Conscious Choice: Jubilee 2000: Debt Relief for a New Millennium

December 2000 | News of the Earth

Jubilee 2000: Debt Relief for a New Millennium

by Dave Aftandilian

Long-time readers of "News of the Earth" may remember hearing about Jubilee 2000 in this column last December. A worldwide movement calling on the wealthy nations to cancel the unpayable debts of the world’s poorest countries, Jubilee 2000 has built a remarkably diverse and successful coalition of communities of faith, social justice organizations, environmentalists, concerned individuals — even Pope John Paul II and rock singer Bono of U2. (The concept of a jubilee year, during which all slaves are set free and all debts are forgiven, comes from the Bible, so it’s no surprise that many religious organizations have taken the lead in Jubilee 2000.) As the true millennium approaches, it seems like a good time to take a look at what Jubilee 2000 has accomplished, and what work remains to be done.

First let’s remember why the movement started in the first place. Thanks to debts owed to individual wealthy nations and multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the fifty-two poorest nations spend so much of their national incomes on paying off the interest (let alone the principal) on their loans that they cannot afford to provide adequate health care, education, and other social welfare programs to their citizens. To take just one example, "a child in Nicaragua is born owing over $2,000, while average yearly income there is $390," according to Jubilee 2000/USA. Such crushing debts can never be repaid, and unless they are lifted, will doom the poorest nations to perpetual poverty.

Massive debt loads also place a severe burden on the environment. According to Jubilee 2000/USA, "Debt harms the environment, encouraging rainforest destruction and pollution as poor countries use cheap but environmentally destructive ways to earn export revenues. To attract foreign investment to help pay the debt, countries often weaken the enforcement of international and national environmental standards and regulations." Small farmers are forced from their lands to make way for monocultural plantations of cash crops for the export market. To increase yields on overtaxed soils, fertilizers and pesticides are regularly overapplied. Fish stocks are damaged through overharvest, and forests are sold to the highest bidder for timber or more land to be cleared for plantation crops or raising cattle. Huge mining projects rape the land for minerals, and leave toxic chemicals behind that leach into drinking water supplies.

Environmental protections have little meaning in countries where people cannot feed their children. As Jubilee 2000 Coalition UK notes, "it is the world’s largest debtors that are chopping down their forests the fastest. Brazil is the world’s largest deforester and one of its largest debtors, owing $112 billion. It is cutting a staggering 50,000 square kilometers of forest every year."

Since 1996, when the movement began, Jubilee 2000 has pressured some of the world’s biggest creditors, including the IMF and the World Bank, to pledge to write off up to $350 billion in debt owed them by the poorest nations. And it has succeeded in convincing the G7 nations to write off 100 percent of the portion of the debt owed to them by some of these countries too. After the dogged efforts of citizen lobbyists across the U.S. as well as President Clinton and various U.S. religious leaders, the U.S. Congress voted near the end of last month to provide $435 million to an international debt reduction plan for up to thirty-three of the poorest countries. As part of the same foreign aid bill, Congress agreed to allow the IMF to release $800 million from the sale of gold reserves to facilitate additional debt forgiveness. Rep. John Kasich (R-OH), chair of the Budget Committee, called the bill "a historic act of grace," and David Beckmann of the relief organization Bread for the World praised the role of Jubilee 2000 and other groups in the process, saying that "not since Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement has the grass-roots action of churches and people of goodwill so influenced our nation’s leaders."

But while the debt relief achieved so far is impressive, much more is needed. A new Oxfam study shows that Zambia — in which one out of eight children have been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic and other causes — will spend 40 percent of its revenues on loan interest payments instead of health or child care three years from now, even after "debt relief." Tanzania will still be paying out a fifth of its total tax revenue for debt payments in 2002 after similar loan "forgiveness," even though about a third of its children are malnourished and less than half are enrolled in primary school. By the end of the year, only about $30 billion of the promised $100 billion in debt relief will have actually been delivered or be firmly on course. As of September 2000, only ten of the forty nations supposedly eligible for it had actually received any debt relief; of these countries, most will continue to pay more in debt service than on health care. In its LDC 2000 report, the United Nations wrote that almost two-thirds of the forty-eight least developed countries still have an unsustainable debt burden, and that the current relief plans will not be enough to provide a lasting end to the debt crisis in these nations.

