GROUP OF EIGHT: Rich Nation Summit Ends With Little For The Poor

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dipankar De Sarkar

BIRMINGHAM, May 17 1998 (IPS) - The world’s eight most industrialised nations closed their 24th annual summit here Sunday, with campaigners dismissing as “disappointing” their plans to ease the debt burden of the world’s poorest countries.

“This is a huge disappointment for the 70,000 people who joined the human chain in Birmingham and the hundreds of millions around the world who suffer under the burden of unpayable debts,” said Ann Pettifor, director of the Jubilee 2000 coalition.

Jubilee 2000, an alliance of 70 nongovernmental organisations want the Group of Eight countries to cancel all debt owed by the poorest countries to them.

Leaders of the G8 countries from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States wound up their May 15-17 summit supporting proposals to include all the 41 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) of the world into a debt- relief measure called the HIPC initiative.

But campaigners, 70,000 of whom gathered in this industrial city Saturday and formed a six mile (7.2 kilometre) human chain to protest G8 debt policies, say the HIPC initiative makes little difference to the poverty of the poorest countries.

Under the initiative, a country has to undergo a three-year regime of financial discipline. These Structural Adjustment Programmes require them to cut down on a range of social sector and other public expenditure, along lines laid down by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Currently, only six countries — Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Guyana, Mozambique and Uganda — qualify for debt-relief under the HIPC initiative, covering funds totalling about three billion dollars. The money is needed to reduce their debt to what the World Bank calls “sustainable levels”.

But campaigners argue the measures these countries need to adopt to qualify for HIPC membership are too stringent, and they hit the well-being of the poorest people in these poor countries hardest.

“The G8, who share responsibility for these high levels of debts, have washed their hands of it and shifted the blame on to the poorest countries,” Pettifor said.

“The most indebted countries now have to jump ever higher hurdles to be considered for an initiative which in Mozambique will deliver just 27 pence per person each year. The communique tightens the vice on the most indebted countries,” she added.

In his closing comments to the press, prime minister Tony Blair of Britain, which currently holds the presidency of the G8, said governments of affluent nations needed to convince their own people that aid going out to the poorest countries was being spent on anti-poverty projects.

The G8 communique said the gathered leaders will work with international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF, and other creditors to ensure “that when they qualify, countries get the relief they need, including interim relief measures whenever necessary, to secure a lasting exit from their