WSSD: PAYING THE BANK AT THE COST OF HUMAN WELFARE

WSSD: PAYING THE BANK AT THE COST OF HUMAN WELFARE

Patrick Burnett
Fahamu

JOHANNESBURG - Developing country governments were continuing to service illegitimate debts that could not be paid without causing enormous human harm, Leslie Fields from Friends of the Earth International told a Global People's Forum meeting on debt eradication during the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD).
Fields said the process of dealing with the debt of poor countries known as the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative had gone off track and failed to meet even its minimum goals. For example, Mali still spent about $88m annually on servicing its debt, an amount that was more than its health spending in a country where there was a high mortality rate for children under the age of five.
In Zambia, more was spent on debt servicing than health and education. In addition, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) were using conditions attached to HIPC initiatives to force countries to adopt globalisation as a precondition to qualify for debt relief.
“Countries continue to service illegitimate debts that cannot be paid without causing human harm. Without radical changes to bank structures, little will be done to address the problem of poverty and debt,” she said.
Atherton Martin, a social justice activist from the Caribbean, took the debate on debt eradication to grassroots level, when he argued for a change in lifestyle patterns on an individual level and for people to be aware that there were other debts, such as environment and resource debts, that were part of the problem of financial debt.
“When we talk about debt lets not make the mistake of talking of debt only in financial terms because there are other forms of debt that we are accumulating,” he said.
Martin said the current lifestyle model promoted consumption and did not take into account the fact that individuals had a responsibility to monitor what they did. In many countries the private debt was greater than the public debt and this created a lifestyle of consumption. He said: “We have to change our lifestyles and that begins with every single one of us. We have to stop being driven by the rules of the game because they are not designed to get us away from the precipice but to keep us consuming.” - ENDS