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June 12, 2005
One Billion a Year of This; Ten Million a Year of That
The newly announced plan to stop demanding payments from 18 of the poorest countries in Africa is certainly a welcome baby-step in the right direction.
While being very aware of how much more needs to be done, I find this development very encouraging. It is indeed a stunning victory for a "popular campaign which mobilized millions of people." The movement is much stronger in Europe than the United States and very important events are still to happen there -- from the live8 concert to the upcoming "human band" in Edinburgh, where tens of thousands of people of conscience will encircle the G8 summit, demanding justice.
This will not be the first human chain to encircle a G8 meeting. In 1998, 70,000 people joined hands in a seven mile long link around the G8 summit in Birmingham, UK, demanding that the debt --illegitimate, odious and murderous-- be dropped, now:
It took 7 more years of relentless campaigning to realize even the minimal goals. I'm still reading the fine print on the G8 agreement so I will blog more when I understand its implications better. What is not in dispute is that it will mean that those 18 countries will stop making about about one billion dollars a year in debt payments. It may seem like a large sum, and in one sense it certainly is, but it mostly highlights our cruelty. We made them wait 7 years for this amount of relief. Just think of the numbers: assuming a rounded 250 million people in the United States, that comes out to about $4 a year, per person. And that's just in the United States. What conceivable reason do we have for not dropping the remaning amount of the already paid and overpaid, odious debt?
Meanwhile most calculations indicate that about 30,000 children die a day due to extreme poverty. That's about 10,000,000 children a year or about 70,000,000 children since the original Birmingham March.
A lot of what happens vis-a-vis debt relief is controlled by the IMF, which is basically controlled by the U.S. department of Treasury. Even a small but well-targeted campaign in this country could accomplish a lot. While there are groups like Jubile USA that campaign on this issue, the truth is they are very small and undersupported. That's a shame.
Posted by zeynep at June 12, 2005 10:06 PM