LONDON: The figures seem mind-boggling. The amount wiped off share values in one day — $36 billion. The price tag for bringing Britain’s Railtrack back into semi-public ownership — $31 billion. The largest accounting fraud in history at WorldCom — US $4 billion.

Yet world leaders at the G8 Summit in Canada last week could offer less than $1.5 billion of debt relief for the very poorest nations, despite a commitment three years ago in Cologne to fund $100 billion of relief and despite a personal appeal from four African leaders who journeyed to Canada to present Africa’s case.

The amount the rich offered to the poor nations was merely the cost of organizing the last five G8 summits.

In the less developed world, 643 million people have a life expectancy of 51; the World Health Organization estimates that $20 billion a year directed at preventive health programmes would transform their life chances. The cost of primary education for all of Africa is similarly trivial by our standards. Amounts of cash that are almost daily currency in a Western country could transform Africa.

More than 300 million people around the world live on less than a dollar a day each, and Tony Blair went to Canada having pledged to help them.

When their local shops are swamped with cheap produce from heavily subsidised US farmers and the unwanted surplus of the still unreformed Common Agricultural Policy, it is hollow in the extreme for us to instruct them to restructure their economies, clean up corruption and open their markets to yet more multinationals.

The most important concession we can still make is over trade — to level the playing field and give Africans the chance to pull themselves up by their own efforts. Even this the West resists — though such is the scale of contemporary inequality that we would hardly notice the difference. Our failure to act is a moral outrage. Nothing less.—Dawn/The Observer News Service