BRING FORTH A NEW DAY!
Posted on July 17 2000 |
We, representatives of various Jubilee and debt campaigns in the Philippines coming from the church, social movements, labor, peasant, urban poor, youth and other sectors of society, gathered today, July 17, 2000 on the eve of the G7 Summit in Okinawa, Japan, express our unified commitment in the struggle to break free from debt and domination.
We are one with sisters and brothers in other countries in a global campaign for a new millennium when debt ceases to be an instrument of exploitation, domination and impoverishment, and social and economic justice reigns.
Even as we affirm the victory of the international Jubilee movement in forcing the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G7 governments to respond to the call for debt cancellation, we strongly denounce the sham, deceptive and self-serving nature of the so-called debt relief schemes of the creditors, specifically the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the G7 Debt Relief initiative which supports and falls within the HIPC framework.
These so-called debt relief schemes conjure an illusion that the debt burden is only a problem of the HIPC countries, hence excluding a majority of South countries where the debt problem has led to further underdevelopment and depredation of national economies by global financial capital.
These debt relief schemes cover only a limited portion of the "debts" of a limited number of countries. Covering only loans considered "unpayable" by the creditors, the debt relief schemes will only serve to clean the books of the creditors rather than bring about actual relief. "Unpayable" loans are mostly those that are no longer being paid anyway.
The amounts of debt relief promised by HIPC and the pledges of bilateral debt cancellation by the US, Japan and a other creditor are not only woefully inadequate as compared to the magnitude of the debt burden of these countries, reality exposes these pronouncements as little more than publicity gimmicks.
Five years after the Highly Indebted Poor Country initiative came into being, only 5 (Bolivia, Uganda, Mauritius, Mozambique and Tanzania) out of the 40 HIPC countries have begun to receive debt relief. Further, only an average 40 percent of the debt burden of these five countries have been reduced, leaving them to pay still more than half a billion dollars a year in debt service. Of the US$ 100 billion promised in Cologne for debt cancellation, only US$ 12.7 billion has been delivered so far.
These schemes presuppose the legitimacy of "debts" of the South countries and proceed from the notion that debt relief or debt cancellation initiatives are acts of charity and generosity for the poor rather than the redress of injustice.
The more fundamental issue, beyond the number of countries and the promised and actual amounts of debts cancelled, is the insistence on linking debt cancellation with economic adjustment conditionalities. The HIPC initiative is unacceptable primarily because of its insistence on the implementation of structural adjustment programs as a condition for eligibility for debt relief.
HIPC continues to be unacceptable even if the IMF and the World Bank re-packages these conditionalities as "Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers" or PRSPs and pass them off as products of so-called democratic processes. The reality is that in most South countries, the IMF and WB and their partner governments who are more loyal to them than to their own people can and will dominate the so-called national PRSP processes. The bottom line is that in the end the PRSPs will have to be approved by the IMF and the World Bank.
The Philippine experience in the last two decades has been a painful and tragic lesson in illustrating how structural adjustment programs have resulted in further impoverishment and indebtedness. There are no signs that the World Bank or the IMF have learned this lesson and are willing to depart from their basic economic paradigm.
The pledges of bilateral debt cancellation, the most recent of which was Japan's, indicate the extent of popular clamor and public pressure for the G7 countries to respond. But we cannot welcome these moves. As long as bilateral debt cancellation and other pledges of the G7 countries support and fall within the HIPC framework, these so-called relief come with the unacceptable price that is compliance with structural adjustment programs.
We continue to demand total and unconditional debt cancellation for ALL south countries, including the Philippines which is classified by the creditors as a "moderately indebted middle income country".
While less than 5 percent of the Filipino population own more than 40% of the nation's capital and resources and some Filipinos are included in the world's richest, 60% of Filipinos live below the poverty line, 3 out of 10 children under age 5 are malnourished, 3 out of 10 school children cannot finish primary education, and 3 out of 10 Filipinos do not have access to health services and sanitation. It is a grave injustice that for the last twenty years, from 30% to almost 50% of the total national government budget of the Philippines goes to debt service.
What is an even more fundamental injustice is that most of the so-called debts of the Philippines did not benefit the Filipino people, are not owed by the people, and were even used against the people.
Many of these debts supported the Marcos dictatorship and its repressive policies. A significant number of these debts were incurred through fraud, bribery and coercion. Many were used to finance projects that caused massive displacement of communities and terrible damage to the environment. Many were actually debts of private corporations owned by cronies of past and present administrations, which were guaranteed and eventually assumed by the government. All of these debts were used as leverage to impose structural adjustment policies on our economy. And now, debt relief is being used as leverage for the same kind of economic conditionalities.
This is also all true for the so-called debts of the peoples of the South.
Thus, we challenge on the Philippine government and other governments of the South to stop payment of and repudiate illegitimate debts, and, re-channel the funds freed from debt service to basic social services and requirements for equitable, sustainable and genuine people's development.
In the immediate we demand the Estrada administration to repeal the Philippine automatic appropriations law that legalizes the immoral practice of placing the highest priority to debt service in government budget allocations.
We also call on the Philippine government and other governments of the South to stop the implementation of structural adjustment policies.
The Freedom from Debt Coalition * Resource Center for People's Development * Philippine Jubilee 2000 * Philippine-Asia Jubilee Campaign Against the Debt * Philippine Jubilee Network * Tri-People Jubilee * Association of Major Religious Superiors of the Philippines
July 17, 2000 Quezon City, Philippines |
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