So, what is the answer. Look to Cuba. There is a nation – and other Latin American nations are now coming around – that is an example of sustainability. This is not just an in vogue word. It is substantive. Intermediate technologies developed, owned and operated by the communities of Africa to meet African community needs. An economy which is driven to meet the basic needs of the people it serves FIRST. Surpluses can be exported. That is “ditch” the free trade agreements. Plant what you need. Understand water as used in the terrain of Sub-Saharan area.

Afterall, what is a $1 a day? or $1,000 a day? The point is building communities. Do Sub-Saharan Africa nations need help? Probably. But not from the G8 and their institutions (and make no mistake the World Bank, the IMF, and WTO are G8 institutions).

Hunger is about distribution. Food is plentiful. While Cuba can show the way, other developing nations such as India with its thousands of years of perfected farming can be a vanguard. We keep looking for intervention by the G8, the money and the goods to solve these problems. And it just never happens. It never will.

Take health care. The US offers African nations the wonderous idea of franchised health care centers. The Cubans offer just in time medical service – a doctor and nurse at the ready on every corner (or however the population is laid out). While the US market driven innovation demands high performance and a profit, the Cuban system is completely dedicated to wellness (no “middle man” profit/greed paradigm ever enters into the picture). Who do you think produces the better outcomes?

Mr. Rajesh Makwana, we (universal we) most certainly have the answers, we’re just looking in the wrong places.

The G8 communiqué is deficient in so many ways: fundamentally, it’s intellectually dishonest and riddled with arithmetic sleight-of-hand. It’s hard to know where to begin, but let me at least take a crack in five areas.
1. The text says: “A vigorous impetus seems necessary to ensure that Africa will meet the Millennium Development Goals.” I shudder at this piece of shameless dishonesty. They have no intention of providing such an impetus: without it, the G8 well knows that all the statistical evidence shows that Africa cannot reach the MDGs … that poverty and disease and conflict are too deeply ingrained to be reversed by 2015. Why go through this abysmal charade of words without meaning?
2. The text says “Trade is a key engine of growth for Africa.” And except for some fatuous gobbledegook about how the G8 will help African exports, the trade section is empty of meaning. Contrast Germany with what was said at Gleneagles: “An ambitious and balanced conclusion to the DOHA round is the best way to make trade work for Africa. The Hong Kong Ministerial in December (2005) will be a critical step towards a successful outcome of DOHA in 2006. The World Bank estimates that implementing the negotiations could lift 140 million people out of poverty.”
DOHA has totally disappeared from this year’s G8 communiqué. But the rub is that it should never have been in Gleneagles. The G8 knew in July of 2005 that DOHA was dead. But they were prepared to toy with the rhetoric of 140 million people to fatten their text. Where Africa is concerned, the G8 is a consortium of fabrication.
3. After describing the carnage of the pandemic which, they point out, apart from the suffering is “causing massive impacts on the economic and social development of the countries concerned,” they make their infamous commitment of $60 billion “over the coming years.”
Now what in heaven’s name is that supposed to mean? In the inelegant language of diplomacy gone wrong, those are called “weasel words.” They’re meant to convey everything and nothing. No group of counties, let alone countries with the manipulative sophistication of the G8, would use that language unless they were looking for a way out. Some commentators are working on the assumption that the language really means the same five years encompassed by the new PEPFAR initiative. I have a message for the trusting naiveté which that suggestion reveals: if they meant five years, they would have said five years.
The promise of Gleneagles was an extra $25 billion a year by 2010, with increases every year thereafter, not $60 billion “over the coming years.” Worse, most of the $60 billion isn’t even new money: it encompasses the $30 billion just announced by George Bush, plus additional billions already announced by other G8 countries. To be sure, the original pledge for 2010 is again repeated, but we already know the worth of those words. According to UNAIDS, we’ll need $18 billion this year, $22 billion next year, $30 billion by 2010, with the dollar figures rising after that. The shortfall is astronomic. What in the world will happen to the millions of Africans, struggling with AIDS, for whom the resources are the difference between life and death, let alone the millions upon millions of orphans for whom any kind of life is compromised?
Allow me a juxtaposition. According to all estimates, including those of the Congressional Research Service of the United States, enhanced by data from the other troop contributors, the G8 countries are spending at least $120 billion each year to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same countries can’t even guarantee a paltry total of $60 billion over an unknown number of years to fight a pandemic that has taken 25 million lives and has 40 million people in its grip. I keep asking, what has happened to the world’s moral anchor?
4. All of this is crucial, of course, because what hangs in the balance is universal access to treatment by the year 2010. What is ominously instructive in this instance is to compare the language of 2005 with that of 2007.
In Gleneagles, the text read: “Implement a package for HIV prevention, treatment and care, with the aim of as close as possible to universal access to treatment for all those who need it by 2010.” In Germany, the text reads “The G8 countries will scale up their efforts to contribute towards the goal of universal access by 2010.”
Two years ago, we were getting “as close as possible” to universal access; now we’re “scaling up our efforts to contribute” to universal access. Language is everything. The current language is frighteningly ambiguous. And it’s not helped by throwing the figure of five million people into the text, when it has become clear, according to UNAIDS, that the numbers requiring treatment by 2010 will be significantly higher.
It is simply unconscionable for the G8 to be so recklessly cavalier about human life. They have it within their grasp to guarantee full universal access by 2010; if they wanted it to happen, it would happen. They similarly have it within their capacity to guarantee every penny required by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, but instead they merely acknowledge the financial targets which the Global Fund has recently set.
In a highly provocative fashion, the G8 is challenging all of us: we, collectively, have to find a way to force the G8’s hand, to pummel them into sanity. In the annals of social change, it’s rare that advocacy has confronted such an adversary.
5. There remains, however, one other aspect of the communiqué that requires further elaboration. The text offers obligatory obeisance to the vulnerability of women. And the language is pointed and strong.
But nowhere — and this is frankly astonishing — nowhere is there mention of the prospective international agency for women, actively under discussion at the United Nations, as a vehicle to make a significant dent on the pandemic. Why? In the final analysis, probably because it would cost money. The deliberate omission of the most significant initiative on behalf of women to emerge in the multilateral system … an initiative proposed with representation from five of the G8 countries, shows the pro forma quality of the paragraphs addressing the desperate dilemma of women and girls.
And that reality lies at the heart of what we’re dealing with. For some inexplicable reason, the G8 is not prepared to provide the resources to subdue the pandemic in Africa. …

For all of us, in this grand coalition of civil society, it’s necessary, I think, to take a much tougher road. And to choose our targets carefully. There is hope in the offing.
…

You have people of tremendous experience to draw upon. You have all of the Millennium Development Goals to keep you on fire. You have millions of lives, hanging by a thread, begging for your intervention.
The problem with the G8, it seems to me, is its congenital divorce from reality. We’re part of an era where human life is devalued. Just look at Iraq, just look at Darfur, just look at HIV/AIDS. The international community has lost its bearings. When that happens, the human dimension slides into obscurity. The grandmother who buries her children, the orphan who weeps through the night, the women scarred forever by sexual violence, they recede into the mists of statistical calculation. We dehumanize them, their faces blurred, their identities lost.
It’s a terrible thing we do to the uprooted and disinherited of the earth. Together, we must bring it to an end.