Subject: [cwj 71] The summit of wasteful expenditure
From: Corporate Watch in Japanese <cwj@corpwatch.org>
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 18:14:22 -0700
Seq: 71
The summit of wasteful expenditure From Shyam Bhatia Deccan Herald, India LONDON, July 21 The G8 summit meeting this week end in Okinawa, which brings together the leaders of the US, France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Italy, Japan and Russia, deserves to enter the Guiness Book of World Records for its shameless flaunting of opulence and greed. One small measure of the lavish hospitality on offer are the welcome packs for journalists, which contain digital cameras, tape recorders, high-tech tooth brushes and bottles of whisky. But the 500 million pounds spent by the Japanese government on staging the summit could instead have been used to write off the combined annual debt repayments of Zambia, Uganda, Rwanda, Niger and Mozambique. The same amount of money could have been used to write off forever the total debt of Sao Tome and Principe. Alternatively, the money would have taken care of 90 per cent of the total debt of countries such as Burundi, Chad or Togo, or twice the total debt of Gambia. Three hundred million pounds would pay for every child in the world to attend school for a month with enough change left over to vaccinate 200 million children against hepatitis B. One tenth of the money, 50 million pounds, would vaccinate children in the developing world against pneumonia and meningitis which claim 400,000 victims every year. The remaining 450 million pounds would pay for a quarter of the cost of providing prevention methods and basic healthcare to prevent AIDS in Africa. Oxfam says the cost of the summit would pay for providing clean water for 5.2 million people in rural Africa, or it could meet the cost of purchasing sterilising tablets to purify 3.4 billion litres of water. It could also pay for the running of 10,000 rural hospitals in developing countries. Some other projects the summit could pay for include vaccinating 500 million cattle in South Asia against disease, planting one billion acres of maize meal in sub- Saharan Africa, clothing 6,000 street children in Ethiopia, funding 33,000 midwifery kits to save the lives of mothers and children in India, and providing 10,000 emergency shelters for people still affected by the hurricane in Madagascar or waiting for their homes to be rebuilt in Kosovo. It all sounds so simple and possible: all for the cost of a single weekend summit in distant Okinawa. FAIR USE NOTICE. This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Corporate Watch in Japanese is making this article available in our efforts to advance understanding of ecological sustainability, human rights, economic democracy and social justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. ------------------------------------- Corporate Watch in Japanese Transnational Resource and Action Center (TRAC) P.O. Box 29344 San Francisco, CA 94129 USA Tel: 1-415-561-6472 Fax: 1-415-561-6493 Email: cwj@corpwatch.org URL: http://www.corpwatch-jp.org ------------------------------------- ______________________ The Corporate Watch in Japanese http://www.corpwatch.org/japan (CWJ) mailing list is a moderated email list in English designed to connect activists campaigning against Japanese corporations and investments around the world. * To unsubscribe from the CWJ mailing list, send an email to majordomo@jca.apc.org with text "unsubscribe cwj". To subscribe to the CWJ mailing list, send a message to majordomo@jca.apc.org with the text "subscribe cwj" * The CWJ mailing list is NOT intended for wide distribution. If you would like to post messages from this list somewhere else, we ask that you first contact us at cwj@corpwatch.org ______________________