The Mad House of Poor Country Debt!
The Biggest Millennium Challenge

1. At the millennium one person is born every second into bad, unpayable debt in the world's poorest countries.
2. The cost of the current faltering proposal for debt reduction for the poorest countries is around £3.4billion. Payments will be over several years and not a penny of relief has been given yet. It seems a lot of money, but it is:
   • Less than a third of the cost of the Channel Tunnel, for which Eurotunnel froze payments on a debt of £8billion in 1995;
   • Less of a challenge when compared to the generous debt forgiveness offered to Eurodisney after the company incurred losses of £860 million in just two years;
   • Little more than the likely error in UK Treasury forecasts for this year's public sector borrowing requirement;
   • Equivalent to what the US spent on going to the cinema in 1995;
   • Little considering that more money will be spent on internally restructuring the World Bank before the year 2000 than they are likely to pay out in debt relief in that time.
3. The poorest countries are caught in a paradox - the more they repay, the greater their debt. By 2015 their debt to export ratio will be three times worse than it was in 1994, rising to over 1000%
4. Just £49 million debt relief for Uganda could save the lives of 398,000 children under five, and 13,000 women who would have died in childbirth, in addition to providing primary education for 2 million more children.
5. Mozambique's Finance Ministry predicts that ,even after relief from the new debt initiative, debt service payments in the next millennium will be three times their average in the early 1990's.
6. The United Nations estimates that 21 million children will die by the millennium if debt relief is not accelerated.