Where does Jubilee 2000 go from here, then? The Board of Jubilee 2000 Coalition UK has voted to shut down its office in the UK after December 31 in order to hold true to the short-term, time-limited campaign they promised to run. But because 100 percent of the debts have not yet been forgiven, many members of the international Jubilee 2000 movement feel this is no time to quit. For instance, Adrian Lovett, Deputy Director of Jubilee 2000 Coalition UK, wants to extend the Jubilee 2000 work in a "Genoa Project" until late July 2001, when the G7 nations will have their next summit in Genoa, Italy. He notes that "there is increasingly strong evidence that a substantial further breakthrough on debt can be achieved at the Genoa summit," in part because the Italian government has already requested a formal dialogue with the Italian Jubilee 2000 campaign so that it can propose a new debt initiative at the summit.

Ann Pettifor, director of Jubilee 2000 Coalition UK; Kwesi Owusu of Jubilee 2000 Africa; Liana Cisneros of the Latin American Jubilee 2000 campaign; and Ed Mayo, chair of the board of Jubilee 2000 UK, have proposed the creation of a new group, Jubilee Plus International, to be headquartered at the New Economics Foundation in London. In an open letter to Jubilee 2000 supporters this past October, Pettifor wrote, "we believe that we have to re-focus our vision: that while we must continue to fight for the cancellation of debts, it is now time to focus our concentration to the root causes of debt.... Above all, we believe, it is vital for the movement to continue the process of democratization, transparency, and accountability of international finance, so that ordinary people, in the north and south, can exercise much greater control over the economic forces that shape, and often devastate, our lives."

How would Jubilee Plus International work toward these goals? One option might be to advocate a plan along the lines of one suggested by Jubilee 2000 Coalition UK, involving the joint appointment (by both creditors and the debtor nation) of an independent arbitrator for international debts of a given country. The arbitrator would then establish a Debt Review Body (DRB) composed of members of all interested parties, including representatives from civil society in the debtor nation. The DRB would monitor funds released from debt cancellation, making sure that they were spent on poverty reduction and social services, and also make sure that future loan offers are agreed only on conditions that would prevent a debt crisis of this scale from ever happening again.

What can we do? First, support the continuing Jubilee 2000 work in whatever form it may take. You can get in touch with the organizers via the Web sites below if you support their efforts or want to become more directly involved. Next, you can write the key figures in the IMF and World Bank and ask them to forgive 100 percent of the unpayable debts of the poorest nations (their addresses can be found in the "Take Action" section of either site). And finally, you can contact your elected representatives in Washington, D.C., and ask them to continue to push for debt relief for the poorest nations and to increase the foreign aid budget (foreign aid has dropped by a third in the past decade among the wealthy countries, according to the United Nations).‘Tis the season of giving, after all.

Jubilee 2000/USA, Coord@j2000usa.org
Jubilee 2000 Coalition UK, mail@jubilee2000uk.org

Send in the Clones?

First there was Dolly the cloned sheep. Now, meet Noah the cloned gaur. (Asian gaurs are heavily muscled, one-ton, ox-like animals native to the bamboo forests of India and Southeast Asia; they have become endangered due to overhunting and habitat loss, and currently number around 36,000 in the wild.) A team of biotechnologists from Advanced Cell Technology, Inc. (ACT), in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced this past October that they had successfully transferred the genetic material from the skin cells of a dead gaur into an egg of a cow whose nucleus had been removed. That gaur-cow egg was then implanted into the uterus of an Iowa cow named Bessie, who, if all goes well, will have given birth to a bouncing baby gaur by early this month.

