Lisa Peryman
Probe International
December 10, 2004

UK Chancellor and Treasury chief Gordon Brown declared this week the creation of a ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’ is at the heart of his government’s agenda for its presidency of the Group of Eight rich nations in 2005.

Brown said Britain is prepared to be judged on how it uses its presidency of the G8 to tackle poverty and that 2005 represents a ‘make or break year for development.’

Prime Minister Tony Blair has promised to put Africa’s poverty at the top of his agenda when Britain takes over the rotating presidencies first of the G8 for the whole year, and in the second half of the year for the European Union.

Earlier this week, humanitarian development agency Oxfam sounded the alarm on poverty reduction, saying the wealthy, developed nations were failing to keep promises made at the UN Millennium Summit five years ago to halve world poverty and reduce infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015. Wealthy nations, Oxfam claims, were spending just half of what they used to spend on foreign aid in the 1960s.

In an interview with BBC Radio on the eve of his speech to the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, Brown promised a ‘new Marshall Plan’ for the developing world and ‘a new deal between developed and developing countries.’

Spelling out both a political and moral case for increased debt relief, the chancellor said the UK was committed to achieving 100 percent debt relief for the poorest African states and getting other countries to match the UK’s goal of spending 0.7 percent of gross domestic product spent on development aid.

A new trade agreement was also vital, as well as respecting the right of African countries to trade with the rest of the world on better terms, Brown said.

This new impetus may have been spurred by the threat of odious debt challenges to the legitimacy of those debts made all the more real by recent events in Iraq.

For example, after the Paris Club cartel of creditors last month declared it would write off an unprecedented 80 percent of their portion of Iraq’s $120-billion debt, the Interim Iraqi National Assembly responded by spurning the West’s bid at debt forgiveness, proclaiming, ‘Saddam’s debts are not our debts.’

The Assembly further endorsed a recommendation by its Economic and Financial Committee to reject the legitimacy of debt incurred by Saddam Hussein from foreign financiers. It argued that the Paris Club was trying to rush through an agreement before the January 2005 elections as a way of warding off a debt challenge from a new Iraqi sovereign government.

Quoting legal scholars, the recommendation tabled before the Assembly stated: “The creditors have committed a hostile act against the people. They can’t therefore expect that a nation freed from a despotic power will assume these ‘odious’ debts . . . the debt consequently . . . falls with the fall of this regime.”

Meanwhile, as Chancellor Brown prepares to travel to Washington and three African states over the next few weeks to underpin the UK’s commitment to debt relief for the region, he has yet to win the support of the US, Germany and Japan – the three biggest G8 countries – for Britain’s proposal.

In his speech on Wednesday, Brown cited President George Bush, as he reiterated how the goals of greater security for the developed world were dependent on progress on poverty alleviation, the Financial Times reports. But Mr Brown also argued that a real reason to ensure justice for the poorest countries was from a personal sense of duty and interdependence, not self-interest.