By Dina Ezzat This Monday Cairo will host the eighth summit of the G-15, the economic grouping of the strongest economies in the developing world. The gathering will be inaugurated by President Hosni Mubarak and is to be attended by a number of heads of state and government. It convenes at a time when the nations of Southeast Asia, some of which are group members, continue to reel in the aftermath of the crisis that undermined Asian financial markets, while yet other members are passing through critical phases of their economic reform programmes and at a time when developing nations are making an attempt to capture a larger slice of the international market to help combat high unemployment rates. "Economic groupings of countries with similar interests and conditions are the norm now, and they do serve the economic interests of their member-states," said Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, highlighting the importance of the upcoming summit. In other words, said Moussa, the G-15 "can help formulate the shape of the world's future economy," although it has to acknowledge the economic gap between South and North. The G-15, first established in 1989, has two major objectives in its coming summit: to promote economic cooperation and trade among member-states and to minimise the socio-economic cost of globalisation and domestic reform programmes. On both fronts the group has already taken a number of significant steps. Indeed, it was thanks to the collective efforts of the G-15 that attempts to impose international trade regulations that would have denied the poorer countries their cheap labour advantage were stopped. "The objection of developed countries to labour conditions and child labour, which help reduce production costs, overlooks the fact that such phenomena are a result of the poverty faced by developing nations," said Mounir Zahran, President Mubarak's representative at the summit. G-15 has been particularly active in combatting the non-stop attempts of advanced countries to get multi-national corporations to close their factories in developing countries, where labour is cheap, under the pretext of fighting poor labour conditions, and have these factories relocated in the richer countries to help create more job opportunities and boost their own economies. Today, there is room for similar collective efforts to minimise the high price of globalisation that developing countries face. As an off-shoot of the G-77 and the Non-Aligned Movement, the G-15 is is in a position to help developing economies secure a bigger share of the international market. Next week's summit will take place shortly before the ministers of trade of the member-states of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are scheduled to meet in Geneva to consider more globalisation measures. "The recommendations of the G-15 at its Cairo summit will be taken into consideration by the WTO meeting," said Zahran. The summit also comes before a meeting that should shortly take place between the G-7, the big industrial nations, and the G-24, a Washington-based economic grouping that attends World Bank sessions and includes some G-15 members. "President Mubarak has already addressed a message to British Prime Minister Tony Blair in which he highlighted a number of important issues in the South-North economic cooperation," said Moussa. The G-15 is actually now a G-15 plus one. Members include Algeria, Senegal, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Jamaica, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Chile, Mexico and Egypt, countries that are home to 30 per cent of the world's population and that account for 39 per cent of the Third World's GDP. Inter-trade among members, though, is limited and one objective of the coming summit, with its side-line trade fair and businessmen's forum, is to highlight the available facilities and opportunities for cooperation. There are already some 20 projects that rely on the vast natural resources and technological know-how of the group to which various member states are contributing, alongside a number of bilateral projects. "Maybe in the very beginning the G-15 did not perform in the best way possible but recently," Moussa believes, "there has been an increasing feeling that, with the way the world economy is going, there is a need to maximise the usefulness of this group." The first and last G-15 meetings were hosted by Malaysia. This eighth summit was originally scheduled to be hosted by Jamaica. When local considerations interfered with plans, Egypt offered to take over so that the opportunity of taking stock of the South Asian crisis and coordinating positions on pending economic issues was not lost. And Egypt remains willing to play host to the 10th summit in the year 2000, as originally scheduled.
