Why critics believe the cost of G8 outweighs its value

Published on Thursday 7 June 2007 01:22

TSAR Nicholas of Russia used to take his summer break in the Baltic resort of Heiligendamm, strolling along the pale sands before retiring to an elegant white seafront villa he had built in 1854.

But anyone looking for the classical residence in 2007 will be disappointed: it was torn down so a brand new media centre with room for 3,000 journalists could be built on the spot. The old building was in regular use for more than 150 years; the new building will be used for barely four days before being closed again.

The fate of the Tsar's residence is just the most extreme example of the sort of lengths governments go to when playing host to the Group of Eight summit, the annual gathering of the world's most powerful political leaders.

Those leaders began arriving in Germany yesterday afternoon, flying to Rostock 15 miles away and transferring to the summit site by helicopter.

Travelling to Heiligendamm by air is the best way to enter the "ring of steel" that now divides the town from the rest of the world. Seven and a half miles long, eight feet high and topped with razor wire and motion sensors, the fence that encircles Heiligendamm contains a total of 500 tonnes of steel.

In all, 16,000 German police have been deployed to watch over the thousands of environmentalists, anti-poverty campaigners, and anarchists who are massing around the summit: water cannons were used for the first time yesterday afternoon, as police estimated that 10,000 protesters had reached the fence.

The German authorities estimate security spending alone will exceed 61 million but they may be getting off lightly compared to British taxpayers. Protecting the G8 summit at Gleneagles in 2005 cost the Scottish Executive 72 million. The meeting itself, from booking the hotel to feeding thousands of officials and journalists, cost the Foreign Office another 12.7 million.

Some of the G8's critics are now saying that the summit itself has outlived its usefulness. Jean Ziegler, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, yesterday joined the abolitionist cause, addressing the "Alternative G8" meeting of activists held near Rostock.

"This should be the last G8 summit. The institution should be abolished. Civil society is now planet-wide," he said, The G8 nations represent 13 per cent of the world's population, but "2.7 billion of the world's population is living below the extreme poverty line - that's nearly 40 per cent."

The alternative summit, supported by many aid agencies, aims to mount an explicit challenge to the legitimacy of the meeting in Heiligendamm.

Michael Moore, the polemical US filmmaker, is expected to attend, as is Wangari Maathai, who in 2004 became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize when she was honoured for her campaign to plant tens of millions of trees across Africa in order to slow deforestation .

Tom Sharman of ActionAid, said the justification for the huge expense and disruption of formal summit meetings is wearing perilously thin, a feeling only reinforced by the White House yesterday making clear that the US did not plan to sign up to a global warming deal this week.

"The G8 is worthwhile if it can act effectively on issues like poverty, AIDS and climate change," Mr Sharman said. "But if it raises false hopes and delivers half-measures, it is worse than useless. Right now it is close to losing its credibility."

Pete Hardstaff, the head of policy at the World Development Movement, took an even harder line. "This self-selecting private members club of the world's richest countries doesn't have the will, or the legitimacy needed to tackle the world's most pressing problems," he said. "It's time for it to go."

Trying to address accusations of elitism, the G8 since Gleneagles has practically become the Group of Thirteen, since the leaders of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa are all invited to attend the summit. Leaders from developing nations will also be present in Heiligendamm; Tony Blair is today expected to have a private meeting with Umaru Yar'Adua, the new president of Nigeria.

Mr Blair, now on his eleventh and last G8 meeting, has become less and less enthusiastic about formal summits over his decade in office.

Privately, one government source concedes that an ever-longer guest list at summits can limit the scope for free-flowing discussions. "It is getting harder - it's now the G8 plus 5, and there are more and more other leaders turning up. Once you could look around the table and see everyone, but now you practically need binoculars to see everyone," said the source.

British officials remain adamant that the Gleneagles summit was a success because it put Britain's chosen issues - climate change and African development - on the international agenda.

Philip Fiske de Gouveia, an associate at the Foreign Policy Centre, a think-tank close the Labour Party, said that the very fact that summits attract such enormous worldwide attention can be a useful tool for "public diplomacy."

"Leaders are becoming increasingly sensitive to the fact that people care about foreign policy so they are more careful about how they present themselves at these summits," he said.

And some insist that away from the cameras, important diplomatic deals can still be done and disagreements averted, all with a handshake and smile.

"Nothing beats face-to-face, eye-to-eye contact - it's not just the meeting around the table, at every summit there are tremendous opportunities to talk informally, in the corridors, over coffee, wherever, and that gives you a chance to clarify the points of view of other nations," said Dennis MacShane, a former Foreign Office minister and a veteran of dozens of summits.

"It is regrettable that serious efforts to make the world run more smoothly are disrupted by demonstrators, but summits are an awful lot better than the alternative - they are the ultimate expression of the principle that jaw-jaw is better than war-war. One hundred years ago, Britain sent gunboats to resolve disputes with other nations. Now we send government ministers."