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NGOs urge debt relief, medical assistance to poor nations |
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July 22, 2000
NAGO, Okinawa (AP) - Concrete actions, not empty words, are needed from rich countries to help poor ones overcome health emergencies and ruinous debts, leading non-governmental organizations said Friday. Dozens of activist groups are here for the Group of Eight summit, and though not included on the official agenda they are getting a better reception than at previous summits. In a meeting here Friday with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, activist groups were for the first time given a direct conduit to air their concerns at a G-8 summit. Jubilee 2000, a global coalition of charity organizations, said in a news conferernce afterward that the debt relief measures agreed upon at last year's Cologne summit have been a failure, and called for new aggressive steps. Anne Pettifor, a group official, urged a "new deal on debt" that would cancel all unpayable debts and remove conditions on debt relief. "We called upon G-8 leaders to have a human face alongside being superpowers economically," said Charlotte Mwesigye, another official of the group. Representatives from Doctors Without Borders, meanwhile, urged industrialized powers to bring essential drugs to the needy by lowering costs and funding research and development of new medicines that meet the needs of the Third World. The 1999 Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization warned that merely providing funds for impoverished countries to buy expensive drugs will boost profits at pharmaceutical companies, but won't stem medical disasters. "Strong political committment is not only money," said Bernard Pecoul, a representative of the group. "It's also public and political leadership to take decision and actions." The organization said new drugs to treat infectious diseases like AIDS are too expensive for the poor African nations that need them most, but could be made accessible by promoting generic drugs. On the other hand, pharmaceutical companies have stopped producing effective drugs that could stamp out diseases ravaging the Third World because they are not profitable, he said. The group accused Western governments of protecting the interests of big businesses at the expense of the poor. "Human life is more important than profit," said Doctors Without Borders coordinator Ellen 't Hoen. Mori, who also met with two other Japanese NGOs, promised to relay the organizations' views to his G-8 counterparts. Japan set up meetings with activist groups in large part to avert the violent protests that contributed to the breakdown of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last December. |