close
Friday March 29, 2024

G7 leaders take on China and plan to stop new pandemics

By AFP
June 13, 2021

CARBIS BAY, United Kingdom: The G7 on Saturday unveiled US-led plans to counter China in infrastructure funding for poorer nations, and a new accord to prevent future pandemics, as the elite group sought to showcase Western unity at its first in-person summit since 2019.

Promising to "collectively catalyse" hundreds of billions of infrastructure investment for low- and middle-income countries, the G7 leaders said they would offer a "values-driven, high-standard and transparent" partnership.

Their "Build Back Better World" (B3W) project is aimed squarely at competing with China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, which has been widely criticised for saddling small countries with unmanageable debt but has included even G7 member Italy since launching in 2013.

The White House said President Joe Biden and fellow leaders addressed "strategic competition" with Beijing on the second day of their three-day summit in Carbis Bay, southwest England.

Britain meanwhile hailed G7 agreement on the "Carbis Bay Declaration" -- a series of commitments to curb future pandemics after Covid-19 wrecked economies and claimed millions of lives around the world.

The collective steps include slashing the time taken to develop and license vaccines, treatments and diagnostics for any future disease to under 100 days, while reinforcing global surveillance networks.

The G7 -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States -- will formally publish the pact on Sunday, alongside its final communique containing further details on the B3W.

"The #CarbisBayDeclaration marks a proud and historic moment for us all," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Twitter.

"Under this agreement, the world’s leading democracies will commit to preventing a global pandemic from ever happening again, ensuring the devastation caused by Covid-19 is never repeated," he said.

World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, criticised in some quarters for being too accommodating towards China where the coronavirus originated, welcomed the health pact.

And he said the UN agency would examine a British proposal to create a "Global Pandemic Radar" to send early warnings of future outbreaks.

However, aid charity Oxfam said the declaration "does nothing to address the fundamental problems that are preventing vaccines being accessible to the vast majority of humanity".

The G7 leaders are expected to pledge to donate one billion vaccine doses to poor countries this year and next -- although campaigners say the rollout is much too slow to end the crisis sooner.

The leaders are also set to issue new commitments on climate change, including financial aid for the developing world, in the buildup to the UN’s COP26 environmental summit in Scotland in November.

"This is not just about confronting or taking on China," a senior White House official said. "This is about providing an affirmative, positive alternative vision for the world."

He said Biden would be urging "concrete action" on the forced labour accusations, calling them "an affront to human dignity, and an egregious example of China’s unfair economic competition". The US president will also seek to address frayed relations with Moscow, in particular over its cyber activity.

Meanwhile, "everybody in the water!" President Joe Biden joked to his fellow G7 leaders at a family photo on the beach, underlining an assured transformation in tone from the antagonistic Donald Trump.

Where Trump alienated and exasperated, undermining the Western alliance at every turn, Biden declared that "America is back!" after starting his first foreign tour as president in Britain.

US service personnel were standing stiffly to attention in respect for their commander-in-chief as Biden addressed them on Wednesday at an air force base in eastern England.

"Please, at ease," he said, urging them to relax. "I keep forgetting I’m president."

It was hard to imagine such an avuncular line ever coming from Trump, and G7 leaders have been equally at ease in the company of the 78-year-old former senator and vice president.

Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of the few foreign leaders praised by Trump, called Biden "a big breath of fresh air".

French President Emmanuel Macron, after contesting a years-long battle of wills with Trump, eagerly grabbed Biden by the arm for a good-natured chat after Friday’s G7 photo at Carbis Bay in southwest England.

With Britain going ahead with the elite club’s first in-person summit in nearly two years, Biden is back in his element having amassed decades of foreign policy experience: glad-handing on the world stage.

The oldest president yet, he has sometimes stumbled over his words in the initial stages of a gruelling eight-day tour that will climax in showdown talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Switzerland.