When your long weekend away with a group of friends and their wives costs £500 million, people might be tempted to ask who on earth you think you are. But then, when you need 22,000 police and eight warships to ensure your safety, and you insist on going to a small island off Japan, where hotel rooms cost $400 a night, perhaps it isn't surprising it costs that much.
Add to that the forests of plants flown in to beautify your every moment and the personal motorcade that one of your guests - Bill from Washington - insists on taking with him everywhere and you have all the ingredients of a really serious event. The trouble is that the magnificence of the G7 (now the G8) summits have been growing in inverse proportion to their effectiveness. In Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1995, the first summit to be in a really out-of-the-way place, the price tag was £10m. Birmingham in 1998 was said to cost just under £7m, but there they got unnerved by the fear they would be surrounded by 70,000 Jubilee 2000 demonstrators and fled town.
Now they're on the distant island of Okinawa, where flights are rare and expensive, and most people with something to tell you will probably not be foolish or rich enough to turn up. The summit was planned before people power in Seattle so disrupted the WTO trade negotiations last November, though not before perfectly friendly demonstrators like me had been tear-gassed. It seems likely that future summits will not just be more expensive, they will also be on increasingly tiny islands and hard for ordinary people to reach and increasingly out of touch.
It's not that world leaders shouldn't talk to each other, especially Clinton and Putin, who normally find communication so difficult. Far from it. But you have to question the right of these eight men to speak, so expensively, for the economic future of the Earth. It's not as if these are the biggest countries, or even the richest. You might ask, for example, why Canada is included at the table, and not, say, China or Brazil.
You might wonder what democratic legitimacy they have, when ordinary people around the world are increasingly asking for some say in the life-or-death decisions taken in distant, corporate boardrooms by MBA alumnae who still believe that business and ethics don't mix. You might ask why they fail to keep to their decisions, like last year's pledge to free 41 heavily indebted countries from $100 billion in unrepayable debt. Or why all they look set to do this weekend is miserably repeat last year's promise.
While we wait for them to act, 130,000 children are dying each week and $60m pours from the poorest countries to the richest in interest payments every day. Flood-torn Mozambique is still paying $45m a year to service its debts.
It's a shameful situation. The Government deserves some credit for leading on the issue in Okinawa, but other countries have been dragging their heels. This year's hosts, Japan, closed its government email address just before the summit after getting 65,000 emails in one day urging action.
Of course, it depends how you look at it. In the narrow sense, the poor owe the rich. We still owe millions to the US from the First World War. England still owes money to Austria for the ransom of King Richard the Lionheart; nobody is insisting those debts remain debts.
But in a broader sense, the scale of the 'carbon debt' owed by the rich to the poor, the damage done by profligate energy consumption in the rich countries, more than outweighs anything owed the other way round.
Yet the eight pals communing on the Pacific island will come out with their usual warm words, repeating last year's promise with a nod towards the environment and debt relief. It's considered traditional in G8 communiques. The real test is whether anything happens - the track record isn't good.
It's worth asking why this is; there seem to be two options. One is that the G8 leaders simply don't care - they're not in tune with the people of the world. The other is that, despite the rhetoric, they are, in fact, powerless in the face of the new reality of world economics.
Debt relief has been held up by a combination of bureaucracy and US-EU in-fighting, but there is also a sense that governments are no longer a match for the fearsome capital flows and corporate muscle that now make the economic world go round. Either way, £500m for a summit, enough to repay Gambia's debt twice over, seems to overestimate their worth. But maybe it would be worth the money if the eight leaders could show enough breadth of imagination to justify the expense of the summit.
Unfortunately, there's little sign of that so far. The G8 leaders might reflect that expense, luxury and wealth have little meaning unless you can be generous. Isn't generosity the only purpose and justification for ever-increasing wealth?
Anita Roddick founded the BodyShop.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
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