PHA-Exchange> Re: G8 cancels debt of the world's poorest countries (2)

[claudio at hcmc.netnam.vn]

from Peter Burgess <Profitinafrica at aol.com> -----

The debt relief dialog is a cruel hoax. But this is what the po-
litical leadership does all the time. And it is dangerous. The
hoopla about the upcoming G8 summit reminds me of the Monterrey
mess in 2002. Exactly what was promised at Monterrey, and ex-
actly what was delivered? Below I have a statement by Jubilee
South from the Monterrey meeting. What progress has been made?
NONE USA NONE UK NONE Civil Society.

The English language is pretty clear, but the leaders of the
United States and the UK seem to be able to say one thing and do
another and nobody seems to mind. 
Turning the G8 meeting into a media event with the assistance of
Bob Geldof, Bono and others suits the political leadership just
fine... but let us get something going that will help poor com-
munities make progress.

--
Statement by Jubilee South on the Financing for Development
Meeting in Monterrey, Mexico

The Subversion of Development in Monterrey

The United Nations (UN) Financing for Development (FfD) process
heralds a disaster for development. The Monterrey Conference is
a festival of words that in no way brings the FFD process closer
to its original goal of ensuring that sufficient and appropriate
financial resources are made available to achieve the commit-
ments made in landmark UN conferences and summits in the 1990s--
including radically reducing poverty.

As UN member states mouth the pious rhetoric of poverty reduc-
tion and national development, they unashamedly seek financial
and political favors from multinational corporations, bankers
and financial institutions. Unfortunately, these are the same
corporate interests that maintain that official development as-
sistance (ODA) is a waste of money and that development is best
left to the dictates of the free market.

To speak of public resources for development is a cruel joke at
a time when military budgets have reached historically unprece-
dented levels. On top of an already bloated war budget, US$ 30
billion will be spent by the United States (US) alone to finance
the war on terrorism. Across the world, rich and poor countries
alike are increasingly defining security in terms of spending on
military hardware while ignoring the more immediate priorities
of livelihood, food, social, physical and environmental secu-
rity.

FFD Off The Track

Resources are badly needed to fight the war on the terrorism of
institutionalized poverty suffered by women, men and children in
the developing world. In most cases, the required resources are
and have always been present in the countries of the North and
South. But in the light of entrenched bondage to external debt
repayment, internationalized and domestic corporate welfare
schemes, structural adjustment, and the systematic privatization
of public goods and capacity, it is little surprise that most of
the world's people are deprived of the resources to determine
and shape their own development.

Financing for development would not be a problem if rich credi-
tor countries were to unconditionally cancel much of the debt of
the South: a debt that has already been paid many times over and
which, in its very conception was illegitimate and often odious.
Financing for development would also not be a problem if the
more democratic governments of the South could find the politi-
cal will not to service such debts, and if rich countries would
seriously address the deteriorating terms of trade that keep
debtor countries in a perpetual position of economic disadvan-
tage. Plenty of resources could be freed up for development if
trade and financial liberalization did not consistently drain
our economies and undermine the possibilities for sustained do-
mestic accumulation of national wealth. With a visionary ap-
proach to development financing, we would not remain trapped in
the language of external, debt-based financing sources, but at-
tempt to protect and build domestic resources, potentials, ca-
pacities and economies.

The FfD process continues to divorce poverty as a national fact
from impoverishment as a global process. The FfD consensus docu-
ment does not acknowledge the historically entrenched--and often
externally catalyzed-- structural causes for the massive financ-
ing gap that currently paralyses national and local development
efforts. On one hand, the FfD consensus document hails the im-
portance of national policies and development strategies, and
even claims that each country has primary responsibility for its
own economic and social development. On the other hand, the
document advocates the abandoning of economic and political sov-
ereignty in order for UN member states to fully adopt market
capitalism, international corporate investment and rapid trade
liberalization as the principal means of securing resources for
development.

