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Leaders of the Group of Eight (G8) are gathering in the French resort town of Evian for an informal dialogue meeting with leaders of some developing countries on Sunday and the following annual G8 summit scheduled for Monday and Tuesday.
The summit, which provides the first opportunity for G8 leaders to meet face-to-face after the Iraq war, faces multiple challenges in the event of the current political, economic and international security situation.
The most grave and imperative challenge, needless to say, is how to revive a sluggish global economy struggling on the brink of recession.
The G8, namely the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and Russia, groups all the leading industrialized countries in the world. The economic status of its member states, good or bad, will have a direct bearing on the global economy.
Because these countries have been witnessing weak economies, spiraling deficit, growing unemployment rates, and depressing consumer confidence over the past few years, the world economy, with few exceptions, has also suffered as a result.
French President Jacques Chirac, who hosts the dialogue meeting and the G8 summit, has urged G8 leaders to focus on kick starting global growth at the Evian gathering.
"I am convinced Evian can convey a message of confidence in world economic growth; but this message has to be credible and the confidence fully justified," Chirac said in a recent interview with the British newspaper Financial Times.
A priority at the summit should be to "encourage growth and show that the (Group of) Eight are willing to work together," Chirac's spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna, quoted the president as saying in a briefing to reporters in Paris earlier this week.
The second challenge for G8 leaders is how to facilitate common development and narrow the gap between North and South, analysts say.
Realizing that growing North-South gap will not only slow down the process of economic globalization but also threaten the economic stability and sustainability of the rich, G8 leaders began to pay more attention to the plight of the poor in their recent summits.
They also made some commitments on debt relief and economic assistance to the developing countries, especially for the most destitute in Africa. Most of the promises, however, have failed to be materialized or lack follow-ups.
Talking about the Evian summit earlier this year, President Chirac stressed that it was a priority to reduce poverty so as to make the globalization a more humane process.
He urged the developed countries to increase development assistance and help some two billion people around the world to shake off poverty.
In order to facilitate North-South dialogue and seek common development, President Chirac has invited leaders from 11 developing countries for an informal dialogue with their G8 counterparts in Evian.
Analysts believe that international security issues, including anti-terrorism and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, will also be high on the summit agenda, especially after the recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco.
Meanwhile, the United States, still struggling to recover from the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 of 2001, has made anti-terrorism and nonproliferation the focus of its foreign policy ever since and is widely believed to continue pressing for these agendas in Evian.
As an important international forum, the two-day summit is also expected to deal with regional conflicts, the post-war reconstruction in Iraq, as well as other global issues such as environmental protection and the fight against AIDS and organized crimes, analysts say.
Moreover, the strong opposition to the Iraq war by some G8 members, France and Germany in particular, had angered Washington and sparked a major trans-Atlantic rift in the run-up and aftermath of the US-led military strike on the oil-rich country.
Meeting face-to-face for the first time after the war, leaders from these countries, with the United States and Britain on the one side and France and Germany on the other, may seek to mend their fences and reinstate the trans-Atlantic alliance in Evian.
(Xinhua News Agency June 2, 2003)
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