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Boris Johnson has gone to this weekend’s G7 summit to promise to “insert the world”. On Sunday night it was clear that by mid-next year COVID-19, which is committed to donating a billion doses of vaccine, would not even be fully fulfilled. No radical announcement was made about climate change or the cancellation of Southern debt. In the words of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the summit would be “dropped as an unforgivable moral failure”.
Vaccines prevailed in this G7, surprisingly, given the marked difference in the spread of vaccines. While G7 nations incorporate 4.6 million people a day, low-income countries can only manage 63,000. The G7 will include almost all citizens by the end of the year, at current rates, low-income countries would have to wait 57 years. This is why the global south requires rich countries to give up on intellectual property rules so that countries around the world can increase production as quickly as possible. But with the notable exception of U.S. President Biden, and the occasional noise from French President Macron, the G7 has sided with large pharmaceutical corporations to some extent to protect the right to earn at any cost in life.
These leaders wanted to use the G7 summit to prove that they could help the global south by leaving the profits of the Big Pharma to it. On Friday, a billion doses were put on the table. This would be enough to include about 10% of the unintegrated population. By Sunday, that number had dropped to $ 870 million, of which only about $ 600 million was actually “new,” most would not be offered until next year, and some of them appear to be closer to exports (to be paid) than donations.
If we consider that a single factory in Bangladesh can generate between 600 and 800 million doses a year if patents are rejected, it is clear that this G7 commitment does not even function as a fig leaf.
Beyond vaccines, the pandemic has caused a debt crisis in many countries, which could exacerbate poverty and inequality for a generation. However, the G7 did not offer anything new to change this situation, especially without taking action against banks and hedge funds, which continue to drain billions of dollars a year from countries that would have to spend on health and economic protection. And on the main problem of our time, halting climate change, the summit merely reaffirmed a decade-long goal of giving $ 100,000 billion a year to developing countries to adapt to climate change – a promise they no longer kept in practice – and pledged to phase out coal. , but without any real details.
Perhaps nothing should surprise us. After all, the G7 pioneer emerged in the mid-1970s as a coup against a more democratic and equal state. The first summit – then just the six most powerful governments in the world – was held in 1975 on the outskirts of Paris. These leaders gathered to close oil sources with threats from Middle Eastern suppliers to control world energy markets and how to deal with former colonies demanding economic liberation from the Western-controlled international economy. Working within the non-aligned movement, these southern countries used the UN to demand a more democratic global economy, where large companies and large finances would be constrained, commodity producers would get a fairer share of revenue, and important technologies. share for the benefit of all.
The G6 summit was a counterattack to this project for a fairer world. The UN’s refusal to include the interests of the richest meant that, in the G6’s view, it should be rejected. Strategic economic decisions were taken to closed rooms of a privileged political class.
The G7 (or sometimes the G8 when it merges with Russia) has remained a forum for establishing the rule of the global economy ever since. At times, it was a body that could distribute enough charity to sustain the status quo. In 2005, the G8 in Scotland, overseen by Gordon Brown, saw packages to get rid of large debts and promised to increase budgets for foreign aid, even if it did nothing to change the direction of the global economy that was already in the biggest accident. Since the 1920s.
In 2021, the poor donations and vague promises of the G7 would not convince anyone that they have the answers to the world’s problems. It is true that there were a number of moves, again driven by the US, to establish a global minimum corporate tax rate. But that is the result of many years of campaigning in the United States and around the world. What the G7 approved was a very low corporate tax rate, as countries like the UK tried to exempt parts of their economy from tax rules.
No, the real lesson of this G7 is that we should not be so excited that the world’s major powers are able to sort out the basic problems we face today. They aren’t even able to hide behind the funding commitments of a spectacular sound. It has been a long time since this outdated and neocolonial global governance was abandoned. This governing group is quick to assert its democratic credentials so that we can ask them to sit with the poorest governments, not as donors, but to be equal, and to be subject to international decision-making.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the attitude of Al Jazeera’s editorial.
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