The International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, June 4, 2003

  EVIAN-LES-BAINS, France In this spa town sandwiched between snow-covered Alps and placid Lake Geneva, President Jacques Chirac of France, host to the Group of Eight summit meeting, managed to win reconciliation with his nemesis over the Iraq war, President George W. Bush.

But peace came at a great price, according to experts on the development issues that Chirac had hoped to champion. Instead of spawning new initiatives aimed at tackling poverty in Africa or broadening access to essential medicines, the meeting was dominated by international security concerns, the focus of the Bush entourage during its one-day visit to Evian.

The G-8 members closed ranks in the war on terror, agreeing on concrete measures to stop the spread of dangerous weapons such as shoulder-launched missiles. They issued a firm warning to North Korea and Iran over their nuclear programs. And they agreed to cooperate on rebuilding Iraq, seeking to push the divisions over the war into the past. But the G-8's final communiquŽ, issued Tuesday as the meeting wrapped up, includes little more than calls for the creation of "action plans" on many development issues. Even on the broader G-8 goal of bolstering a shaky global economy the talk was mostly of improving confidence rather than specific steps to stimulate growth. And there were no breakthroughs on stumbling blocks to the so-called Doha round of world trade talks, a goal that had been embraced by rich and poor countries alike. "Is the Evian bottle half empty or half full?" said Mark Malloch-Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, in a telephone interview. "There is an alarming nebulousness about the G-8 commitments."

During the meeting, Chirac and Bush had many kind words for each other, with the U.S. president praising his counterpart's "honesty" and Chirac wishing Bush luck on his trip to the Middle East for talks on peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.

But it was clear that Chirac was a bit miffed that his move to broaden the focus of the meetings - he had, for the first time, invited 12 leaders of developing countries to an "enlarged summit" on the eve of the main event - was pushed out of the spotlight.

During a news conference Tuesday, summarizing the developments in Evian, Chirac spent more than 15 minutes discussing issues ranging from the global economy to fighting famine to improving access to fresh water for the poor. He devoted only about one minute to the security issues pushed by Bush.

Some of the other summit participants took pains to back Chirac's version of events.

"The agenda was not U.S.-driven," Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada said during a news conference Tuesday. "In the past, summits have been hijacked by issues in the news. That didn't happen this time." But if the United States did not hijack the agenda, it at least exercised a powerful influence over it. A presummit exchange between U.S. and French negotiators demonstrates this. France had proposed ways to improve poor countries' access to essential medicines, which can be extremely costly in places where people live on less than a dollar a day. Under world trade rules, poor countries are allowed to manufacture generic versions of some of these patented drugs in crisis situations. But if they do not have the factories to do so, they are essentially cut off from access to the medications, because countries are not permitted to export the cheaper generic drugs to them.

But the final version of the G-8 statement on health matters softens the draft language on resolving this problem, in what advocates on health issues called a significant setback for poor countries in order to protect the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies.

The editing occurred in a letter from a Bush administration negotiator to his French counterpart that was obtained by news organizations including the International Herald Tribune. The White House did not return a call requesting comment.

"This looks like one of the costs of normalizing relations with the United States," said Sharonann Lynch, a spokeswoman for Health Gap, one of the groups pushing for improved access to medicine for poor countries. But analysts said Chirac ought to share the blame for a lack of significant progress on another issue important to developing countries, the flagging momentum on world trade negotiations. The Doha talks, named after the city in Qatar where the initiative got under way, were intended to be a "development round," a nod to the concerns of protesters who have tried to lay siege to recent gatherings such as the G-8 meetings. The Doha talks have bogged down, however, missing self-imposed deadlines on negotiations in fields such as agriculture. At Evian, there was no new initiative to break the logjam over agricultural supports in wealthy countries, which developing countries say are a trade barrier, flooding their markets with subsidized products and keeping their own produce out of western markets.

Many Evian participants, including Chirac, had great praise for the increase in U.S. funding to fight AIDS; shortly before the meeting, Congress approved Bush's $15 billion, multiyear package. In response, Chirac and other European Union members agreed to increase their own funding, though AIDS groups said the numbers still fell short of the amount needed.

On other issues, leaders of the industrialized countries, many of whose budget deficits have swelled, proved more stingy.

John Kirton and Ella Kokotsis of the G-8 Research Group at the University of Toronto said the amount raised through specific new funding commitments on development issues was about one-tenth the $27 billion mobilized in 2002 at the Kananaskis meeting in Canada.

"To a considerable extent, Evian fell victim to the UN-created divisions over Iraq that had proliferated during the first several months of 2003," they said in a commentary on the meeting.