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| Tuesday, 28 September 2004 |
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Britain to write off its share of poor countries' World Bank debt LONDON, Monday (AFP) Britain, in a move that puts pressure on its Group of Seven partners, said it will unilaterally write off its share of debts owed to the World Bank by the world's poorest countries. The bold gesture was announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown in a speech to some 400 debt-relief and fair-trade activists in Brighton, southern England, where the Labour Party is holding its annual conference. "Although there is no international agreement on 100 percent multilateral debt relief, Britain will do more," Brown said. "We will pay our share of the multilateral debt repayments of reforming low-income countries," he said. "We will make payments in their stead to the World Bank and African Development Bank for the portion that relates to Britain's share of this debt," the chancellor added. "We do this alone today but I urge other countries to follow so that indebted countries are relieved of the burden of servicing all unpayable multilateral debt." Britain holds nearly 10 percent of the total debt owed to the World Bank and other development banks, which itself amounts to 70 percent of the money owed by the world's poorest nations. Experts said Brown's announcement - ahead of a World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) meeting later this week - puts pressure on other Group of Seven industrialised nations to do likewise. Chief among them are Germany, Japan and the United States, the World Bank's biggest stakeholders, while Canada and France are said to have similar announcements in the planning stages. "This is an audacious move by Gordon Brown," said Ashok Sinha, coordinator of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, an umbrella group for aid and development agencies in Britain lobbying for debt relief. "He has thrown down the gauntlet to the rest of the world to follow suit." Brown's announcement dovetails with Prime Minister Tony Blair's intention of making the fight against poverty in Africa a core theme of Britain's turn at the helm of the Group of Eight and the European Union during 2005. In his speech, which was greeted with a standing ovation at the end, Brown lashed out at rich nations for failing to do more to end farm subsidies and clear away trade barriers which keep poor countries poor. In particular he condemned what he called the "scandal and waste" of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, and regretted that "what the world lacks is the common and shared will to act" to alleviate global poverty. Speaking from the pulpit of an Anglican church, with a towering crucifix on the wall behind him, Brown nevertheless called for a "new covenant" between developed and developing countries. "Have confidence," he told his audience, "that together, we can make poverty history." |
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