The heads of state of the most industrialised countries of the world are meeting in Cologne to talk about development, environmental protection, peace, prosperity... and we laugh our heads off!!!
These powerful men want to show their "generosity" by "forgiving" some of the debts of third world countries. We ask these leaders: Whose debts are you talking about? Who has something to forgive to whom? How can you be so eminently hypocritical?
Whose bloddy debts?
According to conservative estimations , in the late 18th and the 19th century the drain of wealth from India to Britain (in the form of tributes and excess of exports over imports) amounted to about 2-2,5% of the yearly British National Income and about 30% of the capital formation. The consequences of this drain were deeply felt in the villages: when the Britishers came, the farmers had to pay around 65% of their income in tributes, 59% of which was kept by the British traders.
Such an inflow of stolen capital surely hastened the pace of industrialisation in Britain, but it was not the only factor. Indian agriculture also provided a substantial share of the raw materials needed for that phase of industrialisation, which was based on the textile industry. This was done by doing away with the diverse and self-sustained economy and ecology of villages and replacing them by the cash-crops needed to pay the taxes, which were the commodities demanded by the British industry. Since the Indian farmers were showing resistance to grow costly cash crops (which required a high working capital and took away the food security of the farmers and the villages), the European traders went as far as to use physical force to impose their will. They kept the prices of these cash crops low by demanding the payment of taxes from the peasants when the latter were short of cash (just before the harvest) and giving them short-term loans in condition that their produce would be sold to the traders at fixed contract prices - which were very low in order to keep the peasants in a debt trap that they could never escape.
By 1820 the British textile industry, which grew protected from its much more efficient Indian counterpart, had become competitive because of a massive growth based on large-scale exports to India. The British then focused on another product to enhance the transfer of wealth from India to Britain: opium. Britain required raw silk and tea from China but did not want to pay for them. Hence, a large extension of India was converted into a huge opium monoculture. This cheap opium was exported by the British to China to pay the bill. In what could be considered as the beginning of large-scale narco-politics by imperialist countries, a country was made addicted to opium and a war was fought in order to fuel the industrialisation of Britain. In 1855 Britain exported 8,5 million pounds worth tea and silk from China and exported only 1 million to that country. The rest was paid with Indian opium.
The formal dismantlement of the Colonial empires didn't change anything in the trade mechanisms used to extract wealth from the countries of the South. The former colonial powers along with the USA put in place corrupt governments to ensure "investment-friendly regimes" in these countries. The combination of these factors gave birth to the so-called "debt crisis" of the Third World, a crisis that has nothing to do with the people from these countries, but with the elites from the North and the puppet regimes that they control in the South.
The so-called "debt crisis" made Southern countries depend on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), controlled by the G7 group. The IMF and the WB imposed on Southern governments a set of devastating policies, according to the wishes of G7 countries. These policies have resulted in the transfer of billions of dollars from the poorest of the poor into the pockets of the richest elites of the world, the massive exploitation of people and nature in order to increase the output of cheap exports for rich consumers, and the dismantling of all policies designed to reduce the dependency of Southern countries on their former colonisers. And of course these policies led to the skyrocketing of the debts instead of their progressive elimination, just like the policies of the British traders towards Indian farmers.
Now the heads of state of the G7 want to present themselves towards the public as generous world leaders willing to forget and forgive some of these debts in a remarkable charitative gesture. This is a joke!!!
We laugh at the Gang of Seven Criminal Hypocrites that are meeting in Cologne
We laugh at their claim that neoliberal policies will bring peace and prosperity for all
We laugh at the corrupt Southern governments
for playing their part in this melodrama by paying debts that never existed
We laugh at the so-called "debt relief" of the G7 - WE DO NOT FORGIVE YOUR DEBTS!!
Representatives of people's movements from all over the world and of the refugees and migrants living in Germany will hold a joint hunger strike during the World Economic Summit in solidarity with all those who suffer hunger, oppression, misery and death due to the destructive policies imposed by the governments of Western industrial countries.
Over the last decades, trade liberalisation policies adopted by almost all governments of the world (often forced by institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) have led to devastating problems all over the world. The dependency on the global market that these policies have exacerbated, which is also increasingly affecting Northern countries, implies that local and national policies are determined to an increasing extent by the single objective of international competitiveness, at the expense of equality, human rights, social and environmental policies, labour conditions, etc. Today, the combined incomes of 358 billionaires exceed the combined incomes of 2,3 billion people, 45% of the world's population. The neoliberal policies behind this development have been codified as international law in the Uruguay Round of the GATT, which also created the World Trade Organisation (WTO) with the mission of enforcing these rules, punishing countries that decide to follow different policies and provide a permanent negotiation forum to continue developing this system of global domination. This system of global governance is dominated by the G7, a club formed by the governments of the seven most industrialised countries of the world, which is now meeting in Cologne (along with the president of Russia).
In November 1999 the WTO will hold its Third Ministerial Conference in Seattle. This conference is likely to launch a new round of negotiations which will expand even further the scope of the WTO system. The new round is expected to result, among other things, in more trade liberalisation in agricultural products (which has already taken a heavy death toll in India and other countries in the form of suicides of hundreds of complete families of farmers), more possibilities for TNCs to obtain patent rights over life forms, and the granting of unprecedented rights to foreign TNCs all over the world, through the incorporation of all the contents of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI) into the WTO. The Gang of Seven will decide the agenda of these negotiations.
This crazy New World Order is maintained by national and global systems of repression that are intensifying the oppression on social activists, many of whom don't have any other choice than leaving their home countries in order to save their lives. It is also destroying the livelihoods of billions of people all over the world, who are forced to leave their places and go where the wealth stolen from them is being concentrated - the metropoles of their countries and the rich industrial nations where the global flows of stolen capital converge. The response of the rich countries to this disarray is simple: criminalising and prosecuting those whose lives have been dislocated by global capitalism.
With this hunger strike we express our solidarity with all the wretched of the world, from the South, North, East and West, those who had to flee and those who are suffering misery and repression in their own countries. We call on all people of the world to resist the New World Order and its instruments, such as the regime of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). We encourage people to organise and construct alternatives from below - not asking those responsible for the miseries of the world to repair them, but taking control over our own lives and shaping a new world free of exploitation and oppression, a world guided by justice and self-determination.