Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-17-Speech-3-165"
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"en.20000517.9.3-165"2
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"Mr President, as others have said, many promises have been made on debt relief but in fact very few have been delivered. After all the headlines that we heard at Cologne last year, less than $13 billion of the $100 billion promised has actually been cancelled and as the Commission and the Council have told us, contributions to the HIPC Trust Fund are still way below target. As the Commissioner rightly says, the burden deserves to be shared. The fact is that despite a $1 trillion budget surplus over 10 years, President Clinton is not able to squeeze $210 million for HIPC out of Congress. That is an appalling fact for us to take on board.
It is also the case that we are still waiting for the World Bank and the IMF to come up with something similar to the European Union. All G7 countries have promised some form of 100% debt cancellation, but many of them are very slow and disinclined to do it in the way that we would like. Also, to qualify for debt relief, each country has to complete a long and often contradictory ‘HIPC’ process, and only 5 countries have so far managed to go through the hoops that they are being asked to go through.
So far, the United Kingdom is the only country that has offered 100% debt cancellation. France, Germany and Japan only include pre-cut-off debts and so ignore a significant portion of debt. Japan, incidentally, ties its debt relief to responsibility to buy Japanese exports.
On Mozambique, for instance, it is very significant that the IMF, the World Bank and the Paris Club only postponed payments from Mozambique and then actually lent more money.
So, what I would say, finally, is that we in this Parliament urge all the creditors to stop delaying and to start working really hard towards fulfilling full debt cancellation for the poorest countries. Of course, I agree with all my colleagues, the poorest countries who fulfil the criteria of delivering debt relief to those countries that show a commitment to social sector and human development support."@en1
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