Jubilee Northwest Coalition

Doubletalk 

For debt cancellation to truly work, rich nations need to adjust their attitude 
By Edgar Sioson 

Real Change Seattle - July 2005

 

With all the recent hoopla surrounding the G8 announcement of the debt cancellation agreement, you would think that AIDS, poverty, and malnutrition had been eradicated in one handshake deal. The irony only gets deeper when we look back and see those same hands repeatedly slam the door on pleas for mercy and humanity. As recently as late April, Secretary John Snow announced that the U.S. Treasury was unwilling to consider the possibility of selling International Monetary Fund (IMF) gold, an option that even the IMF itself says could easily finance debt relief strategies for poorer countries. Indeed, the G8 debt cancellation plan followed through with that announcement. The aggressive lobbying of the gold industry had paid off: it kept the price of gold safe from the imaginary weight of what could have been a much more effective debt cancellation program. Instead, the current debt cancellation plan is riddled with all the same economic conditionalities that rendered previous plans ineffective. It is also limited to only 18 countries that currently belong to the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative — the same program that had already been revised once for failing to deliver on its promises. Gordon Brown, the current British Finance Minister, once said the HIPC Initiative foreshadowed “a lasting exit from the burden of unsustainable debt.” That quote was from three years ago. Since then, despite the rosy promise, additional thousands of lives a day could have been saved under a more realistic and more inclusive debt cancellation program. Obviously, the G8’s new and revised debt cancellation program demonstrates that they had been wrong once and they could be wrong again. From what they are offering the HIPC, the G8 seems not to have learned its lesson from projecting overly optimistic earnings for poorer countries in the past. But what could blind these G8 countries from considering more creative and just ways of financing debt cancellation? The answer can be found by looking for what is curiously missing from the G8 ministerial meetings, and from mainstream media coverage of the announcement. There is not much, if any, equal representation and participation from the indebted countries on how their fates should be decided. Once again, the G8 nations acted as legislator, rule enforcer, and judge on the debt issue. The same absurd and unrepresentative process that led to past failures remains unquestioned among the elites of freedom-loving nations. One result of this blindness is that international lenders routinely avoid shouldering their full share of the faulty loans. Snow’s statement from June 11 reads: “Importantly, under this agreement, donors have committed to preserve the financial integrity of the IMF, World Bank, and African Development Bank.” In the G8 approach, financial commitments are always prioritized ahead of indebted governments’ rights to address their citizens’ basic needs. Non-revenue generating programs, such as education and subsidized health care, are routinely discouraged in favor of financing projects that cater to wealthy investors and corporations. Another portion of Sec. Snow’s statement is perhaps more revealing of the overall attitude that breeds itself in the absence of fair representation: a self-image of doing one’s best when all evidence points to the opposite. “There is something fundamentally wrong with this cycle of lend and forgive, lend and forgive,” he states. The reference to forgiveness is a terrible misnomer. Any other lender, under fair bankruptcy proceedings, would have to acknowledge its shared responsibility for the failed loan. Instead, Snow’s cycle of “forgiveness” emphasizes the shortcomings of the indebted countries, when in all reality the lender is responsible for feeding that cycle of futility in the first place. There is much to be appreciated, yet still much more to be desired, in this latest version of the G8’s “forgive-and-forget” doubletalk. They’ll “forgive” every four or five years, and in between seem to forget about the issue until growing destitution once again points to the inadequacy of “forgiveness.” This cycle of false hopes, inaction, and death must stop. How can we allow debt slavery in an age when democracy and human equality are supposedly promoted by our nation? The public must hold the G8 leaders accountable to their bold promises and not stop raising their voices until a truly inclusive, truly unconditional, 100-percent debt cancellation program does justice to the issue. Edgar Sioson is a member of the steering committee of Jubilee Northwest (www.jubileenw.org), a local coalition working for the unconditional cancellation of international debt. [Take Action] Jubilee USA Network is circulating postcards calling on the G-8 to “Wipe Out Debt in 2005” for ALL impoverished nations, WITHOUT harmful conditionalities. These postcards will be delivered one week before the G-8 meeting in Scotland. You can order postcards or sign online at www.jubileeusa.org. And buy CITGO gas, owned by the Venezuelan government, to support national social policies that support the poor.

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30,000 people a week die of poverty-related causes, many of them children, and mostly in the countries of the Southern Hemisphere where, for every dollar of aid or trade that flows in, $1.50 flows out in debt payments.



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