The world's richest nations have let yet another opportunity to drag their poorest counterparts from poverty slip by. Despite many fine words, the Group of Seven meeting ended in London on Saturday night without firm pledges for action.
That was despite a solid action plan being put forward by Britain's finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. He had envisaged doubling international aid to developing countries by issuing bonds on the world's capital markets. Ministers and bankers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan backed the idea, but their most influential partner, the United States, rejected it.
Instead, they compromised - expressing a willingness to provide multilateral debt cancellations of up to 100 per cent for some of the world's most impoverished nations. The summit of finance ministers agreed that any such relief would be on a case-by-case basis.
Again, they failed to heed the calls of humanitarian experts. They even ignored respected South African statesman Nelson Mandela, who last Thursday challenged them to ease the plight of hundreds of millions of poor people by slashing debt, boosting aid and making world trade fairer. Using the imagery of his 27-year imprisonment and eventual release to lead a democratic South Africa, his message was straightforward: 'In this new century, millions of people in the world's poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free.'
Such sentiments have long been the goal of the United Nations, which has hosted a series of conferences at which promises to tackle poverty have been generous, but resulting action disappointing. Targets to pull from poverty a majority of the estimated 3 billion people who live on US$2 a day or less - half the world's population - by 2015 remain far from being met.
Rich nations have in the past indicated a willingness to set aside 0.7 per cent of their budgets to help the developing world. Only a few countries, most notably Norway, achieve that aim. The US is among the biggest culprits.