The United States wants to resolve the issue of the debt burden that is crippling the growth of many African countries, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said on Monday.
”American ministers have told me that they want to see some resolution of the debt-relief issue,” he told journalists in Cape Town, where he is attending a Commission for Africa meeting.
He said this indicates that progress in this area, as well as action on Aids funding, is possible in the next few months.
The report of the commission, due out in March, ”could be the signal for a set of measures that all could come around”.
Finance and economics ministers from 14 African countries, including Nigeria, Mozambique, Rwanda and Algeria, are attending the two-day meeting of the commission’s economic chapter to fine-tune a draft of the final report.
Brown is at the end of a four-nation tour of Africa, in which he announced massive British debt relief for Tanzania and poverty-stricken Mozambique, and floated a proposal for an African version of the Marshall plan, which restored a shattered Europe after World War II.
Brown is hoping the African ministers will back his proposal, which calls for a doubling in development aid, the writing off of debt to international institutions such as the World Bank, and action for an improved trade regime for Africa.
”Justice promised will forever be justice denied unless we remove from this generation the burden of debts incurred by past generations,” he said at the opening session of the commission meeting on Monday.
He told the ministers he intends to put their demands and proposals to a summit of European finance ministers in Brussels on Tuesday.
He will also take the commission’s proposals ”on the road to” the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July, a United Nations special summit in September, and trade talks in December.
These are the meetings and summits ”which make this year a once-in-a-generation opportunity for change”.
At current rates of progress, it will take 150 years to meet the Millennium Development Goals, supposed to be achieved by 2015, for primary schooling, halving poverty and eliminating avoidable infant mortality.
”The whole world should know 150 years is too long for any people to wait for justice,” he said.
Brown said the commission report should become ”the world’s vehicle by which we agree to the request I have heard from all over Africa, that finally for the poorest countries … we write off the historic and unpayable debts of the past and end an injustice that has lasted for far too long”.
Eighty percent of Africa’s external debt is owed to international institutions such as the World Bank.
He has talked with commissioners and finance ministers over the past few days about detailed proposals to use International Monetary Fund gold to write off the debt to the fund, and to ask World Bank shareholders to take over the debts owed by 70 of the world’s poorest countries.
South African Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, who is attending the meeting with Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin, told reporters earlier that the British debt-relief initiative shows the spirit that Africa wants from the rest of the G7 countries.
It places those countries in a very difficult position, he said.
”They must justify to the world why they care so little for the poor of Africa,” he said.
The fact that debt relief has been offered for countries affected by the Asian tsunami disaster, and given for Iraq, allows a case to be made for Africa.
Addressing the opening session of the commission, Manuel said it is important to be clear about the body’s debt-relief goals.
”Recent experience suggests renewed flexibility in the treatment of debt, and the readiness of developed countries to write off in servicing and/or stock debt.
”But there are also major contradictions. It’s apposite that we remind ourselves this morning that the decision by the Paris Club to write off debt to Iraq in a single day provided more debt relief than all of Hipic [the heavily indebted poor countries initiative] has been able to deliver since its introduction in 1996.
”These are the contradictions that we face: this is the case that we have to make.”
Manuel also said talks in the World Trade Organisation are moving too slowly.
”We should consider the commission as an opportunity for us to be specific in what we believe will move those talks along,” he said. — Sapa