The consensus document even speaks of "sustainable debt financ-
ing" without addressing the use of debt as an instrument of
domination and exploitation of the South. And although the docu-
ment claims that debtors and creditors must share the responsi-
bility for unsustainable debt situations, it continues to empha-
size the policy measures that debtor countries need to undertake
to qualify for debt "relief" and offers no alternative to cur-
rent methods of determining "debt sustainability". The document
enshrines macroeconomic and policy prescriptions standard in
debt restructuring, including the reorienting of national legal
and regulatory frameworks to facilitate privatization, trade and
investment liberalization, and the marketization of land and
natural resources. These same prescriptions have run the econo-
mies of the South to the ground time and time again.

UN's FFD is squarely and deliberately framed in the process of
corporate globalization with increasing power for the transna-
tional private sector and their State and institutional support-
ers. The Monterrey Conference will make a positive difference
not to those crippled by high debt burdens and mal- development,
but to the corporations and financial institutions that seek le-
gitimation after the recent economic debacles in Asia, Africa,
the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Turkey and Argentina.

If there were any hope that the United Nations could provide po-
litical space for alternative development thinking, that hope is
being buried in Monterrey. The UN is steadily backpedaling on
the multi-sector consultations, let alone the key declarations
of the social, population and women's summits. In essence, FFD
marks the official acceptance of the privatization of develop-
ment financing.

The FFD process fails to address the key issues of global eco-
nomic governance and systemic injustice that are at the root of
poverty and the financing gap. This constitutes economic subver-
sion, even terrorism, against the people of the South.

Monterrey is a disaster in global terms because not only does it
abandon development as a sovereign process of justice and redis-
tribution, but because it goes on to legitimize through the UN
the outright abandonment of development to the paradigms and
power of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the
World Trade Organization.

In the context of the UN-supported, IMF-WB-WTO-defined FFD proc-
ess, it has become crystal clear that civil society groups in
the process are being used to legitimize an essentially ille-
gitimate and anti-development paradigm. FFD should be a wake-up
call to those who naively believe that fundamental changes in
the dominant neoliberal paradigm can be achieved through reason-
ing and collaboration.

Take Back the Future

The battle for development, however, will not be won or lost in
Monterrey. It will be fought and won where social progress has
always been fought, that is at the level of the people them-
selves through the organization of popular power.

We call on peoples' movements and non-governmental organiza-
tions, therefore, to stand in opposition, as they have done at
the World Social Forum, to a process of globalization commanded
by corporate interests and by the governments, North and South,
at their service.

We call on the United Nations to firmly establish its integrity
and independence from the purveyors of the neoliberal system,
the IMF, WBank WTO.

We further call for the United Nations to move forward in ad-
dressing development issues by taking the bold step of acting on
the debt issue, a problem that has caused poverty for millions
around the world. Towards this, we call on the UN to:

1. form a global commission with more than 50% representing
civil society (and others from governments and the UN) to review
the work of the IMF and other International Financial Institu-
tions

2. pass an International Covenant regarding stolen wealth

3. launch an international investigation and inquiry into Gov-
ernments and IFIs responsible for illegitimate, odious, onerous,
fraudulent and criminal loans and other similar economic issues

4. adopt a Declaration and/or international convention to crimi-
nalize government policies that lead to the genocide and/or mass
impoverishment of whole populations, whether directly on the
part of a local government or through the action of accomplices
such as creditor governments and institutions.

5. ensure compliance of member states and international institu-
tions with existing human rights norms and mechanisms, including
the supervision of the way in which external debt leads to the
gross and systematic violation of civil, cultural, economic, po-
litical, and social Human Rights including the rights to self-
determination and development.

We further call on movements in the South and the North to vig-
orously promote an economic vision that is based on human val-
ues, plurality, cooperativeness, concern for others, equality
and the right of communities to exist.

End the subversion of development for the peoples of the South
and all marginalized peoples of the world!

JUBILEE SOUTH 15 MARCH 2002

--
JUBILEE SOUTH is a network of jubilee and debt campaigns, social
movements, people's organizations, communities, NGOs and politi-
cal formations from more than 40 countries in Latin America and
the Caribbean, Africa and Asia/Pacific and composed of over 80
national campaigns, movements, organizations and regional net-
works. 
_______________________________________________


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