Articles - From the Vicar

September 2000

I make no excuse for returning this month to the issue of debt relief, given the unfortunate circumstances of the summit conference of the G8 nations that took place in Okinawa at the end of July. As was widely reported, the Japanese government spent £500 million on hosting the conference - a sum of money that many might think could have been more wisely applied to the cause that Jubilee 2000 has so tirelessly championed over the past few years: the scandalous burden of indebtedness that continues to blight the development of so many Third World countries.

At the Cologne summit last year the G8 countries pledged themselves to cancel £66 billion-worth of accumulated debt. So far less than £10 billion-worth has been cancelled and the Okinawa summit produced nothing more than a re-affirmation of the Cologne pledge, not even a timetable for its implementation. Meanwhile it is estimated that over 30,000 children a month die in developing countries as a result of their governments' need to make servicing debt a higher priority than investment in health and education programmes. Putting that statistic another way, some 45 children in the Third World die during our Sunday morning Parish Eucharist as a direct result of the indifference of wealthy countries' governments to the needs of the earth's poorest.

"We'll find a poor person who can't pay his debts, not even the price of a pair of sandals, and we'll buy him as a slave." Thus did the prophet Amos characterise the attitudes of Israel's economic élite over 2,500 years ago. The countries that make up the G8 are today's economic élite. Let us pray that, even now, they will listen to the words of the brave prophets who speak on behalf of the many who are dying daily because of the greed of the few.