More than 600,000 people across Canada signed the petition --- 450,000 signed through Development and Peace. Representatives of the churches’ Jubilee Initiative will present the petitions to the Canadian government on May 11 at a special ceremony on Parliament Hill.

As part of an international campaign, Jubilee 2000, the petitions will then be sent with others signed by millions of people around the world to the G-7 Summit in Cologne, Germany. Jubilee 2000 draws upon the biblical tradition of Jubilee (Lev. 25:10) when slaves were freed and land was restored to its original owners every fifty years.

Debts a heavy burden for poorest nations

Millions of citizens are asking the world’s wealthier nations to start the new millennium by providing hope to the most impoverished people of the world. These debts represent a burden for countries in the South and affect the lives of millions.

Honduras, a country recently ravaged by Hurricane Mitch, has accumulated an external debt of US$4 billion while Nicaragua owes US$6.5 billion. More than 30 per cent of these countries’ export revenues are used to repay debts. These dramatic examples illustrate how developing countries struggle with external debts which now total more than $2,000 billion.

A just cause

Certainly a country, like a person, must respect its commitments. But is this justified when these commitments create even worse poverty for the majority of their citizens? Is it justified when the interest paid is already several times more than the original sum borrowed?

Our partners in the South know only too well the devastating affects of indebtedness. "A large chunk of our export revenues are used to repay the debt instead of going to much needed investments in education, health, housing, road works, providing electricity and drinking water," says Olga Espinoza, a human rights worker in Peru.

In Haiti, $50 million a year is spent to service the debt, five times more money than is invested in agriculture. The director of the Karl-Lévesque Cultural Institute, (a Haitian popular education centre) confirms that there is a close link between managing the debt and structural adjustment programs.

"The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which hold the largest portion of our external debt, are forcing us to adopt privatization programs. They ask us to exclude the educational system, sanitation, rural development and agricultural reforms from our list of priorities. But we believe we must adopt these measures to develop our country," the director says.

The debt crisis is worst in Africa where four times more resources are devoted to servicing the debt than are spent on health care in some cases. In Senegal, the first country to adopt a structural adjustment program in 1984, public spending in health and education has dropped by more than 20 per cent while the debt has reached $4 billion.

A realistic goal

The Canadian government is concerned with the gravity of the debt crisis. In March 1999 it launched an initiative to reduce the debts of the most impoverished nations. We congratulate the Canadian government for this action. Canada is now in a position to play a leadership role at the upcoming G-7 Summit and should urge other wealthy nations to adopt similar policies.

We also believe close attention must be paid to the details and mechanisms of any initiative to cancel the debts of the world’s poorest nations. If too many preconditions are set or if the rich nations establish all the rules of the game and force the poor nations to adopt economic policies which do not take into account the interests of the majority of their people, we are no further ahead. The civil societies of the countries concerned should participate in any eventual discussions regarding debt cancellation.

Even officials of the World Bank recognize that the (HIPC) Highly Indebted Poor Country initiative, which they started in 1995 and which was supposed to reduce the debt level of some 40 countries to a more manageable level, has not had the desired results. Only two countries, Uganda and Bolivia, were able to qualify for this initiative. Canada should not rely on this program, due its cumbersome and complex process, and adopt its own effective initiative to cancel the debt of the world’s poorest countries.

Development and Peace is also asking the Canadian government to review the list of countries that might qualify for debt cancellation. The Canadian government has drafted a list of 30 countries while the Jubilee 2000 campaign believes that 50 poor and heavily indebted countries should be on this list.

To say that the debts held by the world’s poorest countries constitute a modern form of slavery is no exaggeration. It’s time to end this situation. It’s a question of justice.