How to save lives? Cancel the debt

Social justice news
February 2005

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CRS commits $80 million to tsunami relief
Development group vindicated: U.S. now seeks Iraq's missing billions
How to save lives? Cancel the debt
Operation Rice Bowl celebrates its 30th anniversary
Pax Christi USA urges Darfur crisis be brought before the International Criminal Court
USCCB welcomes debt cancellation plan

How to save lives? Cancel the debt
Advocates for global debt relief and economic development are urging finance ministers from the world’s richest nations to use this weekend’s G7 meeting in London to cancel poor countries’ debts.

In a report released today ahead of the London meeting ("Do the Deal: the G7 must act now to cancel poor country debts"), leading international agencies ActionAid, CAFOD (Catholic Agency for Overseas Development), and Oxfam say the G7 finance ministers must seize this opportunity to have a huge impact on world poverty. According to the report, every week, poverty kills more people than died in the Asian tsunami. A child dies every three seconds from a preventable disease, and yet the world’s poorest countries spend more on debt repayments—$100 million a day—than they do on health.

"It's time to stop tinkering with the debts and lives of the world's poorest," said Henry Northover of CAFOD. "The small debt relief given so far has been used well and saved lives. It would be an act of gross cynicism to talk of poverty reduction while refusing the poorest the means to achieve it."

"If finance ministers agree a deal on debt cancellation, this G7 meeting would be the first milestone on the road towards ending the obscene poverty that kills 50,000 people every day,” said Oxfam’s Max Lawson.

Romilly Greenhill of ActionAid said: "Further debt relief is urgently needed. But it must be new money, and it must come without the kind of economic policy conditions that can harm poor people instead of helping them."

The tsunami has shown that when politicians want to act, they act quickly. Last month, under an intense media spotlight, rich countries agreed to suspend debt repayments from the tsunami-affected countries. In November 2004 they also agreed to cancel a total of $31billion of debt owed by Iraq.

And yet in Africa, the world’s poorest people are paying for their countries’ debt burdens with their lives. The development agencies say it will take full debt cancellation, as well as increased aid and fairer trade for low income countries to meet the internationally agreed targets, the Millennium Development Goals.

One important source of financing for debt relief could be a revaluation of the IMF’s stockpile of gold which, the agencies estimate, could raise $45 billion.

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