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G8 leaders failure will affect health

Medact and other members of Jubilee 2000, the international movement campaigning for debt cancellation, have condemned as ‘scandalous’ the lack of action shown on debt by the G8 summit meeting in Okinawa.

Earlier, in Cologne in June 1999, G8 leaders had announced a $100bn debt-relief package for the 40 heavily-indebted and poor countries. But the Cologne initiative has since come under fierce criticism for the lack of urgency with which it has been implemented. So far only about $15bn of debt has been cancelled, benefiting slightly just nine countries.

The Okinawa Summit did not bring any new breakthrough, despite last-minute pleas from UN secretary general Kofi Annan and African leaders.

Medact and Jubilee 2000 point out that the Cologne deal will only be fully implemented by 2005 and will still leave countries paying more in interest payments on debt than on healthcare. They are angry that the vast cost of this year’s summit (about £500m) would have been enough to write off the debt of Gambia.

Annan, who has recently called for a 100 per cent write-off of poor country billion debt in return for commitments to poverty reduction, expressed his disappointment at the outcome of Okinawa. ‘For years we have had too many promises and too little action,’ he said.

In their final statement, the G8 leaders pledged that by 2010 they would cut the number of young people with HIV by 25 per cent, reduce the burden of disease associated with malaria by 50 per cent and cut TB deaths by half. But if government budgets are still squeezed by the huge burden of debt repayments it seems impossible that these targets can be met.