough for Africa. A year of promises and grand intentions came to nothing as the leaders of the industrialized world agreed to an action plan lacking two key elements — action and a plan.”

Phil Twyford, Oxfam’s international advocacy director, said, “We’re extremely disappointed by this wasted opportunity. They’re offering peanuts to Africa — and recycled peanuts at that.”

Bob Geldof, the debt campaigner and Live Aid organizer said, “It looked fairly promising until a month ago. But in the past two weeks it has all unravelled into this meaningless conference.”

As the G8 summit ended yesterday, the UN development programme reported that on current trends, only ten of the 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa were on course to meet the 2015 targets, which include halving poverty, universal primary education and cutting infant mortality by two-thirds.

Four African presidents — Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olesegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria and Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal — had been invited to the summit as representatives of Nepad, the New Partnership for African Development set up in the hope that a commitment to better governance and tackling corruption would lead to more aid.

Nepad sources described the text as “absolutely empty.” The questions of investment in Africa’s infrastructure, debt cancellation and trade access had not been mentioned.

G8 sources said that by next year, a plan would be in place to develop Africa’s own peacekeeping force, with special focus on Sudan, Angola and the Congo.

While welcoming the G8 focus on Africa, Henry Northover of Cafod, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, said that “Hopes for a potential new aid relationship between the richest countries and Africa have been squandered.” Cafod said the “inaction” plan was striking only for its vacuousness and contained no concrete actions of timetabled commitments.

Andrew Pendleton of Christian Aid said, “Meeting in their Rocky Mountain retreat in Canada, the G8 leaders have listened to Africa and that’s a step in the right direction.”

Responding to Oxfam’s comments, a British official said on Thursday, “Pressure groups exist to put pressure on government and it’s right that they do so, but to describe the outcome of a summit that has delivered an extra $6 billion and more for Africa as peanuts is absurd.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.