Analysis: Selling globalisation

G8 leaders want to explain globalisation to protesters

By CNN European Political Editor Robin Oakley

GENOA, Italy -- Leaders of the major industrialised democracies who assemble in Genoa, Italy on Friday for the Group of Eight summit will seek to demonstrate their concern for the less well off by giving a major boost to a global fund to boost the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

Presidents and prime ministers of the eight countries-the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Japan and Russia-have already pledged around one billion dollars to the fund initiated by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan , who will join them in Genoa.

The G8 leaders are particularly keen that the “Global AIDS and Health Fund” should help to combat the three major infectious diseases, on the continent of Africa, where many countries’ economies have been devastated by health problems, especially AIDS.

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With their eyes partly on the thousands of demonstrators who are expected to protest in the streets of Genoa, the leaders will seek to emphasise what they see as the positive elements in globalisation.

Italy’s Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero, says the G8 must do more to explain globalisation and to stop it being demonised by protesters.

The G8 leaders are demanding reforms of the World Bank and other multilateral lending institutions to help battle poverty in underdeveloped nation. Bush in particular wants them to do more to boost education.

But the leaders are also expected to back a new round of world trade negotiations this autumn.

Echoed by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George W. Bush has argued in the run-up to the summit that the protesters are doing no service to those they claim to be helping.

He insists: “Those who protest free trade are no friends of the poor. Those who protest free trade seek to deny them the best hope for escaping poverty.”

But Bush will be under pressure from other Summit participants both over his proposed missile defence plan and over his refusal to sign up for the Kyoto Accord on combating global warming.

And he is likely to be at loggerheads with some other summit participants over his call for the World Bank to give more help by way of grants and less in the form of loans which are often not repaid. Others argue that this would diminish the overall amount of aid to developing countries.

As ever the G8 summit is in danger of having its longer term economic objectives overshadowed by more immediate political concerns.

Foreign ministers from the G8 countries, meeting in Rome over two days to help to define the Genoa agenda, spent much of their time focussed on the deteriorating situations in the Middle East and in Macedonia.

The eight ministers backed a call for third party monitors to be deployed to help resolve tensions in the current Arab-Israeli conflicts, a move which is vigorously opposed by Israel and which has previously been resisted by the US.

How much environmental issues will figure at the summit is still uncertain. But EU officials have in recent days been pressuring Japanese ministers to back the Kyoto accord without waiting to see what alternative plans the US comes up with later this year to combat global warming.