7-05-05, 11:18 am

IT IS vital, in the run-up to the G8 summit, that anti-poverty campaigners are able to tread a path between wide-eyed idealism and abject cynicism.

Bob Geldof and Bono's tendency to trust George W Bush and Tony Blair speaks volumes for their willingness to see good in everyone, but it also serves as a caution against the danger of self-delusion.

The US and British leaders have condemned Iraq to mass poverty through a war that has consumed 100,000 lives as well as tens of billions of dollars.

And their plans for Africa are not the boon that their spin doctors and insufficiently critical observers claim.

However, the role of international public opinion cannot be ignored.

Were it not for the pressure from a huge array of non-governmental organisations, single-issue campaigning groups, religious bodies, political parties and countless individuals, Messrs Bush and Blair would not feel constrained to talk about Africa.

At each G8 gathering, there is a genuflection in the direction of Third World poverty.

But the need for global solidarity is at odds with the ethos of capitalism, which thrives on the basis of winners and losers in a competition to the death. Private profit lies at the heart of all decisions rather than any thoughts about oneness of humanity.

As former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger once put it, the fact that people were hungry was insufficient argument to give them food. There had to be a political justification.

And that's why most aid offered by Washington is designed to provide a return for US farmers, infrastructure companies or arms manufacturers.

That remains a constant worry, not simply with regard to the US but to the G8 as a whole. To qualify for debt cancellation, recipient states have to agree to open up their economies to penetration by transnational corporations based in the G8 countries.

Fledgling industries are destroyed as they are unable to build themselves up in a protected domestic market, as Britain, the US and, more recently, Japan and South Korea did.

Free trade is not the cure for the Third World. It is part of the disease so long as the rich countries and the agencies that they control lay down trading rules.

Partially cancelling debt, increasing aid and offering loans will not reduce poverty unless the developed countries take their boots off the necks of the world's poor.

Privatisation of water, education and other public services not only prices the poor out of these new markets but also sucks capital out of the country in question as profits are repatriated to the rich North.

Poor countries must be allowed to develop their own economies, producing food to feed their own people as a priority over cash crops.

Unfair barriers to trade should be lifted and there must be an end to unnecessary grandiose projects and arms deals that benefit corrupt leaders and equally crooked Western companies.

Whatever emerges from Gleneagles, the struggle will continue to build an alternative to the unjust and unequal system that glorifies the quest for maximised profits, no matter what the cost to humanity.

From Morning Star