Byline: ALEX BRUMMER
THE usual image of the Group of Seven largest industrial countries is a club of 'rich nations' which thinks of no one but itself. Certainly, in times of turbulence like the present, when almost all the major economies are slowing if not slumping, it is critical not to take the eye off the ball.
Hence the immense pressure on the European Central Bank in Washington to play its part in ensuring that slowdown does not become crash or Glashutte Fake Watches recession.
Even Europe's major finance ministers, such as Laurent Fabius of France, could barely hide their frustration at the ECB's obstinate refusal to cut interest rates at a time of potential crisis. Much of the rhetoric about being 'forward looking', coined by Gordon Brown, was aimed at the ECB.
It is also evident at this year's spring meetings of the G7, IMF and World Bank that the agenda is changing. There was a time not long ago when managing directors of the IMF barely recognised that poverty and social deprivation existed. As the instrument of the Americans and Fake Chopard Watches other rich nations, their job was to impose discipline on renegade economies, however bitter the medicine.
That is no longer the case. Direct action by anti-capitalist protesters, of the kind determined to lay May Day siege to London today, is no longer dismissed out of hand.
The forces which disrupted the Seattle world trade summit, and have turned almost all major financial gatherings into riot scenes, are making a difference.
There is a new willingness to recognise that globalisation has a darker side and the richer countries have a real obligation to take note. Not so long ago the German and Japanese governments would come to these gatherings determined to block anything - such as debt relief in Africa - which threatened financial discipline.
The belief was that if rich countries offered debt relief to the poorest, they would expose themselves to 'moral hazard' and future debts would not be paid. Such arguments are now rarely heard.
Similarly, there is a recognition Maurice Lacroix Fake Watches that if free trade talks through the World Trade Organisation are to be resumed after the Seattle fiasco, the opening of markets must be linked directly to what the G7 called a 'poverty reduction' agenda.
Whereas once the G7 would largely confine itself to such elevated matters as exchange rates and fiscal policy, it has now become a broader steering group for the whole globalised system.
Its pronouncements range from trade talks to dealing with the consequences of the recent climb-down by pharmaceutical companies on the supply and pricing of HIV/Aids drugs to Africa.
The West, having galvanised itself in the millennium year 2000 to bring debt reduction plans to 22 of the poorest countries of the world, most in Africa, cannot stand by and watch the gains Fake Prada Handbags Handbags wiped out by disease.
As World Bank president James Wolfensohn noted here, Aids killed almost 3m people around the world last year and a further 5m were HIV-infected.
This represents 'a global development problem, threatening to reverse many of the gains made over the last century'.
This is the kind of rhetoric which one might expect to hear from lobby groups, rather than from the head of the World Bank or the G7.
One would expect it to find little favour from a rightwing US administration like that of George W Bush, which ran roughshod over the Kyoto environmental agreement and is busy plotting a star wars defence system.
Not a bit of it. The US administration, which has a great deal of trouble extracting funds from Congress for poverty issues, joined Gordon Brown here in pushing for a new 'global purchase fund' for drugs and vaccines to treat HIV/Aids, TB and malaria.
There is a recognition that simply making drugs available to South Africa and others for the treatment of Aids is not enough, as Glaxo SmithKline and the other drug giants like to point out.
Aids treatment requires a complex cocktail of drugs which needs close monitoring - almost impossible to provide in the impoverished health care systems of Southern Gucci Replica Handbags Africa.
So debt relief schemes in the region need to be linked to poverty reduction plans which deliver better health care.
This may well look like soft soap to the anti-capitalist demonstrators, some of whom may seem more intent on destroying property than on changing the global agenda.
But there should be no mistake.
The protesters' voices are being heard, even among the high priests of the free market here in Washington Alex Brummer is senior financial journalist of the year.
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