Calls for debt relief amid the credit crisis

The organization Jubilee USA issued a statement yesterday that called on the international community to help Haiti and Liberia. The group says that delays in granting debt relief to the two countries have gone on long enough.

Jubilee USA asks the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to act quickly, just as they did to help the banks with the credit crisis.

Here are some quotes from leaders of Jubilee USA, clipped from their blog Blog The Debt

Neil Watkins, National Coordinator of Jubilee USA Network, said: “After four hurricanes in a month and an escalating food crisis it is outrageous that Haiti is being told it must wait six more months for debt relief. This is like Hank Paulson telling Wall Street he will get back to them in the New Year.”

“Haiti has been dealing with multiple crises in recent months. As a result it is still spending $1 million a week on debt service while its people starve. As we’ve seen this month, when Wall Street bankers are affected, they get fast tracked for debt relief. But the people of Haiti don’t seem to matter very much in Washington. Haiti needs the immediate debt cancellation of its illegitimate debt that it has long been promised now,” said Watkins.

Nick Dearden, Director of Jubilee Debt Campaign UK, said: “Liberia has a large, illegitimate commercial debt burden and both the government and its creditors are ready to make a deal via the Debt Reduction Facility, but are being held up by delays in the World Bank bureaucracy. The people working on the DRF should stop crisis-watching on CNN and get on with releasing funds that will save people’s lives.”

“Liberia is on the front line of the global food crisis, and yet it is still being told it must wait until 2010 for debt relief to be delivered. In such a rapidly-changing world, the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative is increasingly looking like an outdated process. It’s time for an urgent injection of political will to get some liquidity back into debt cancellation, and bail out the world’s poor from a mess they had no part in creating,” said Dearden.