This is a valuable article which supports the extensive struggle for the reform of debt relief, but warns of the reformist limitations of this campaign.
>The scheme, set up in 1996, has been the first to bring together
>government, commercial, and multilateral lenders such as the International
>Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
>
>But three years later, only Uganda, Bolivia and Guyana have been approved
>from a list of 42 potential beneficiaries. Guyana has yet to receive any
>relief.
This exposes the hypocrisy of concentrating on a patronisingly named new category: the "Heavily Indebted Poor Countries". (HIPC's)
One of the conditions is spending on health care and education. As the price of HIV drugs in a country like Uganda is prohibitive, this is cruel, especially as the terms of trade for coffee worsen.
As for emphasis on education, this is a recipe for intensified global migration as educated people seek to sell their labour power in the metropolitan heartlands where capital accumulates.
>"It's a cruel joke for the world's wealthy governments to protest that they
>can't afford to cancel the debts," says Jeffrey Sachs, director of the
>Center for International Development at Harvard University.
>
>Since the initiative was launched, "the stock market wealth of the rich
>countries has grown by more than five trillion dollars, more than 50 times
>the debt owed by the 42 poor countries," notes Sachs, a former 'shock
>therapy' economic reformist. He now advises Jubilee 2000, the international
>debt-relief coalition.
We need to firm up on these figures and date, which show how even through the workings of the crises, the global system is one that intensifies the uneven accumulation of capital. Unless reforms address this centrally, and thereby challenge the private ownership of the means of production, they will remain reformist, and will lay the ground for future crises.
>So why the fuss over a seemingly small sum?
Wrangling over this issue of charity debt relief for the HIPC's is, together with gold sales, one of the last barriers against addressing the structural inequalities of the worlds system of finance capital.
Chris Burford
London.