AfricaFocus (Washington, DC)

September 22, 2005
PRESS RELEASE “Arbitrary criteria have been used to exclude most countries from debt relief. While it may be politically expedient for powerful countries to pretend that only a small set of countries need debt cancellation, it is time to explode this myth.” – Christian Aid

As delegates gather for the World Bank and IMF meeting this weekend, debt cancellation is still on the agenda. But, say debt campaigners, the agreement reached at Gleneagles, Scotland by rich countries is not only inadequate. There may even be backtracking from that limited commitment, which promised full cancellation of debt for 18 countries. This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a press release from Jubilee USA Network, stressing the threat that the World Bank/IMF meetings this weekend will fail to implement the Gleneagles agreement. The Bulletin also contains a press release and executive summary from a new report from Christian Aid – UK. That report, “What about Us? Debt and the Countries the G8 Left Behind,” stresses the need to expand full cancellation to a wider set of countries and calls for the immediate cancellation of approximately 20% of developing country debt as illegitimate “odious debt.”

For the full text of the Christian Aid report “What about Us?,” see www.christian-aid.org.uk/indepth/509debt

Additional information from Jubilee USA Network is available at www.jubileeusa.org

For earlier AfricaFocus Bulletins on debt, visit http://www.africafocus.org/debtexp.php [PDFver here]

The World Bank’s latest information on the debt issue is at www.worldbank.org/debt