British finance minister Gordon Brown will this week seek to build a broad, international consensus behind his proposals to fund debt relief and double aid to the world’s poorest countries. With just a month left before leaders from the Group of Eight industrialised nations gather in Gleneagles, Scotland, there has so far been little agreement among rich countries on the best way to lift Africa out of poverty.

But Brown hopes the combination this week of European Union finance ministers meeting in Luxembourg and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s visit to Washington will raise support for Britain’s proposals ahead of next weekend’s G8 ministerial meeting in London. “At a time when there is an urgency about the need to act, what we are proposing is nothing less than a new deal between rich countries and poor countries,” Brown will said in a speech in Newcastle yesterday, according to a Treasury official.

“A new global economic alliance that engages the richest G8 countries and all 25 countries of the European Union from the richest to the poorest.” G8 finance ministers meeting in London at the end of the week will also be joined by their counterparts from China, South Africa, Brazil and India. Brown will ask rich, oil-producing countries to support his call for greater debt relief and aid to poor nations.

“Instead of the poorest countries paying up to $15 billion on debt servicing between now and 2015, the poorest countries should have their debt servicing payments wiped out,” Brown said. He has also proposed the creation of an International Finance Facility (IFF) that would raise money available for aid spending now by issuing bonds against future development budgets.

So far the idea has not been backed by all G8 members and Brown wants to get a pilot IFF running in the next few weeks to fund vaccination programmes. “If we can agree a go-ahead for this immunisation plan, on the road to a fully fledged international facility in the next 10 years, 5 million lives can be saved and in the 10 years after 2015 another 5 million lives,” he will say.

Britain, seeking to salvage its planned debt relief deal for Africa ahead of next month’s rich nations’ summit, is to ask oil-rich Arab states to contribute more, the Observer newspaper said on Sunday.

The current holder of the G7 presidency, Britain has declared 2005 a make-or-break year for Africa but its proposals for easing the burden of African debt have been coolly received by its partners including the United States.

Arab world to help Africa

“It is critical that all wealthy countries, including the richer, oil producing states join in,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown wrote in the newspaper. Despite their oil wealth, the Gulf states have had little tradition of donating overseas aid. The Observer said Brown has opened discussions with his opposite numbers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

Details are expected to be discussed at the summit in Gleneagles, Scotland on July 6-8. British Prime Minister Tony Blair flies to Washington on Monday in an attempt to persuade President George W. Bush to commit more money to Africa. The Bush administration and other nations are unconvinced by Britain’s plan for an “International Finance Facility”, that would double aid for poor countries by issuing bonds against rich states’ future aid budgets.

British government sources are now floating the idea of pressing ahead without US involvement. Nor has London won a critical mass of support for a scheme to sell off International Monetary Fund gold to fund further debt relief for Africa.

Brown said on Friday he would write off the 500,000 pound tax bill from staging a “Live8” concert in London aimed at pressurising world leaders into eradicating African poverty. A YouGov poll for the Daily Telegraph newspaper on Saturday found 83 percent of Britons were not confident that money given to Africa would be spent wisely.

<B>Sumeet DESAI</B>