On trade, the UN offers no hope to developing countries being forced to liberalise their economies.

While the G8 leaders at Gleneagles acknowledged that developing countries needed to have control over their own economic policies, the text simply reaffirms a ‘commitment to trade liberalisation’.

As usual, rich countries cannot take their own medicine. They have rolled back from an earlier version of the text which promised immediate duty free access into developed countries’ markets to all products from the poorest countries.

Now they are just going to ‘work towards’ this – a promise made so often over the years that it is entirely meaningless.

This is a tragic missed opportunity to send a signal to the World Trade Organisation’s ministerial conference in December that the world is ready for trade justice.
Conditionality

The document fails to go as far as the G8 in giving developing countries the space to decide, plan and sequence their development policies.

It notes that developing countries must take ‘primary responsibility’ for their policies and development strategies, but then dictates what those policies must be.

It is therefore much more ambiguous than the G8 communiqué on conditions attached to aid and debt relief.

Debt

On debt, the UN’s endorsement of the first steps taken at Gleneagles is positive but is a mere regurgitation of the G8 deal.

While it pays lip service to the need for broader debt relief, it contains no new suggestions for the way forward and is a big missed opportunity to address the systemic question of the debt crisis for developing countries, the vast majority of which do not benefit from current initiatives on debt cancellation.

HIV/AIDS

Christian Aid welcomes the endorsement of the G8 pledge to provide universal access to treatment by 2010.

However, we are extremely concerned by the absence of any mention of the need for prevention and sexual education or the role that sexual and reproductive health services play in fighting HIV/AIDS.

The recent shortfall in funds pledged for the Global Fund to Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria shows that governments need to match rhetoric with money.