|PIC1|When African leaders meet their rich G8 counterparts next week the inevitable smiles will mask bitter disappointment over broken promises on both sides.

G8 nations are falling short of grand pledges they made at a summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005 to double aid to Africa by 2010. Western leaders are increasingly frustrated by Africa's lack of progress in tackling crises such as Darfur and Zimbabwe.

"I want to hold the G8 countries to their promise. When you sign a contract, you absolutely must stick to it," said Angelique Kidjo, a popular West African singer from Benin.

G8 aid to Africa will fall $40 billion (20 billion pounds) short of the Gleneagles pledge under current plans, according to a report last month by an Africa Progress Panel, which was set up to monitor implementation of the 2005 commitments.

But surging oil and food prices, an economic downturn in major G8 economies and tensions over world trade talks may push Africa down the agenda this time around.

Kidjo told Radio France International she and fellow anti-poverty campaigners like Irish rock stars Bono and Bob Geldof would be sending messages to G8 leaders - and they might even gate-crash the party at Hokkaido in Japan next week.

Geldof visited Sierra Leone last month to see for himself the impact of aid and private sector investment in the country ranked bottom of the most recent U.N. Human Development Index.

"While I'm no agriculture expert, something more has to be done here so that people are fed," Geldof said, describing Sierra Leone, part of what was once known as West Africa's 'Rice Coast' as "so green it makes Ireland look beige".

Geldof's prediction Africa would be "a giant economic power by 2040" might be a stretch, but there are reasons for optimism.

Japan, for example, has already met its Gleneagles pledges.

Sierra Leone will save $36 million this year thanks to debt relief, partly via a G8 scheme, and is using it to restore mains power which collapsed during a devastating 1991-2002 civil war.

But experts warn food inflation threatens to eat away at such progress as poor countries struggle to make ends meet.

"The rising cost of food must . play a central role during this year's G8, as currently 800 million of the poorest people on this planet cannot afford food because prices have risen by more than 40 percent," the Sierra Leone office of the British government's aid wing DfID said.

"If we don't deal with rising food prices the entire first Millennium Development Goal - to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger - will never be achieved," it said.

The U.N. Millennium Development Goals agreed in 2000 set out key targets to reduce world poverty by 2015, although many poor countries especially in Africa are not expected to achieve them.

TRADE TENSIONS

Rising food prices have also polarised positions over trade, just as World Trade Organisation talks on the "Doha Development Round" head to a key ministerial summit in late July intended to hammer out a long-delayed deal to liberalise global trade.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who assumed the rotating European Union presidency on Tuesday, has opposed dismantling EU agricultural subsidies which poor countries blame for keeping world prices low and for keeping their produce out of Europe.

"What African agriculture wants is open market access to Europe, but what Sarkozy is arguing for is more protection . Western G8 countries are under pressure from their domestic constituencies on this ," Alex Vines, head of the Africa Programme at London's Chatham House thinktank, said.

The G8 groups Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

The elephant in the room is China, whose massive demand for oil and commodities has thrown state budgets and inflation planning into disarray by pushing up prices and whose aid and investment packages challenge the role of Western aid in Africa.

Eager to secure mineral supplies, China has ramped up its commitments in resource-rich countries like Angola and Sudan.

A proposed $9 billion Chinese investment programme in Democratic Republic of Congo has threatened to derail IMF aid, a condition for the G8's own Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative.

Rising prices for Africa's commodities exports and increased foreign investment should strengthen Africa's bargaining power vis a vis the G8 and the Western-dominated IMF and World Bank.

Yet several African leaders due to attend the Japan summit - the same group represented at Gleneagles in 2005 - will do so in a significantly weaker position than three years ago. This includes outgoing South African President Thabo Mbeki and Nigeria's Umaru Yar'Adua, who was elected in flawed polls last year.

That will do little to mitigate the perennial problem of such summits: their remoteness from the realities of poverty.

As Kaly Jalloh, an unemployed youth of 19, said in Sierra Leone's capital Freetown: "We don't know anything about aid, but we know that poverty is too much."