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07/06/2004:

"'Africa must not pay its debt'"

news24.com
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - A top economic adviser to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan told African countries on Monday to refuse to pay their huge debts if rich countries did not cancel them.

American economist Jeffrey Sachs made the comment to a conference on hunger on the eve of a summit of the heads of state of the African Union (AU), which estimates sub-Saharan Africa has foreign debts of $201bn.

"The time has come to end this charade. The debts are unaffordable," said Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and special adviser to Annan on global anti-poverty targets.

"If they won't cancel the debts I would suggest obstruction. You do it yourselves."

...Sachs called on the developed world to double aid to Africa to $120bn a year, and meet commitments they made in 1970 to spend at least 0.7% of their gross domestic product on grants and loans.

The United States and other rich nations spend billions of dollars on arms but only a minute fraction of that on fighting poverty, he said.
full article

We are not talking about Western pity, mercy, and charity in 'fighting poverty.' Poverty is not some impersonal apolitical phenomenon, particularly in Africa. Africa is so poor precisely because Africa is so rich! Rich in resources the West needs and steadily bleeds from her and has for centuries now. And then has the audacity to attribute Africa's poverty, Latin America's poverty, to some undefined defect in the people there, whom it is the white West's moral duty to 'help.' Professor Sachs is right in practice but wrong in principle. The truth is, Africa owes nothing. The West owes Africa.