The Toyako G8 Summit held from July 7 to 9 with the participation of leaders from 23 other countries exposed the wide rift between the developed and developing worlds and failed to reach concrete agreements on key issues ranging from climate change to surging oil and food prices and the weak dollar.
There were several reasons. One obviously was the lack of leadership on the part of the Group of Eight leaders.
The purpose of the annual G8 summit is to make top-down decisions on issues that individual countries will have difficulty addressing. True, the share of the global economy occupied by the G8 major industrialized nations has been declining from the dominant 70 percent they commanded when they launched what was then known as the Group of Five in 1975. But they still account for about 60 percent of total GDP.