With more than one million people attending Live8 concerts at the weekend, probably two billion watching and listening to them on television, radio and the internet, and over 200,000 people participating in the Edinburgh demonstrations, the G8 summit at Gleneagles this week has been well and truly framed on its agenda of relieving absolute poverty in Africa.
The spotlight must also apply to its discussions on climate change and world economic issues which have a direct bearing on global wealth and poverty.
This is a marvellous show of solidarity, largely from a new generation of young people whose moral and political commitment are often doubted. It sets up real expectation from these world leaders. It will help to ensure their decisions on these issues are examined critically as well as sympathetically, and effectively followed through. All involved face a challenge to turn this musical and political engagement into a movement of enduring pressure, so that the measures agreed are properly targeted to achieve their objectives.
If primary poverty is indeed to be made historically redundant in Africa and elsewhere, more radical and far-reaching measures than those on the G8 agenda will have to be taken in subsequent years. The question is whether what is planned from this summit creates a genuine basis for further progress.
While the G8 proposals are a step forward, they do not resolve the developing country debt crisis. They cover only 18 countries initially, with 20 more to follow. Debts (mostly to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) will not be cancelled outright, but reduced, with conditions attached. Such constraints often create new barriers to development by prematurely opening weak economies to competition, insisting on inappropriate privatisations of public utilities, or by parallel reductions in aid flows reducing the overall effect.
Similar criticisms apply to trade liberalisation, which masks continuing export subsidies in rich countries and has more to do with giving them access to new markets than opening new opportunities for fair trade by poorer ones.
Development aid is commonly ill-focused on reducing poverty, prey to corrupt diversion or tied to donor country trade deals. This weekend has hopefully raised knowledge and awareness of traps like these, making it more difficult for G8 leaders to sell self-interested concessions as unwonted generosity.
The same cautionary advice applies to the G8 agenda on climate change and economic co-ordination. Better distributed world economic growth can do more to relieve poverty than direct aid - and certainly underwrites it. Climate change issues will be most contentious at this summit between the US and other participants. It is to be hoped Tony Blair is ready to confront the issue head on, with such public momentum behind him, rather than pursue an unprincipled compromise.