Provided Noah is born healthy and survives to adulthood, he will be not only the first member of an endangered species to be cloned, but also the first cloned animal to be born from the womb of a different species. ACT researchers say they have already received permission from the Spanish government to begin work on the first clone of an extinct species. When the last bucardo (a mountain-goat-like native of the Pyrenees) was killed by a falling tree early this year, the species would normally have gone extinct. But, because Spanish scientists had the forethought to collect cells from the animal the year before its death, it may live again. Also, according to an article in the November issue of Scientific American, "plans are under way to clone the African bongo antelope, the Sumatran tiger, and that favorite of zoo lovers, the reluctant-to-reproduce giant panda." And a government-sponsored group in India wants to clone the cheetah and reintroduce it to South Asia, where it hasn’t been seen in decades.

If all this makes you a bit uncomfortable, you’re not alone. Conservationists are concerned because they feel research in cloning endangered species may siphon much-needed funding away from what they see as the only truly effective way to preserve these creatures — safeguarding the places where they live in the wild. There’s also the danger that cloning will encourage the attitude that we shouldn’t worry about habitat loss or overhunting or the other root causes of extinction, because we have a techno-fix for it all with our test tubes and incubators. Not to mention the huge ethical questions involved. Leaving aside the morality of playing God through the use of the cloning process, there’s also the issue of whether it’s fair to bring back creatures whose homes have long ago been destroyed. As Russell Mittermeier of Conservation International said, cloned animals without a place in the wild to live would just be "museum pieces." Kent Redford of the Wildlife Conservation Society put this a little more bluntly in an interview with the Washington Post:

"There is a very hollow echo of a gaur in the birth of that animal to a cow in Iowa. To say that is a gaur is to disrespect all gaurs in all the places where gaurs live. That animal will never live its life in true gaurdom, to wander in the forests of India and frolic with other gaurs and die and let teak trees grow out of it. That’s the gaur I’m working to save."

On the other hand, any tool in the battle to save the many endangered species on this planet could be helpful if used wisely. The rationale behind cloning is not that far removed from other captive breeding efforts that have proven successful in rebuilding the numbers of some animals in the wild, such as the California condor or the golden lion tamarin. There’s also a bit of atonement involved, it seems, of paying for our sins of destroying these animals by trying to help them come back. As Robert Lanza of ACT told the BBC, "I’ve heard a lot of people saying we are playing God. Well, we do play God when we wreak havoc on the environment, we play God when we destroy their habitats and shoot them for sport. The least we can do is try to reverse some of that damage, to give these species a fighting chance of surviving in the wild."

Still, we need to tread very carefully with biotechnological approaches. Pure as Dr. Lanza’s personal motives may be, for instance, the company for which he works "is engaged in the research and development of technologies for the production of transgenic animals with applications in pharmaceutical protein production and cell and organ transplant therapy," according to their Web site. (As reported in a recent article in Newsweek, one of Dr. Lanza’s colleagues, Jose Cibelli, took some of his own cells and fused them with cow eggs in 1996; he grew the resulting embryos through five cell divisions in the lab, but "halted the experiment to assess its ethics.") The major reason people have been making animal clones is not out of guilt for species loss, but out of the desire to engineer the tissues of these animals so that they produce proteins useful to humans — a technique known as "pharming." The first goat clones, for instance, were designed by Genzyme Transgenics Corporation to produce a human protein in their milk that prevents blood clotting. Such techniques may save many human lives, but they also use animal bodies as factories in a way that many people find morally repugnant.

Returning to cloning for conservation, "the bottom line is that there are no scientific sleights of hand and no quick technological fixes to the problem of biodiversity loss," the World Wildlife Fund wrote in a position paper on its Web site. "Genetic research may be a valuable, if limited, tool for conservation, but the battle to save biodiversity will be won in the field, not in the laboratory."

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