DEVELOPMENT: UN Calls for Debt Relief in Humanitarian Crises

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb 29 2000 (IPS) - A United Nations report recommends the cancellation of the foreign debt of Zambia to allow it to focus its resources on fighting the AIDS epidemic, and of Honduras and Nicaragua, devastated by hurricane Mitch in late 1998.

The report proposes that debt relief be linked to humanitarian emergencies and enforcement of the ban on the worst forms of child labour.

Linking debt relief to HIV-AIDS prevention in Africa and reconstruction in the wake of Mitch, as well as to investment in education, would be one small step on the long road to eliminating poverty in the world’s least developed countries, say the report’s authors, Reinaldo Figueredo of Venezuela and Fantu Cheru of the United States.

The report is currently being discussed by the UN open-ended working group on structural adjustment policies and economic, social and cultural rights, sessioning in Geneva through Mar 10. It will also be debated at the Mar 20-Apr 28 annual session of the UN Human Rights Commission.

The authors’ recommendations are based on the conviction that measures adopted by industrialised countries and multilateral lending institutions to tackle the foreign debt problem have fallen short.

The document specifically refers to the debt reduction proposal announced in June 1999 at a meeting in Cologne, Germany of the Group of Seven most industrialised nations – the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada.

The Cologne reforms are aimed at gradually but significantly expanding the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative administered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

But the debt relief measures contemplated by the Cologne reforms “would be neither sufficiently deep nor broad and would not be delivered at the pace required to address the pressing development financing needs of poor countries,” say the authors.

Their report stresses the urgent need to link debt relief to the three critical humanitarian emergencies mentioned, which require an immediate response from the international community due to their widespread consequences for the human rights of millions of poor persons.

In Africa, the speed with which HIV (the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus) is spreading counteracts the progress made in terms of economic growth, improvement in life expectancy and reduction of infant mortality rates.

The HIV-AIDS epidemic is not only the most pressing public health concern in Africa, but has also become the greatest threat to development in the region, says the report.

More than 5,000 people die of AIDS daily in Africa – a figure that will have climbed to 13,000 by 2005, according to epidemiologists.

But “the unprecedented scale of HIV-AIDS-related death and the breakdown of family and social network systems in Africa have yet to mobilize the international community in action,” say Figueredo and Cheru.

“The reaction of Western governments to the HIV-AIDS crisis in Africa amounts to callous indifference when compared to recent Western reponse to the most widely televised and strategically important trouble spots – Turkish earthquakes, Balkan wars and Middle East peace agreements,” the report states.

“In Kosovo, because of the presence of CNN cameras, the response of the international community has been swift and often with large sums.

“In Africa, on the other hand, the silent emergency of HIV-AIDS takes its toll on a daily basis in remote villages and the narrow streets of overcrowded shanty-towns, far away from the nearest CNN camera.

“What explains the gross indifference by the international community to the widening humanitarian crisis of HIV-AIDS in Africa? Why have so many African leaders kept ‘silent’ when their citizens are being decimated by the epidemic on a daily basis?” ask the authors, who point out that “continued warnings about the impending crisis by WHO and UNAIDS have fallen on deaf ears.”

In the case of Zambia, given the magnitude of the epidemic, health emergency criteria should be employed rather than the macroeconomic conditions imposed by the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) for the granting of debt relief, says the report.

“Addressing this crisis is not an optional charity, but an obligation,” it underlines.

In 1998, the Zambian government poured 125 million dollars into servicing its debt to Paris Club creditors and multilateral institutions – a figure equivalent to 69 percent of the government’s total social spending that year.

The Zambian government, in collaboration with several local non- governmental organisations and church groups, is proposing a multilateral programme for debt relief to help it respond to the HIV-AIDS epidemic.

The authors point out that under the initiative, the funds that currently go towards servicing the debt would instead be earmarked for anti-HIV-AIDS efforts.

An estimated 89 million dollars over the next five years, or under 18 million dollars a year, would be needed to finance all government and non-governmental HIV-AIDS prevention efforts in Zambia, compared to the 2.5 billion dollars spent in Kosovo by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in just the first month of the 1999 war, says the report.

With respect to Honduras and Nicaragua, Figueredo and Cheru point out that the storm that slammed into the two Central American countries in October 1998 was the worst natural disaster in that region in recent history.

“All debt contracted under the heading of emergency aid should be treated on the books not as ‘new debt’, but as an advance down payment toward debt relief, which both countries would have been granted sooner or later,” the authors recommend.

They also suggest that “all bilateral contributions made so far to the Central American Trust Fund to cover debt service payments due to the multilateral development banks should be credited to Honduras and Nicaragua as grants.”

And regarding the worst forms of child labour, they pointed out that poor families in countries like Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe put their kids to work as a survival mechanism.

Although many parents are aware that the job prospects and skills of their children would improve with schooling, they cannot afford to do without the income brought in by their children, the report points out.

Incentives must be made available to confront the conflict between the short-term economic interests of the parents and the long-term interests of their children, say the authors, who cite the Bolsa Escola programme of scholarships for families that keep their kids in school until age 14, set up five years ago in Brasilia by Governor Cristovam Buarque.

Figueredo and Cheru suggest using the successful initiative, which is being applied in several Brazilian cities and in Mexico, as a blueprint for programmes in Heavily Indebted Poor Countries.