NAGO - A good summit needs a good nickname, and it says a lot about the Group of Eight meeting in Okinawa that, after three days of lunches, dinners and round-table discussions, nobody could agree what to call it.
The Japanese hosts had promoted it as the "information technology summit" - but the idea never really caught on with the others.
For British Prime Minister Tony Blair, it was all about the obligation of the rich democracies to the poorest countries of Africa - but even he admitted frustration at how little was achieved on the key issue, debt relief.
Jubilee 2000, the debt relief coalition, called it the "squandered summit." Oxfam called it the "lobster and caviar summit," after the dinner the summiteers consumed as they discussed hunger and poverty in the Third World.
But the truth is that it was about all these things, and many more besides - and that, as a consequence, it was not really about anything very much at all.
There were no defining moments, no arresting images that summed up its themes and direction. When the final communique appeared, it was in an atmosphere of scepticism and anti-climax.
In fact, the failure to come up with any dazzling breakthroughs and inspiring promises may have been a wise move - for it was the euphoria generated by the G8 summit in Cologne in 1999 which gave the leaders their biggest headache in Okinawa.
A year ago, the G8 made its bold promise to bring $US100 billion of debt relief to 24 of the poorest countries by the end of 2000, but, a year on, the debt relief summit is revealed as a feeble sham.
So far, only nine countries have made it through the obstacle course of conditions imposed by the big lenders; when their debts are written off, they will amount to no more than $US15 billion in total.
The leaders did set themselves other targets on Okinawa. Blair lobbied successfully for an ambitious plan to halve deaths from TB and malaria in 10 years, and to cut Aids deaths by a quarter. The leaders aim to get every child into school by 2015.
The World Trade Organisation will meet before the end of the year, and one goal will be to reduce tariffs which keep poor countries' exports out of the richest markets.
United States President Bill Clinton announced an American plan to encourage Third World families to send their children to school by providing $US300 million of free school lunches.
But the debt relief campaigners argue that such measures treat symptoms rather than their underlying cause - poverty.
The problem, they argue, is not that poor countries do not want to fight Aids and feed schoolchildren. But with $US60 million of their budgets being spent every single day on interest payments alone, it is not a choice they are capable of making.
The area which has attracted some of the bitterest criticism is the emphasis on information technology. As the host, Japan has identified something it calls the "digital divide" - the potential for further polarisation between rich and poor created by the developing world's inability to make the most of computers and the internet.
Japan is promising $US18 billion of public and private money, in the words of the summit declaration, "to bridge the international information and knowledge divide."
Groups like Oxfam, Jubilee 2000, Medecins Sans Frontieres and the Catholic charity, Cafod, respond that such high-minded goals are absurd in much of the Third World.
"To send out computers into the bush, where there are no telephone lines and no reliable electricity, and limited literacy, does not make much sense," says Henry Northover of Cafod.
Only one leader will walk away entirely satisfied - the G8 newcomer, President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Where his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, was a supplicant seeking relief for his own country's debts, Putin sailed coolly through the weekend, setting out his plans for economic reform and winning help for disposal of weapons plutonium.
- INDEPENDENT
Summit without a name leaves heights unscaled
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