8 Jul 2009

A bluffer's guide to this week's G8 summit

By the time you are reading this I hope to be supping on mozzarella di bufala in a medieval Italian hilltop town full of churches stuffed with paintings by Renaissance masters.

The reality will probably be that I shall be going through umpteen security scanners along with some 3000 other journalists queuing for the G8 summit in the earthquake zone of L’Aquila, and helping our cameraman in my own puny way to lug camera and editing gear past Italian police in the summer heat.

And as I do this along with the 3,000 others, while traumatised Italian earthquake victims watch us in disbelief from their tents, no doubt I shall be wondering why, in the age of videoconferencing and the internet, do thousands of people have to go to so much time and expense to enable other people – the world’s leaders – to be seen eating mozzarella di bufala together in the same room?

What follows is my shot at an answer. Let me get the “boring but important” stuff over with first, before we talk about Brylcreem Berlusconi and the latest gossip.

ECONOMY
On the global economy, which supposedly dominates discussions on this the first day, I’m not holding out too much hope of anything significant, even if Gordon Brown and other leaders will be spending the night in the training school of the Italian financial police.

British officials are portraying this summit as a “stepping stone” between the G20 London summit in April and another such gathering scheduled for September in Pittsburgh.

There will be another attempt to spur the international banking system into extending more loans, as the world economy may not be returning to health as quickly as was hoped; and Gordon Brown is joining Nicolas Sarkozy in calling for controls on oil price speculation.

What this seems to amount to is calls for more transparency from oil producers (who aren’t at the summit) on their production figures, and more clarity from consumers on demand. The real fear driving this is that oil prices will surge to the levels of last year, which contributed to the economic malaise, and that this will choke off any hint of growth.

There will also be the usual talk of a World Trade agreement under the so-called “Doha round”, but waiting for this to materialise is like waiting for Godot to arrive.

ENVIRONMENT
More signfiicant that the economy, I think, is climate change, which will be discussed on Thursday.

Now the Obama administration has put a climate change bill through the lower house of Congress, the Americans and British are hoping this will create some sense of momentum – and some sense of obligation on developing countries to do their bit; a sense of “it’s your turn now”, which was hard to generate when President Bush was at the G8 Hokkaido summit a year ago.

The Environment Secretary, Ed Miliband, is the only British minister expected to join Brown at the summit, which tells its own story about UK priorities.

“We want developing countries to sign up to a target around temperature change,” says a British official involved in negotiations. What this means is that the emissions of China and India have to grow more slowly over time, and peak earlier, supposedly without sacrificing economic growth.

But as with the economic talk, this G8 is a stepping stone to another meeting – the Copenhagen negotiations later this year on a global climate deal.

AFRICA and DEVELOPMENT
Africa has become an inescapable feature of G8s since Tony Blair put it on the agenda at Gleneagles in 2005. The supreme irony, of course, is that no G8 member has done more to cut its aid budget than Italy, the host of this summit.

British officials are talking about reinforcing previous G8 commitments on transparency and accountability, because they know that all their work at Gleneagles 4 years ago – and the credibility of the G8 itself – is on the line here in Italy this week, probably on Friday.

The African rabbit being pulled out a hat this year is a $15bn fund for agricultural development, with the UK giving $1.8bn over three years. This could mark a shift away from spending on emergency food supplies through the World Food Programme – though the WFP hopes not and says we should do both.

The idea is to get countries to come up with agricultural development plans which are then vetted by the World Bank and funded by governments in a more coordinated way than bilateral assistance currently allows. Will it silence Bob Geldof and the G8’s critics? Nope.

FOREIGN POLICY
Iran, again. Each year the G8 seems to issue statements, and each year we seem to be coming closer to a realisation that it may prove impossible to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear programme.

No doubt the Russians and Chinese will be sounded out on a possible new round of UN sanctions, and the G8 will absorb the significance of the last few weeks of political unrest, spurred on by the British who are trying to balance (a) the importance of keeping the EU in talks with Tehran, and (b) the need for a coordinated response to the detention and possible trial of a British embassy employee.

The Brits want to put Burma and the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi higher up the agenda too, after the UN Secretary General was not allowed to meet her last week.

BERLUSCONI
Will the earth move for Silvio this week? Well, it could, in more ways than one. L’Aquila has been dogged by seismic aftershocks and if these continue the summit could be moved to Rome.

The organisation of this year’s G8 has been dire, and juicy photos of young women frolicking in the nude at Silvio’s Sardinian villa have added to concern that the Italian PM’s foibles could dominate this summit, especially if they prove more interesting than anything else.

Don’t rule out further revelations, timed to embarrass him, though his domestic popularity has barely slipped according to the polls. Prosecutors in the city of Bari are investigating a prostitution ring which may have supplied scantily clad women to Silvio’s parties.

What if those prosecutors announce that they want to question the Prime Minister himself, just as he is politely pecking Sarah Brown or Carla Bruni-Sarkozy on the cheek?

I am told that the wife of Italian President Giorgio Napolitano has been put in charge of the “spouses programme”, which includes an audience with Pope Benedict at the Vatican. One doubts whether Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, will appear at Silvio’s side, after she accused her husband of “frequenting minors” in May and demanded a divorce.