Eight leaders from the world’s wealthiest industrial powers held their

annual meeting recently, and I’m left with one burning question: why?

The G-8 Summit is a meeting where world leaders gather to discuss

various issues and deal with some of the major economic and political

concerns facing their nations and the rest of the world.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted this year’s conference,

which was held in Scotland. Topics on the agenda included climate

change, the threat of global warming and the augmentation of economic

aid in Africa, among other things.

All of these topics seem very interesting, as well as

attention-worthy, and one expects that world leaders would be able to

come up with great solutions to these problems.

The sad part is that they produced no such solutions.

The topic of climate change and global warming resulted in the

leaders agreeing that these were urgent issues to look into, but other

than that, nothing else was decided. What does that have to say about

our leaders, and about our world?

It’s very disappointing, and ridiculous, that the world’s most

powerful leaders came together and agreed that we have a global warming

problem when everyone else knew that long before any G-8 meeting took

place. Why waste time and money agreeing on something that is already

known when a solution should be discussed. Is this what the leaders of

the world do every day?

Here we were thinking that they’re actually working extremely hard

coming up with solutions to serious problems, but instead, they’re

taking their sweet time, flying around the globe ‘?world leader-style’

while the rest of us work hard at our own jobs.

Additionally, the African aid package discussed at the summit sounds

great. It’s very sad to see the images that remind us of how poor some

nations really are, and how much people are actually suffering.

At the end of the day, the G-8 Summit resulted in Prime Minister

Blair announcing that monetary aid to Africa would be increased to $50

billion by 2010.

That sounds great, but where is all this money coming from? Is it

not coming from tax-paying citizens in the United States? It’s amazing

that aid can go to poor people who are so far away, but wouldn’t it

make a little more sense to help those who are poor here at home first,

as there are certainly plenty?

It is understandable that Africa as a whole needs a lot of aid in

many areas. There are disease and poverty issues that surely need to be

addressed.

However, Africa is not the only nation facing these issues. There

are other countries around the world facing a similar situations. If

this aid is going to be given, shouldn’t it be going to other places,

too? Why only Africa? Attention should be paid to other places.

We’ve all traveled to different places around the world and we’ve

all seen poverty in some form ?Africa is not alone. ‘

In recent decades, the continent of Africa has received a lot of

monetary aid from countries like ours, totaling somewhere in the

billions of dollars. What is going on there that after all this help,

the continent is still facing the same, if not worse, conditions?

The money should be handled in a way that will create effective

progress on the continent. Perhaps there should be less emphasis placed

on how much money will be raised or given to Africa, and instead placed

on how this money will be spent, who will be in control of it, where

it’s going, etc.

Instead of spending loads of money to put on concerts to ‘?raise

awareness’ of world poverty, perhaps it would be best to sit down and

have a real meeting to seriously discuss what will be done and how all

nations, not just one, can be helped. We all know that world poverty

exists; we’ve all seen it, heard it and smelled it.

Getting together to sing a song will not make poverty go away.