Africa: Poverty And Climate Change in the Spotlight

Africa: Poverty And Climate Change in the Spotlight

Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)

23 November 2007
Posted to the web 24 November 2007

Joyce Mulama
Kampala

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) has opened with calls for the gap between rich and poor countries in the 53-member grouping to be addressed.

"The present partial transformation of the Commonwealth is not good enough for the individual countries, nor is it good for the Commonwealth in general or the wider world," said President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, which is hosting the Nov. 23-25 event.

"There are (measures) that need to be applied to an economy in order to allow it to grow sustainably, and therefore enable a society to metamorphose from pre-industrial to industrial; from feudal, peasant society to middle class, skilled society."

One of the most important of these measures, added Museveni, is assisting poor nations to move away from simply producing and exporting raw materials. Instead, they should be helped to add value to raw materials -- such as the coffee beans grown in Uganda.

"The present price of bean coffee is one dollar per kilogramme. When Nestle buys this raw material, roasts and grinds it abroad, it earns 20 dollars per kilogramme for the same coffee that Uganda has sold at a dollar. This means that in every kilogramme of coffee Uganda is donating 19 dollars to the outside world."

However, developing states had to share responsibility in transforming their economies. In many of these states, infrastructure needed attending to.

According to Museveni, effective road and rail networks lower the cost of doing business. At present, most developing countries -- particularly in Africa -- have poor transport networks and inefficient energy systems, resulting in high production costs that have made their goods unable to compete with those of other countries.

Calls have also sounded in Kampala for wealthy nations to ensure fair trade. Earlier this week while addressing a workshop of African and Caribbean journalists, Don Mckinnnon, the outgoing secretary-general of the Commonwealth, reiterated that rich nations had to eliminate the agricultural subsidies that have done extensive damage to developing countries.

The theme for this year's CHOGM is 'Transforming Commonwealth Societies to Achieve Political, Economic and Human Development'.

Queen Elizabeth the Second is also attending the meeting in Uganda's capital, Kampala -- which has been dominated by the Commonwealth's suspension of Pakistan "pending restoration of democracy and the rule of law" in the words of McKinnon.

She is the head of the Commonwealth, a gathering mainly composed of former British colonies which encompasses some two billion people. CHOGM is a biennial event.

Climate change is another issue of concern for the gathering, with Mckinnon urging the leaders to give it greater attention. "Climate change is all around us now. Commonwealth heads of government should respond on the matter here, in Kampala."

Similarly, Lawrence Gonzi, Malta's prime minister, spoke about the shared responsibility of countering the effects of climate change, which is expected to affect those in the developing world most severely.

"Among us are some of the world's largest emitters and some of the smallest," he said in reference to the emissions of greenhouse gases widely believe to be causing global warming.

"We will feel a broad range of impacts from the melting of the glaciers to drought, from tropical storms to sea level rise. The challenges of climate change require a united front."

In terms of the 1997 Koto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, several industrialised nations are committed to reducing their combined greenhouse gas emissions to five percent below 1990 levels, by 2012.

A global summit on climate change being held next month in Bali will seek to put an emission reduction agreement in place for the post-2012 era.