Baroness Vadera, the former Labour minister, now a
G20 adviser and the co-sponsor of the Africa free trade area
initiative. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
A free trade area for Africa, to help the impoverished continent match the spectacular growth of Far East economies, emerged as a distinctive British initiative at the G20 summit today.
The anti-poverty strategy, which is partly the brainchild of former Labour minister turned G20 adviser Baroness Vadera, has been developed with Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa.
David Cameron, speaking at a business summit in Seoul today, said: "We should explain that free trade is good for the poorest parts of our world as well, and one thing the British have been very active in trying to insert into this G20 is a free-trade area for Africa.
"Africa should be a growing part of the world economy: we should be lifting more people out of poverty in Africa. But we will not do it with all the trade barriers that exist between African countries."
There are currently three distinct free trade areas within Africa, but a meeting in January of the continent's major powers is designed to create a single free trade entity spanning 26 countries.
However, anti-poverty campaigners warned that a new approach focused on growth must not be used as an excuse to wriggle out of aid promises. "That's got to be the worry – that there's the appeal of the new, and that promises that are quite painful to deliver in the current climate are gone," said Adrian Lovett, global campaign director for Save the Children.
Save the Children said that of $25bn in aid promised by the G8 countries in 2005, only $12bn has been delivered, and warned that development progress could be derailed by the economic crisis.
Zuma, who is attending the G20 meeting, said the summit is also expected to launch major investments in infrastructure and skills development in developing countries, to help rebalance the world economy by creating new centres of demand outside the flagging economies of North America and Europe.
A battle earlier in the year – in part waged by Vadera, who was helped into her current role by her former boss, Gordon Brown – has ensured that the issue of international development is now appearing on the G20's agenda, having previously been seen exclusively as the preserve of the G8.
Leaders are expected to agree on a "nine-pillar" plan tomorrow that is intended to become a guide to strengthening cooperation between developed and emerging economies. The nine pillars are infrastructure building, trade promotion, human resources development, private investment, job creation, domestic resources mobilisation, growth with resilience efforts, financial inclusion and knowledge sharing.
Vadera, a former investment banker who was ennobled by Brown, points out that South Korea is one of only two countries that has transformed itself from a low income country to a high-income country in just one generation. She argues that it achieved this not by following the traditional prescriptions of the World Bank or the IMF, but by using international trade as an essential component of its development policy.
She argues that it is not enough to rely on aid over the long term; instead, greater reliance on domestic resources is critical to build a more resilient economy and implement a home-grown development agenda.