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| Friday, 11 June 2004 |
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G8 considers inviting China and India into its fold SEA ISLAND, Ga. Thursday (Reuters) Faced with the growing importance of developing countries, the rich club of G8 nations mulled different ideas on Wednesday for holding regular talks with countries like China and India. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin said he had floated the idea of holding summits of the Group of 20 - which includes the Group of Eight leading industrial nations but adds other important countries - in addition to G8 summits. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said the leaders were thinking of inviting China and India into the G8 itself. "It doesn't make much sense for us to talk about the economy of the future without two countries that are protagonists on the world stage," Berlusconi told reporters during a break in talks at the annual G8 summit. The G8 comprises the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia. Berlusconi said the leaders discussed the strength of the Chinese economy and the fact that it was not constrained by the sort of labor laws that exist in the West. "But we said that we shouldn't be afraid of China because it is a huge consumer market and the idea was put forward to call China and India to join the G8, making it the G9 or G10," Berlusconi said. A Canadian official said: "The G8 needs to acknowledge that global power and influence are not uniquely in the hands of the G8." The issue of whether the G8 is inclusive enough comes up virtually every year, and another Canadian official said talks were only in a preliminary stage. But Martin held out the possibility of a G20 summit next year. Earlier G8 endorsed a plan to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and singled out North Korea and Iran for concern. Leaders of the Group of Eight agreed on a one-year ban on the transfer of equipment and technology for uranium enrichment and reprocessing. But the G8 "action plan" fell short of some of the goals laid out by President George W. Bush in a major speech on proliferation in February and some analysts said it was too modest. Pressed by the United States, however, the G8 - holding its summit in Sea Island, Georgia - had harsh words for North Korea and Iran in their statement. They called on North Korea to abandon its weapons program and reiterated a commitment to nuclear talks among six countries - North and South Korea, Russia, China, the United States and Japan. "We strongly support the six-party process, and strongly urge (North Korea) to dismantle all of its nuclear weapons-related programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner," the statement said. On Iran, the leaders stopped short of adopting the U.S. position, which is that there are grounds for suspecting that the Islamic republic is trying to develop nuclear weapons. |
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