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http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040926/ap_on_bi_ge/britain_debt_4Britain Proposes Debt Relief to Nations Sun Sep 26, 1:51 PM ET Add Business - AP to My Yahoo!
By ED JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
BRIGHTON, England - Britain will provide more debt relief for the world's poorest countries and challenge other rich countries to do the same, Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites)'s government said Sunday.
Treasury chief Gordon Brown said many developing countries were crippled by servicing their debt and could not invest in their infrastructure.
"We will pay our share of the multilateral debt repayments of reforming low-income countries," Brown said in a statement, released by the Department of International Development.
"We will make payments in their stead to the World Bank (news - web sites) and African Development Bank for the portion that relates to Britain's share of this debt. We do this alone today but I urge other countries to follow so that over indebted countries are relieved of the burden of servicing all unpayable multilateral debt."
Brown was scheduled to reveal further details in a speech later Sunday to a "Vote for Trade Justice" event at a church in Brighton, the coastal town where the governing Labour Party is holding its annual conference.
Britain holds about 10 percent of the total debt owed to the World Bank and other development banks, or about 7 percent of all the debt of the world's poorest nations.
Britain's Development Secretary Hilary Benn said poor countries needed "significant additional resources" to "lift people out of poverty, get children into primary schools and improve basic health."
"Debt relief is an efficient way of transferring these resources to countries that can use them most effectively," he said in the statement. "We call on other governments, especially our G-8 partners, to join us so that no country is held back by the burden of unsustainable debt."
To be eligible for the debt relief, countries must be able to show the savings will be used to meet the goals of the 2000 Millennium Summit. Those goals include halving the number of people living in dire poverty from 2000 levels; ensuring that all children have an elementary school education; ensuring that all families have clean water; and halting the AIDS (news - web sites) epidemic — all by 2015.
The list of countries will include those that have been through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative: Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, as well as a number of other countries such as Vietnam and Armenia, where the World Bank has assessed the countries are capable of absorbing direct budget support, the statement said.
Britain also called for debt payments owed to the International Monetary Fund (news - web sites) to be funded through the more efficient use of IMF (news - web sites) gold reserves.
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