By John Dillon

Jubilee 2000 is a global campaign that aims at lifting the heavy burden of debt from the world’s poorest countries.

The poor are shackled by the chains of unpayable debts. When they cannot pay, their old debts are rolled over into new ones, with onerous obligations attached. Since 1980, African countries have engaged in over 8,000 separate debt renegotiations without resolving the underlying problem.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that the lives of 21 million children in sub-Sahara Africa could be saved by an investment of $9 billion US in basic health, nutrition and sanitation. The African countries, however, cannot afford even a fraction of this amount because they already owe $13 billion US in debt repayments every year.

The roots of the debt crisis lie in policy decisions taken in Northern industrialized countries. The poorest nations were never consulted when their Northern creditors raised interest rates in the 1980s. The result was sharply higher debt servicing costs, economic recession, and falling prices for less developed countries’ exports. The total revenue generated by sub-Saharan African exports declined, even though their volume increased by over 50%.

In light of the poverty, hunger and environmental degradation resulting from the debt crisis, the biblical tradition of the Jubilee has a new resonance for us today. The year of Jubilee is the name given in the Bible to the Fiftieth Year, a year which proclaimed liberty from oppression and release from debts. Slaves were set free and all debts owed by the poor were cancelled. The Jubilee was a call to a new beginning of restoration and hope.

While we cannot apply the biblical text literally, the cancellation of the unpayable debts of the poorest countries would be an appropriate way to mark the beginning of a new millennium.

At last year’s G-8 summit in Birmingham, England, 70,000 people formed a human chain around the summit site to demand debt relief. The response of the politicians was less than inspiring. They pointed to the timid steps toward debt reduction they have taken under the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Unlike the insipid HIPC initiative, we are calling for the complete cancellat5ion of the poorest countries’ debts. The HIPC plan provides only for the partial reduction of debts to what are deemed to be "sustainable" levels. When fully implemented, it would lower most countries’ debts by no more than 20%.

The HIPC plan, in fact, would leave some countries, such as Mozambique, paying almost as much in debt servicing as they were before the uncollectible portions of their debt were written down.

The most objectionable aspect of the HIPC initiative is that it makes debt relief contingent on strict adherence to orthodox Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). These SAPs have been imposed on debtor countries for 15 years without success. Even the chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, now admits that SAPs have not helped resolve poor countries’ underlying economic and social problems.

Accordingly, the Jubilee 2000 campaign insists that debt relief and future lending not be tied to adherence to SAPs. Rather than promoting genuine human development, SAPs distort economies into what author Susan George calls the "mal-development model."

Some neoliberal economists and bankers argue that all debts should be repaid, but the fact is that the debts owed by the poorest countries have already been repaid many times over. Between 1981 and 1997, the less developed countries paid over $2.9 trillion US in interest and principal payments. That is about $1.5 trillion US more or double what they received in new loans. For every $1 that Northern countries provide in aid, over $3 comes back from the less developed countries in the form of debt repayments.

If the world’s poorest people are to enter the new millennium with renewed hope, their debts must be cancelled and debt relief must not be tied to any kind of SAPs.

We invite Canadians to join millions of other people around the globe in signing petitions calling on the leaders of the industrial nations to cancel the debts. These petitions – which can be obtained from the Canadian Ecumenical Jubilee Initiative – will be presented to the 1999 Group of Eight Summit in Cologne, Germany in June.

(John Dillon is a research for the Canadian Ecumenical Jubilee Initiative, P.O. Box 772, Toronto, Ont. M4Y 2N6; Ph: 416-922-1592; Fax 416-922-0957; e-mail:jubilee@devp.org – Check out the web site at: www.web.net/~jubilee).