The Atlanta Journal - Constitution
Genoa, Italy --- Leaders from the world's seven richest democracies and Russia on Friday pledged $1.2 billion to fight AIDS and other diseases, and called for a new round of global trade talks.
The meetings at the annual summit of leaders from the so-called Group of Eight, or G-8 nations, went on even as police battled thousands of anti-globalization demonstrators outside the summit site.
Just three blocks and a world away from the protests, President Bush and his G-8 counterparts huddled around a small round table in the elegant Palazzo Ducale, a 13th-century palace in this ancient trading port.
They agreed to provide $1.2 billion for a global trust fund to support efforts to prevent and treat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. All are preventable diseases that together kill millions of people each year, most of them in poor countries. Bush had announced the U.S. contribution of $200 million in May and said the United States would provide more if the fund proves effective.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who attended Friday's meeting, asked earlier this year for a global AIDS endowment. At the time he estimated that an effective fund would require between $7 billion and $10 billion in resources.
Health advocacy groups complained that the $1.2 billion commitment was far short of the need --- the Philadelphia-based Health Gap Coalition called it "miserly" --- but the summit's host said Friday's pledge was just the beginning of what he expects to grow into a giant pool of public and private donations.
"We have high hopes to see this fund rise to $2 billion," Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said.
He said 36 million people have died from AIDS, 25 million of whom lived in Africa. He admitted, though, that there was more to the pledges than altruism.
"People travel," Berlusconi said, "and there is the risk of a dangerous spread of these infections in Western countries."
The leaders also agreed to support a new round of global trade talks when trade ministers from around the world meet this November in Qatar. The last such round resulted in the creation of the World Trade Organization.
Efforts to open a new WTO trade round were first undertaken in earnest in November 1999 in Seattle. Mass protests similar to those here on Friday disrupted those proceedings. But the trade talks were derailed because industrialized countries and developing nations couldn't agree on a common agenda.
Bush arrived in Genoa on Friday to participate in his first G-8 summit with his counterparts from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.
Today, the leaders will discuss global warming and other issues in group meetings and bilateral sessions. Bush's decision earlier this year not to support the 1997 Kyoto global warming protocol --- aimed at reducing atmospheric pollutants that trap heat --- prompted outrage from some of America's closest allies.
Bush said in advance of the summit that he hoped to persuade the leaders to focus on alleviating world poverty.
With a total of 840 million people generating $20 billion worth of goods and services per year, the G-8 countries account for 14 percent of the world's population and two-thirds of its wealth, according to World Bank figures.
However, the group avoided any new pledges for forgiving more than $300 billion in debt owed by poorer countries, settling instead for a phrase to encourage nations to follow through on their promises two years ago to forgive $54 billion of that debt to selected countries. In a speech before the World Bank on Tuesday in Washington, Bush called for transforming the global development institution by shifting the World Bank's aid from one chiefly of loans to a blend of half loans and half grants.
That, said Bush, could go a long way toward alleviating poverty by enabling poor countries to pursue worthwhile development projects without being strapped by crippling foreign debt.
He did not win support for that initiative among his G-8 partners. Instead, in a joint statement, they agreed to stress the need for the World Bank and other international development institutions to continue "reviewing their pricing policies with a view to enhancing the development impact of the resources available."