UK stresses importance of international aid promises

British Prime Minister Tony Blair this week pledged to press world leaders to do more to tackle famine, conflict and disease in Africa. Blair stressed at a meeting of the New Partnership for Africa's Development in South Africa on Saturday that more could be done to assist the continent in terms of world trade reforms, assistance with peacekeeping, and diseases like HIV/AIDS. "In an interdependent world it makes no sense for us to leave ... Africa in the situation of being the only continent anywhere in the world ... that has gone backwards [over the last few decades]," he told reporters. Blair dismissed suggestions that the world's poorest continent had dropped down the pecking order of issues now that Britain had passed the presidency of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations to Russia.