Leonard Anderson
Reuters
March 4, 2004

Palto Alto, California: (Reuters) Creditors are likely to forgive $80 billion to $90 billion of Iraq’s $120 billion debt owed to donor nations, World Bank President James Wolfensohn said on Wednesday.

Wolfensohn, speaking to business students at Stanford University, said $80 billion to $90 billion “has a fair chance for debt relief” but he did not offer any details or timing.

The World Bank head has said he believes most of Iraq’s major government creditors are willing to forgive two-thirds of Iraq’s debt. France, Germany, Japan and Russia have all promised big reductions.

Wolfensohn was in California for talks and meetings in the San Francisco Bay Area on Wednesday and Los Angeles on Thursday to press for action to reduce global poverty.

“Madness is running over our planet,” he said, ticking off statistics on development assistance and defense budgets.

World development help is running at about $56 billion a year, while military expenditures are almost 20 times higher at more than $900 billion, Wolfensohn said.

Subsidies and tariff protections for world agriculture, including large commercial interests, reach about $350 billion a year.

“This is a huge frustration. We have to find a way to focus on poverty and development . . . but the big issue is indifference. People don’t care. Money is not flowing to where it is needed,” Wolfensohn told the students.

The World Bank is working to meet U.N. goals to halve by 2015 the proportion of people who earn less than $1 a day and go hungry, he said.

Another principal goal, Wolfensohn said, is to ensure that by 2015 children worldwide will be able to complete primary schooling.

“We must give people a better life and peace. If we don’t do that we have troubles that can’t be sorted out by military expenditures,” he said.

The World Bank head also said a donor meeting to begin a “needs assessment” for troubled Haiti will be held in three weeks.

It will include the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, U.S. Agency for International Development, and assistance agencies from France, Britain and other countries, a world Bank spokesman said.

The meeting would focus on urgent social and economic support for the impoverished Caribbean nation and gauge donor feelings since the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide last weekend.

A more formal pledging meeting, which would include a new Haitian administration, would be held later.