As this year’s president of the G8, Japan has an opportunity to boost
international support for science and technology
in development.Japan
has an enviable
international reputation in many areas, from producing
quality goods to hosting one of the world’s most important meetings on
climate change in Kyoto in 1993. But effective aid to developing
countries is not among them.On paper, the figures look impressive
enough. Japan’s foreign aid budget, although falling in recent years,
remains one of the largest in the world. But Japan is often criticised
for focusing help on its immediate neighbours, using its money
unimaginatively, and spending too much on lucrative contracts for its
own construction and supply companies. As this year’s president of the
G8 group of the world’s leading industrialised nations, and as host of
the G8 summit in Hokkaido this summer, Japan has a unique opportunity
to correct this image. Already it has indicated its desire to see
assistance to Africa as a top priority at the summit.The meeting will
also offer Japan the chance to put some political muscle behind
previous summit commitments — not always vigorously pursued — to
enhance the role of science and
technology within international aid
policies. In highlighting the importance of science and technology in
development, Japan will have its own experience to draw on.The
country’s success in rebuilding its economy after the Second World War
is a textbook example of the power of technological innovation to
stimulate social development that many developing countries would love
to emulate.Japan already makes some efforts to help them to do so. Its
aid programmes contain several practical achievements, including
assistance for science and mathematics education in some African
countries, backing for science policy studies in others and generous
support for international agricultural research centres.But much more
could be done, as the country’s own scientific community has
acknowledged. In a report published last April, Japan’s Council for
Science and Technology Policy argues that “Japan should change its
traditional mindset, and place a new emphasis on making use of the
country’s superior strengths in science and technology to take the
initiative in resolving worldwide issues that face the human
race”Preparations for the G8 meeting will indicate how far the Japanese
government is prepared to endorse this position. There will be
opportunities for it to make a difference: for example, Japan will host
the first formal meeting of G8 science ministers shortly before the
Hokkaido summit. Last month it announced that this meeting will have
two main agenda items. The first is to look at scientific cooperation
between G8 countries. The second will explicitly address capacity
development in developing countries, as well as cooperation through,
for example, joint research and knowledge transfer.As Kiyoshi Kurokawa,
the chief scientific adviser to the cabinet, has written, “The G8
summit will provide a major test for both the government and the
scientific community of Japan to exercise leadership in this
challenging, globalising world.”But there are grounds for concern that
the importance of science and technology in development — particularly
the need to go beyond piecemeal support for individual projects to
address such fundamental issues as capacity building in research and
development — still requires greater acknowledgement in Tokyo.Next May
sees the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development
(TICAD), a meeting that is expected to set the agenda for addressing
Africa’s needs at the G8 summit the following month. It will include
discussion of topics ranging from infectious diseases to global
warming, which call for significant scientific input. But, despite
encouragement from scientists in some other G8 countries, no session
will be devoted to science and technology as such. It will be
regrettable if this unrecognised need for a strategic commitment to
support science and technology in developing countries is repeated at
the G8 meeting itself. This is what happened three years ago, at the
Gleneagles summit in Scotland: attempts to introduce into the final
communique a quantified commitment to building scientific capacity —
based on the recommendations of the Commission for Africa set up by the
then British prime minister Tony Blair — were apparently watered down
after opposition from the United States.A firm stand by Japan on this
issue, drawing on any recommendations that emerge from the TICAD
meeting, could make up for what happened in Gleneagles. And it would be
helpful if, before then, the government were to adopt a recommendation
in the science council’s report that it should strengthen its own
internal arrangements for delivering on such a commitment. This could
be done, for example, by giving support for capacity building in
science and technology a higher profile within the Japan International
Cooperation Agency. This — as Kurokawa points out — could in turn be
made easier by drawing public attention, both domestically and
internationally, to the importance of this field and the considerable
contribution that Japan has already made.Fewer countries are better
placed than Japan to show the developing world how to exploit the
promise of science and technology — or, in light of its experience of
atomic weapons during the Second World War — to stimulate debate on how
to avoid any potentially negative social and environmental impacts. As
president of the G8, Japan now has a unique opportunity to exert a
strong influence over international activity in this arena. It is to be
hoped that it will grasp this opportunity with enthusiasm and
commitment.