TOKYO (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Group of Eight rich nations on Tuesday to stick with a three-year old pledge to raise African aid levels to $25 billion a year, after a report the leaders may be about to backtrack.
"I would like to urge and emphasise that leaders of G8should implement their commitment which was made at theGleneagles summit meeting," Ban said at a news conference inTokyo, referring to the G8's 2005 summit meeting in Scotland.
"When it comes to climate change ... and the global foodcrisis, these campaigns should be led by the industrialisedcountries -- they have the capacity, they have the resources,and I hope the leadership demonstrates their political will,"he said.
Ban's comments come less than a week ahead of the G8 summitin northern Japan on July 7-9.
They follow a report by the Financial Times newspaper onSunday that said a draft communique for the summit failed tocite a specific aid target to Africa as set at Gleneagles.
At that summit in 2005, G8 nations pledged to raise annualaid levels by $50 billion by 2010, $25 billion of which was forAfrica. This was reiterated at last year's summit in Germany.
Experts have expressed concerns about the pledge, sayingdonor countries may fail to meet their promises, which are notlegally binding and are hard to track in actual spending.
African development, as well as the food crisis and climatechange, will be on the agenda for next week's G8 summit.
Eight other major economies, including China and India,will also meet on July 9 on the sidelines of the G8 summit todiscuss climate change.
Eager to show leadership ahead of the summit, Japan hostedan African development conference in May at which it vowed todouble development assistance to Africa over the next fiveyears.
Ban, who will take part in the summit, also called for theG8 nations to reach an agreement on long-term cuts in emissionsof greenhouse gases at the meeting.
"I hope that at the Hokkaido summit meeting the leaderswill be able to agree on a shared vision, how the futureagreement will look and also commit themselves to expand andbuild on the existing agreement," he said.
In Japan, the G8 nations are expected to formalise a goalof halving the world's greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, afteragreeing last year in Germany to seriously consider the target.
But doubts persist about whether and how far the leaderswill be able to go beyond last year's agreement.
Britain's climate envoy said last week that a breakthroughis unlikely in talks on global warming at the summit.
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said in June that theG8 nations would not be setting a medium-term target forcutting CO2 emissions by 2020 or 2030, seen as necessary byenvironmentalists as a way to achieving the long-term goal.
(Reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Michael Watson)
