Economist Jeffrey Sachs said Wednesday that the G8 could endanger its credibility if leaders fail to fulfill several “broken multi-billion-dollar pledges” aimed at helping the developing world, Canwest News Service/Vancouver Sun reports.

The comments from Sachs, a U.N. secretary-general advisor and director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, came ahead the G8’s forthcoming report about “unfulfilled promises from past summits, ranging from doubling aid for Africa to establishing a food security fund for small farmers,” the news service writes (O’Neil, 6/17).

VOA News also reports on Sachs’ comments and includes analysis of G8 commitments from Joanne Carter, executive director of the Results Educational Fund, who also sits on the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria board.

“Action by the U.S. and Canada and other G8 leaders in this political window, extending from … the G8 [summit] to the September U.N. Millennium Development Goal summit in New York, will in many ways determine whether we have the resources and the commitment over the next 5 years to achieve the MDGs or whether the G8 simply makes gestures,” Carter said (DeCapua, 6/16). 

Sachs “said he was troubled a leaked draft of the leaders’ final communique contained no mention of the failed Gleneagles promise,” the Canadian Press/Winnipeg Free Press reports. “It seems that at the very summit that’s supposed to be about commitments being fulfilled and about accountability, they are probably going to try to duck this,” he said (Blanchfield, 6/16).