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As the leaders of the G7 member countries prepared for their meeting
in London this week, the environmental movement fired a shot across their
collective bows by openly accusing the world’s top seven industrialised
countries of ‘failing the test of leadership, the planet and future generations
on major environmental issues’.

A report released during The Other Economic Summit (TOES), a regular
event which takes place in parallel with the main meeting, listed details
of what it described as the G7’s ‘failure to address nine crucial issues:
atmosphere and energy, species and habitats, water and oceans, transport,
land use, agriculture, waste, global relations and the public right to know’.

Andrew Lees, campaigns director of Friends of the Earth, said that the
last two summits had been ‘tinged with green’. But he added: ‘Whilst the
G7 may have learnt green reform, they have since done nothing’.

John Major, who is hosting the G7 meeting, last week called for decisive
leadership on environmental issues. ‘We have been too much like Billy Bunter,
happily consuming without reckoning the cost,’ he said. It is widely expected
that, partly as a result of Major’s pressure, considerable reference will
be made to environmental issues in the summit’s final communique, due to
be published later in the week.

However on a G7 scorecard prepared by various environmental groups,
Britain comes bottom on pollution and global warming. It has no action plan
for reducing greenhouse gases or increasing energy effeciency, renewable
energy or clean-up equipment for power stations to curb acid rain. ‘If Billy
Bunter had failed so badly, he would have been expelled from school,’ said
David Gee, director of FOE.

Other European countries fared equally poorly on the scorecard. Germany,
usually seen as Europe’s leader on green issues, scored worst on transport.

‘Whilst we’re the only G7 country with no motorway speed limit’, said
Dr Angelika Zahrnt, of FOE-Germany, ‘our new transport policy for the eastern
part of Germany relies on roads. A chance to develop a green transport policy
from scratch in Germany has been lost’.

The Italians scored lowest on waste. ‘Despite plans to phase out nuclear
power,’ said a representative of the Italian Green Party ‘the illegal export
of toxics to the Third World continues’.

But it was the US, the most powerful of the G7 countries which produces
23 per cent of all greenhouse gases, which was most heavily criticised.
‘If all nations used this much energy we’d have a five-fold increase in
greenhouse emissions and a five degree temperature rise in ten years’, said
Jim Tripp of the US Environmental Defense Fund.

The most damning criticism of the G7 came from the Third World. Maneka
Gandhi, India’s outspoken former minister for environment, accused the G7
countries of ‘keeping the Third World on the debt/poverty hook, whilst vastly
over-consuming and polluting themselves’.

Over-consumption in the First World relies on under-consumption in the
Third, but the Third will be the first to suffer the consequences, she said.
‘If global warming occurs, the cyclone that killed 150 000 in Bangladesh
will be far more devastating . . . and the famine that is killing millions
in Africa could wipe out life itself in that region.’ Douglas Korsah-Brown,
of FOE-Ghana, said that 60 per cent of Ghana’s foreign exchange earnings
are eaten up in debt repayment, for which the country had to rely on natural
resources. ‘With rising population and an economy which can’t create any
capital, the first victim is the environment’ he added.

Like Gandhi, he believes the G7 will fail the Third World if concrete
agreements on debt relief are not reached during this week’s summit. ‘Not
only do we need debt relief, but we need a reversal of the outflow of resources’,
said Korsah-Brown. ‘For Africa, if not most of the Third World, this is
now a matter of survival.’

The TOES meeting called for the G7 countries to stop recycling their
old rhetoric and start drawing up concrete legislation, timetables and budgets
to address crucial environment and development issues. Delegates to the
alternative meeting said that a business-as-usual approach was no longer
acceptable.