By Gustavo Capdevila
Inter Press ServiceMay 31, 2003
Civil society organisations issued another call to the Group of Eight (G8) most powerful countries to cancel the foreign debt owed by the world's 52 poorest nations -- although they do not harbour hopes for a favourable response. The G8 leaders will undoubtedly claim that they lack the funds needed to write off the debt of the highly-indebted poor countries (HIPC), warned the groups gathered at a counter-summit in Annemasse, 40 kms from the city of Evian in eastern France, where the G8 summit begins Sunday. But that would be an outright lie, because when the industrialised countries set out to find money, they are always able to do so, said Barry Coates with the London-based World Development Movement.
Parallel to the annual summit of the G8 -- which is made up of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- held Jun. 1 to 3 to discuss broad political and economic issues, civil society is debating questions like the relationship between trade and development, the effects of globalisation, terrorism, the environment, and human rights. Besides the cancellation of the foreign debt of HIPCs, the chief demands that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are making of the G8 include financing for HIV/AIDS programmes, access to water, and the need to hold transnational corporations accountable.
The NGOs are also calling for an extension of debt relief programmes to all developing countries. More than 150 NGOs from around the world have joined in the Jubilee 2000 global initiative launched in 1996 in Britain to press the governments of the world's rich countries to forgive the debt of the poorest nations. Since then, some 34 million people across the globe have signed a petition addressed to the G8, calling for debt relief.
At the same time, massive demonstrations were held in cities in Europe, because, according to Coates, the campaign to put an end to the injustice of the debt must be carried out in the countries of the industrialised North. The biggest rallies were held in Birmingham, England, and Genoa, Italy. And in June 1999, an estimated 35,000 people formed an 8-km human chain in Cologne, Germany to demand the cancellation of the foreign debt obligations of poor countries.
But the calls for debt relief have fallen on deaf ears. Instead of writing off the debt, the G8 has watered down its 1996 pledge to reduce the foreign debt burden of the world's poorest countries. The 52 HIPCs owe a total of 350 billion dollars, Coates said in Annemasse, where the NGO conference was held under the slogan ''Another World is Possible''. To the call for the cancellation of the 350 billion dollars in debt, the G8 responded with the promise to reduce the amount by 110 billion dollars, said the British activist. But the G8 later announced that 60 billion dollars, instead of 110 billion, would be cut. And in the end, the approved reduction of the debt has amounted to just 36 billion dollars, or 10 percent of what activists and poor countries were requesting, said Coates. Meanwhile, the use of the funds made available through the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) HIPC programme has come under fire.
Solange Koné, an activist with a community health NGO in the West African nation of Cote d'Ivoire, said that in sub-Saharan Africa, civil society has been disappointed with the use of the first HIPC funds made available. In Niger, for example, schools were built in areas where there is no clean water. ''No children attend the schools; only antelopes are wandering around there,'' said Koné. Hospitals were also built in Niger just two or three kms away from existing health clinics, to serve a population that was much more in need of agricultural assistance, she added. NGOs from Africa taking part in the counter-summit have criticised the plans drawn up by the international lending institutions to identify the areas in greatest need of poverty alleviation funds.
Civil society groups from French-speaking African nations have begun to meet in Bamako, Mali to come up with a common position with respect to the poverty-alleviation plans, while English-speaking countries are meeting in Kampala, Uganda. Koné announced that a joint meeting of NGOs from French, English and Portuguese-speaking African nations would be held in December to hammer out a common position towards World Bank and IMF prescriptions and conditions. The funds earmarked by the multilateral lenders for the HIPCs are even insufficient to meet the goals set by the institutions themselves, said Coates. Moreover, the continuous slide of international commodity prices has made the debt of HIPCs unpayable, he argued.
The activist maintained that the G8 would have no problem writing off the debt if the political will to do so existed. For example, Britain's share of cancelling the debt of HIPCs would amount to 48 dollars per taxpayer -- half of what the British government has spent on the ''illegal and immoral'' war on Iraq, Coates pointed out. Enrique Arceo, with Argentina's Institute of Studies on the State and Participation, agreed that the demand for writing off the entire debt of HIPCs is fair. He also pointed out that Argentina has gone from ''an emerging economy to a submerged country, on the verge of financial collapse, with a foreign debt that surpasses'' its Gross Domestic Product.
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