 |
Jubilee 2000 SA Outraged at G7 Debt Plans
Jubilee 2000 South Africa, an organization fighting for cancellation of third world and apartheid debt, Monday expressed its outrage at the Group of Seven (G7) debt announcement at their summit in Okinawa, Japan last week.
"The G7 have attempted to rehash old pledges that have failed, effectively imposing further conditions on the promises of limited debt cancellation that have yet to be delivered a year after they were made in Cologne," the organization said in a statement.
According to the statement, 19,000 children die each day in sub-Saharan Africa due to preventable diseases and the region is spending four times more on servicing debt than on health and education combined.
"We have every reason to believe that these are yet more empty promises. We are astonished that the G7 have ignored global public opinion by reversing debt cancellation processes. They are effectively sentencing 19,000 African children a day to death by debt," the statement said.
The statement also criticized the G7 countries for failing to adopt plans to cancel debt for countries that are affected by military conflicts.
"(This) is hypocritical because arms exported predominantly from G7 countries are used in the conflicts they refer to," the statement said.
"No attention has been given to cancellation of odious debts, debts of post-conflict countries, and countries affected by severe natural disasters -- all of which are relevant to Southern Africa, " it said.
The G7 leaders had admitted the need to speed up debt relief for the world's poorest countries, but blamed military conflicts in some nations for blocking progress.
So far only nine countries have qualified for cancellation of their debt on the strength of a year-old promise to write off 100 billion U.S. dollars owed by the poorest 41 nations, they said.
According to the statement, the G7 summit cost 750 million dollars, the amount enough to cancel the debt payments of Rwanda, Zambia, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Benin, Haiti, Guyana and Laos for one year.
"As the G7 assess their own economies as moving 'towards more balanced and sustainable patterns of growth', they have yet again failed to act to reverse the growing impoverishment in developing countries and global inequality," the statement said.
The G7 countries are the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.
In This Section
|