BRITAIN: British Chancellor Gordon Brown vowed yesterday not to scale back his ambitious plan to lift Africa out of poverty, despite signs that rich countries still disagree on how the goal should be achieved.
Mr Brown and Prime Minister Tony Blair have declared 2005 a make-or-break year for Africa, pushing other Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations to adopt plans to fund debt relief and double aid to the world's poorest nations.
"This is not a time for timidity nor a time to fear reaching too high," Brown said in Edinburgh. "This year . . . is our chance to reverse the fortunes of a continent and to help transform the lives of millions."
But the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, is just a month away and Britain - which holds the rotating G8 presidency - is still struggling to win over key members like the United States.
"We have still got a long way to go in the next few weeks in the run-up to Gleneagles," Mr Brown told a news conference.
The summit will be the focus of a mass movement to put pressure on G8 leaders, with large demonstrations and huge Live8 rock concerts held in Europe and the United States.
Mr Brown praised charity campaigners and promised to write off the £500,000 tax bill from staging Live8.
Mr Brown said he was in almost daily contact with US Treasury Secretary John Snow ahead of a London meeting of G8 finance ministers next week, which should lay the groundwork for the Gleneagles summit.
Mr Blair will also try to sell British plans for African poverty relief to a reluctant President George W. Bush at a meeting in Washington next week.
South African President Thabo Mbeki, fresh from a meeting with Mr Bush in Washington, said in Cape Town he thought the United States was willing to boost aid but did not want to be tied down on how the increase should be financed.
Mr Brown set out a list of proposals to meet the Millennium Development Goals, which were agreed at United Nations level in 2000 and include halving poverty and disease by 2015.
One idea is to sell or revalue International Monetary Fund (IMF) bullion, the third-largest reserves in the world, to raise cash to write off African countries' debts to international organisations.
The United States, worried about the impact of such transactions on the global bullion market, has said the sale of IMF gold may not be necessary.
But Britain insisted that using IMF gold was still on the agenda.
Mr Brown also pushed the idea of an international finance facility (IFF) to let developing states borrow against future aid pledges, an idea which has also drawn US opposition. Britain hopes to at least launch a pilot IFF to fund immunisation programmes.
"It is an extraordinary fact that a finance facility for immunisation, raising an extra $4 billion ahead of 2015 for vaccinations, could save an extra five million lives over the next 10 years," Mr Brown said.
Fairer trade rules are also part of Britain's plan, but such reform also looks far from certain.
Mr Brown urged more nations to raise aid spending by taking a cue from European Union countries, which last month set firm targets to help meet a goal of spending 0.7 per cent of gross national income on official development aid in 10 years' time.
Britain also pledged to keep pushing the development agenda outside the G8, which comprises Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Canada, the United States and Russia.
Mr Brown said he had invited ministers from China, India, Brazil and South Africa to the pre-Gleneagles meeting of finance ministers to discuss the global economy and development.
He backed Bob Geldof's call for a million people to march on Edinburgh to protest against world poverty and said it should go ahead as long as it was peaceful.