Sir, - On March 15th the Paris Club suspended 40 per cent of Mozambique's debts, which may have seemed like good news to round off media coverage of this latest disaster.
However, suspension merely puts debt "on hold". Debt is now suspended like a sword of Damocles over the head of the people and government as they try to plan rebuilding. Debt repayments claim priority and will return. What will happen to Mozambique when it leaves the headlines?
Nicaragua and Honduras were devastated by storms almost two years ago. They left the headlines when a debt moratorium was declared (they had been paying $2 million a day). However, the World Bank and IMF, as preferential creditors, are outside the moratorium. Current repayments are $1 million a day. Storm victims in poor countries must rebuild with one hand behind their backs.
The World Bank and IMF viewed Mozambique as the jewel in the crown of their structural adjustment programme. It put infrastructure, water, health, education "on hold" to maintain debt repayment schedules. Homes, roads, and sewers didn't stand a chance when the floods came.
The developing countries of today are for the most part the colonies of the past. The resources in people, commodities, minerals and land taken from them, right up to the end of the Cold War, first built and now bolster outside powers. Poor countries have been left indebted and underdeveloped and are still pawns in political and business power games.
Global warming, a by-product of industrialisation, is producing weather extremes which, eight times out of 10, affects not its source countries but the least industrialised poor countries.
The Jubilee campaign is a worldwide movement for the cancellation of unpayable debts and independent arbitration. It is not a pious hope or an easy solution but an urgently needed first step. Disasters are not nine-day media wonders.
Debt kills. Debt cancellation must come, not as an act of charity but in justice and in reparation. - Yours, etc.,
Maire Kelly, Raheny, Dublin 5.